Yesterday, R. Kelly was acquitted of charges for child pornography which have been pending for nearly six years now. If I believed he were innocent, I would think it was a real travesty to have such horrible accusations hanging over his head for so long. Now, the extremely witty Josh Levin over at Slate and the highly respected Bill Wyman over at Hitsville have both been covering the R. Kelly trial and associated tribulations with exceptional thoroughness and panache. If you want to know way too much about R&B singer and producer R. Kelly and his penchant for underage girls, I definitely recommend the work of both of these writers. I’m going to try to break it down for y’all here though.

First of all, I think the irony police need to be called. This week Max Hardcore was handed a criminal conviction for making videos of adult women dressed youthfully and engaging in consensual extreme sex acts, most likely including watersports (not the jet-ski kind), videos for which Max Hardcore had full documentation that the women were legally adult and consented to appearing on video and having said video distributed. The same week R. Kelly got excused for making videos of allegedly underage women engaging in arguably consensual extreme acts, definitely including watersports (not the jet-ski kind), videos for which R. Kelly could produce no documentation that the women were not underage or had consented to have their image recorded and shared in this way.

I feel sorry for R. Kelly. I truly do. I suspect he is not competent to handle his own affairs, yet, being rich, he is surrounded by people who apparently regularly take him for as much money as they can carry away. Even the star witness for the prosecution stated that R. Kelly would not continue with making a sex video if she was visibly upset and she admitted to taking advantage of him financially over and over. The testimonies in his recent trial are, in fact, rife with descriptions about how various people in positions of trust did everything from extort payments from him to stealing jewelry and, yes, homemade videos. According to GQ magazine, R. Kelly was sexually abused by an adult male neighbor as a child. Given that R. Kelly’s brother told Vibe that the singer never gave their mother a dime because she refused to divorce his stepfather, I would hazard a guess that the man was probably abused by his stepfather as well. R. Kelly also personally told Vibe that he is functionally illiterate. Members of his entourage further assert that R. Kelly is unable to do basic addition and subtraction. I’m guessing that someone with a bunch of multi-platinum albums could afford a reading and mathematics tutor, so it’s fairly likely that this means R. Kelly is deficient in the brain department. He probably is not mentally on a level above his young sex partners.

This still does not excuse competent adults for leaving their children with a grown man of R. Kelly’s well-documented predilections. He has settled multiple cases with families of allegedly underage girls he allegedly had inappropriate sexual relationships with. He has been caught with videos and pictures of his misdeeds over and over and is apparently not savvy enough to stop creating new evidence against himself. He married his protege Aaliyah when she was fifteen-years-old. This is not someone who is smart enough to cover his tracks. Apparently, her family was sufficiently on-top-of-things to get the marriage annulled and prevent Aaliyah from ever seeing R. Kelly again. Somehow, during the preceding three years it took for R. Kelly to work on Aaliyah’s multiplatinum debut Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number, it never occurred to her family that leaving her alone with a guy who likes young girls was not necessarily the best idea. The name of the album didn’t give anybody pause? Given that he actually tried to marry the girl, I’d view him more as retarded than ill-intentioned. I don’t mean retarded in the sense of schoolyard taunts, but, in the literal sense, R. Kelly may be a musical savant, but, he appears to be extremely developmentally delayed and not at all bright. Multiple sources report that the man even has trouble remembering to bathe himself.

I started off laughing out loud at the coverage of the R. Kelly trial. I mean, dude, if you are going to have an inappropriate and totally illegal sexual relationship with a teenage girl, maybe you shouldn’t, ya know, videotape it. Especially, if you’ve been busted out and/or had to make blackmail payments/legal settlements for this sort of thing in the past. And R. Kelly’s defense team’s arguments seemed so ridiculous when they claimed that it wasn’t R. Kelly on the videotape in question and it didn’t even look like him and, if it did look like him, then that was because of special effects, and, if it was not special effects and it was R. Kelly on the tape, then the girl must be eighteen. As R. Kelly hands the girl in the video money on camera at the beginning of the tape, the defense attorneys even argued that it would be mean to find R. Kelly guilty because that would be tantamount to calling the girl in the vid a whore. Funny stuff.

Now, to be totally frank, I don’t really think it is generally appropriate for a forty-year-old to have an ongoing sexual relationship with a teenager of legal age either. There are, of course, exceptions where people with a huge age difference can have a great relationship, but I’d say that, on average, that’s not ideal. I think the older the people involved are, the less an age difference matters. Is a fourteen-year-old mature enough to know she is participating in an extortion plot against her inappropriately aged lover? Probably depends on the fourteen-year-old, but everything about that is certainly illegal in every respect in the State of Illinois.

