Posted on 11/21/2001 9:45:48 PM PST by TheMole
The adult video store mogul who helped legitimize pornography in Canada has been charged in Honduras with making X-rated videos of underage girls at his luxurious country home.
Randy Jorgensen, 45, who gained national notoriety for his national chain of video stores and a legal battle that ended up in the Supreme Court, strongly rejects the allegations.
He pleaded his innocence after voluntarily appearing before a judge on Oct. 5 in response to an arrest warrant.
The allegations were levelled by a disgruntled ex-employee and have not been corroborated, he said repeating his denials.
"It's one of the hazards of being in the adult industry. As soon as somebody says something, it causes great uproar," Mr. Jorgensen said.
He said neighbours of his vacation home in Honduras told the court they had observed nothing unusual going on there.
Mr. Jorgensen, who founded Adults Only Video in 1987 and expanded it to Canada's largest adult video rental chain, has attracted considerable media coverage, both for his aim of making sex shops couple-friendly and for his many court battles.
He has been waging war on Canadian prudishness, censorship, bureaucracy, zoning codes, municipal bylaws and customs policies for more than a decade. His stores are clean and bright and offer a wide variety of sex-related products besides videos.
Between 1991 and 1995, he has estimated he spent an average of a day and a half a week in court and ran up at least $1-million in legal expenses.
Mr. Jorgensen said he had received a letter from the Honduran judge on Oct. 5 that exonerated him of the latest charges.
But Alma Reina Cruz, the special prosecutor in charge of the case, told the National Post yesterday that she filed criminal charges against Mr. Jorgensen and two American men, Mike Wyatt, 60, and Woody Abbott, a 59-year-old California native who also goes by the name Willard Lee.
"Mr. Jorgensen has been formally charged with living off the avails of minors," Ms. Cruz said. "We have a witness who denounced him and the two Americans for taking pornographic photos and videos of minors. She said the men drugged the girls and gave them alcohol before filming them."
Bruce Harris, director of the Costa Rican-based group Casa Alianza, received an anonymous tip about the case two years ago, eventually passing on the information to Honduran authorities.
"The tipster gave us the names of the people involved and we sent our people to investigate," said Mr. Harris, whose organization monitors sexual exploitation of children. "We suspect the pornographic material could have been distributed through the Internet and placed on Web sites."
Mr. Jorgensen owns 56 Adults Only Video stores from B.C. to Ontario, with annual revenue of about $25-million.
As Mr. Jorgensen built up his business from a single video store in Saskatchewan, he faced innumerable charges. After one raid in 1990, RCMP in Manitoba charged him with more than 1,100 counts of violating obscenity laws, considered a record for one defendant. Those charges were later withdrawn.
He was convicted in Ontario, only to see the conviction overturned in the Supreme Court. The judges ruled in 1995 that a video store owner could not be convicted if he did not know a tape contained obscene material, as Mr. Jorgensen claimed about three films seized by police.
Mr. Jorgensen has two houses in Honduras, including a large villa with a pool and several acres of land called Campo del Mar in Trujillo, a tourist town on the northern coast. It is there that he is accused of luring the teenagers, aged 14 to 18, and allegedly shooting pornographic photos and videos of them.
In a transcript of his court interview, Mr. Jorgensen denied knowing Mr. Wyatt and Mr. Abbott, denied that his home was ever used to make videos of nude children, and denied knowing the girls in the photos.
"I come to Honduras only for vacation," he told a judge in his Oct. 5 "examination of the defendant."
"I have never had cameras in my house."
He blamed the incident on a disagreement with his former house administrator, Arlene Esther Ramirez Marin, who worked for him for four years. He said she accused him of the charges after they had a dispute about her failure to produce accounting records for the money he sent from Canada to a bank account in Honduras.
"I asked her many times to give the accounting and she only gives me pretexts or excuses. So I was surprised by the accusations against me," Mr. Jorgensen said in the court documents.
Ms. Marin quit her job as administrator last June but never asked for her severance pay, he added.
Mr. Jorgensen is free to re-enter Honduras and will remain a free man as the case against him proceeds. Ms. Cruz, the special prosecutor, acknowledged that the case will rely on witnesses, who have testified about the existence of the pornographic tapes.
If convicted, Mr. Jorgensen could face up to six years in prison.
He said he has no plans to abandon his home away from home. "One disgruntled employee handing my business card to an ambitious prosecutor isn't going to turn me away."
Anybody know anything about the Honduran legal system? Any chance of this scumbag rotting in a rat-infested dungeon or suchlike?
"Adult" video. Should be added to the e-mail lists of oxymorons.
This Idiot deserves to be executed. I hope Honduras has the death penalty for this crap.
"Adult" Video has no right to pollute society, and should be banned. Our Founding Fathers Never Permitted this garbage, but the liberal hippie crowd has destroyed our sense of values.
How Far has the West Fallen.
The filth and perversity in our society toda is nauseating. We need to get rid of this garbage or we will end up like the Roman Empire.
It is also disheartening that people are fretting over such "rights" as injecting poison into their body or watching women being subjugated into sodomy. There are many real rights to look out for.
Libertarian, as in the party, probably stands for for being libertines than actually liberty.
Sexual morality is what has advanced Western civilization. Chastity until marriage kept society nearly free of venereal disease for many years. Some hippies come along, and, BOOM, half a generation later and we have AIDS.
May God Bless and Protect our Glorious Republic!
WOODY??
WILLARD??
I start getting suspicious when I read stories like this. Is this one of those Onion send-ups?
Heh. Canada is the country that does not allow religious broadcasters to own, outright their own TV or radio stations.
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