Aaliyah’s uncle Barry Hankerson was R. Kelly’s manager for many years. In point of fact, he remained R. Kelly’s manager for many years after Aaliyah’s recording with R. Kelly, marrying him, and subsequently getting that marriage annulled. When R. Kelly and Barry Hankerson parted ways professionally, Barry Hankerson wrote a letter to the record label saying that he felt R. Kelly needed psychiatric help for his compulsive pursuit of young girls. Well, yeah. The guy is obviously psychologically off. But, what I want to know is, when exactly did his manager figure out that R. Kelly had a problem there? How many settlements with the families of teenage girls did it take? How many incidents did he personally witness working closely with the singer/producer? How many years of thinking about it, after his own fifteen-year-old niece Aaliyah married R. Kelly, did it take for it to occur to him that maybe teenage girls should not be left alone with R. Kelly?

Reading about this case, it appears that, over and over again, people with a professional or otherwise fiscal interest in R. Kelly put junior high school-aged girls in his presence, knowing full well what R. Kelly was like. The more I read, the more it looked like a bunch of criminal opportunists basically taking advantage of the mentally handicapped.

Now one could argue that rock and roll has a long history, stretching from Elvis Presley to Tripp Eisen, of musicians dating young girls. But that is one for the philosophers or at least another article. In the here and now, we have decided, as a society, that it is against the law for grown men to have sexual relationships with fourteen-year-old girls. Whether or not they pee on them. So long as that is the rule, I think we also ought to have a law against profiteering friends and family who put young girls in harm’s way by leaving them alone with men like R. Kelly. Adults are supposed to protect their young, not cash in on their suffering.

On the plus side, I learned a new vocabulary word. According to Slate freelancer David Tuller, ephebophilia is the word for guys who do not like actual children but who have a more R. Kelly post-puberty pre-legality taste. So everyone go forth and try to use your new vocab work ephebophilia in a sentence some time this week.

I’d like to take a moment out from my busy schedule of rolling around on the floor laughing at the recent obscenity prosecutions in the United States, in order to comment on them. Veteran adult video performer and producer Max Hardcore was just found guilty of obscenity in Florida. For those who are unaware of his oeuvre, Max Hardcore was the first guy on the extreme-hardcore-with-teens bus. Whether or not you really want to see gaping anal or watersports or puking in a sexual context or even naked chicks who look younger than twenty-two, Max Hardcore certainly deserves both credit and responsibility for bringing such things into the popular culture. Apparently, along with credit for his ground-breaking work in rough sex on camera comes an attempt by the State of Florida to nail him on 20 counts of distributing obscene materials through the mails and internet. Now I have it on good authority that various government agents have been so anxious to bust Max Hardcore over the years that one such over-eager and nervous gent once accidentally discharged a firearm in Max’s house, during a study of paperwork, such that repairs were needed. Now, don’t get me wrong, Blue Blood magazine in print used to get screeners of Max’s movies way before they got as extreme as they supposedly are now. And I couldn’t sit through one then. At the time, I was just like, how did some construction worker manage to parlay an interest in sex into this huge career?

Now Blue Blood art director Forrest Black and I used to enjoy going to all the adult industry trade shows. We attended the adult video shows in Vegas since the pre-Internet times when the adult video show was a little room in the Sands which was part of CES, the Consumer Electronics Show. The very first time I encountered Max Hardcore in person, we shared an elevator at one of those shows and Max told Forrest he liked his fun fur coat. That was about the extent of the interaction and it was still enough for me to be blown away by Max’s charisma. Max Hardcore has that kind of rockstar thing where you stand next to him and he just exudes hotness. He has perfect manners, only you just know he is nasty as all get-out in the bedroom. He has that total Madonna in the living room and whore in the bedroom thing down and he is just very appealing on a basic lizard brain level. Everyone knows a guy where chicks do things with him that they would normally never do. Max Hardcore is one of those guys.

So the State of Florida indicted him on a robust 20 counts of being bad without artistic, literary, or scientific merit and determined that a jury of his peers would have to sit through five of his films back-to-back in a room full of strangers. This sounds like some surreal form of torture out of Brazil (The dystopian science fiction movie by Terry Gilliam, not the country where the unwise film porn movies of HIV-positive tranny hookers.) If “Fist of Fury 4 — Euro Edition” and “Pure Max 19” are not your thing, they are probably really not your thing. If they are your thing, can you imagine having to watch many hours of your specific personal taste in porn, while fully dressed, in a room packed with people you do not know, for hours and hours? Ouch. The defense felt, reasonably I believe, that showing only part of the videos could allow the prosecution to, err, cherry pick only the most appalling scenes and leave out the parts which defense attorney Jeffrey Douglas described as “substantially more light-hearted.” So there was quite a lawyerly tussle over how much of the movies in question to show.

Max Hardcore is no stranger to the legal hot seat, but the bizarre thing here is that he actually got convicted of ten counts and his company got convicted of ten. I’m not sure how it works if a corporation has been naughty, but whatever. One of the freakiest things about this case was that jurors have actually come forward and said that they found against Max because of how the law was explained to them, but they felt he deserved to go free. A jury of his peers felt that the law was unfair and Max was doing no wrong. The State of Florida was actually trying to take the man’s house in California and the jury was having none of it. Full disclosure: I have been a guest at said house and enjoyed Max Hardcore’s hospitality and, yes, that is a photo of me with him at a bar, but, unlike the unfortunate jurors in this case, I have never been forced to watch one of his movies all the way through. I remember when I was a wild girl, but now I am a total prude because I draw the line sexually way before I start vomiting on someone’s cock. This has really messed with my sense of self, but I digress.

Now, of course, Max Hardcore will be appealing the ruling against him. I think he stands a good chance of winning because (a) he always wins this sort of thing, (b) the charges are ridiculous, (c) he just really does not come across as a bad guy, and (d) if even the jurors in Florida were sympathetic to him, the higher up the legal chain he goes, the more likely I think things are to go his way.

A number of adult industry chicken littles (Sky-is-falling ninnies not to be confused with Paul Little aka Max Hardcore aka Max Steiner.) are all aflutter about how this means the end of adult video and adult internet and freedom of speech etc. etc. etc. They are quick to point out that people who live in more liberal parts of the country such as California should be freaking the fuck out because of the Ira Isaacs case starting this month. Round about now, you are probably asking, who is Ira Isaacs? I know I’d never heard of him.

Apparently Ira Isaacs makes bestiality and scat videos. Inside the United States. It seems that nobody ever pointed out to this Ira Isaacs guy that there is a reason there are countries like Holland. According to adult industry publication XBiz, the titles in question in the Ira Isaacs case include “Gang Bang Horse — ‘Pony Sex Game,’” “Mako’s First Time Scat,” “Hollywood Scat Amateurs No. 7,” and “BAE 20.” I’m not even going to ask what BAE stands for, as I previously thought it stood for Best America Erotica, a fine series of book anthologies, edited by Susie Bright, which I have been published in. And I’d like to keep thinking of BAE that way.

Now, while poor Max Hardcore was found guilty for distributing videos of consensual heterosexual human sexuality in Florida, the Ira Isaacs case had to be halted yesterday. Because the Los Angeles Times reported that the judge in the case had a personal website with naughty materials on it: “Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, granted a 48-hour stay in the obscenity trial of a Hollywood adult filmmaker after the prosecutor requested time to explore “a potential conflict of interest concerning the court having a . . . sexually explicit website with similar material to what is on trial here.” In an interview Tuesday with The Times, Kozinski acknowledged posting sexual content on his website. Among the images on the site were a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. He defended some of the adult content as “funny” but conceded that other postings were inappropriate. Kozinski, 57, said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends. After the interview Tuesday evening, he blocked public access to the site. Kozinski is one of the nation’s highest-ranking judges and has been mentioned as a possible candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court. He was named chief judge of the 9th Circuit last year and is considered a judicial conservative on most issues. He was appointed to the federal bench by President Reagan in 1985.”

So, just to recap, a sexy and well-known guy who gets chicks to consensually do crazy stuff on camera has to spend bank on attorneys because of a ruling in Florida that even the jurors do not agree with. An obscure bestiality and scat aficionado in California can’t get a fair trial because the State is having difficulty finding a judge who does not collect bestiality-related porn pics. In California, it is apparently acceptable to post a repository of same to the internet, provided you think the content is “funny” and are not tech-savvy enough to know that people can, ya know, see things which are posted to the web.

You just have to see the humor in all that. To keep from weeping.