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From the July 18, 1993 Auburn Journal:

A school voucher initiative - also known as the Parental Choice in Education Initiative - calls for giving $2600 credit in the form of a voucher to the parents of a school-age child to be applied toward the cost of education for that child at whatever school - public or private - the parent chooses.

"No question, this would devastate financing of public education," said Placer County Superintendent of Schools John Reinking. Reinking's remark is a common reply from public school administrators, who fear the worst in giving parents the option of taking away dollars normally assigned to public education and funneling them to private schools. But the economic issue isn't at the core of the argument for a grassroots organization called ExCEL, which is pushing for approval of the voucher initiative.

The focus is on reform, says Luke Ford of Newcastle. Ford, 27, believes parents should be economically empowered to choose schools for their children because it will lead to a betterment of education overall, not to mention reintroducing the notion of ethics and morality in the classrooms.

"We are the first civlization in history to have raised a generation of youth who are value-free," said Ford, adding that the absence of a moral framework in public education coupled with declining scholastic performances has pushed the voucher initiative to the ballot.

Ford is a 1984 Placer High School graduate and the Placer County coordinator for Parents For Educational Choice, which is supporting the initiative. He is also an unlikely candidate for the job, being virtually house-bound as a victim of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome since 1988....

Raised as a Seventh Day Adventist, Ford grew up in a private school setting, switching to Placer High School as a sophomore.... "I've had experience in both, as well as Sierra College," Ford said. It's that classroom experience that prompted him to become politically concerned and as active as his health will allow in pushing for the voucher initiative.

"My generation grew up in a vacuum," Ford said, noting that as a high school student he saw lots of good sports, music and language programs, but nothing at school on the subject of ethics....

"The idea of teaching kids to be decent people, and the difference between good and bad wasn't there, except for a teacher or two who might do it by example," he said.

Ford's father is a minister who was a professor in Australia... before moving the family to California. He says his father had to cut his class materials by half when they moved, just to accomodate slower paced U.S. students. "We (the United States) used to be considered at the top, educationally, in the world. Now we are near the bottom," Ford said.

Ford became aware of the voucher initiative a year ago through his doctor, Alan Bonsteel of San Francisco, who is the Northern California director for Parents for Educational Choice. Since then, Ford, who recently converted to Judaism, has become increasingly concerned about social issues and public education. "People want to take charge of their lives. They want to make choices and they tend to be dissatisfied with public education, partly because of religious reasons," he said. "Many people feel the public schools just aren't doing the job," Ford added.

Even though he believes there is grassroots support for the initiative, Ford says he has seen little organized effort locally to get it passed. "I think I'm it (the county coordinator) because no one else has come forward," Ford said.

Ford said his health prevents him from making many public appearances, but he is available by telephone to answer questions and help coordinate a Placer County effort in behalf of the initiative.

From the 10/7/97 New York Post:

TRAGEDY OF THE XXX FILES

By FAYE PENN

THE upcoming film "Boogie Nights" puts a somewhat shiny gleam on the adult film industry of the 1970s.

But many of its biggest stars were irreparably tarnished by the so-called "golden era of porn" - dozens died from drug overdoses or alcohol poisoning, and countless more from AIDS.

"Many of them are addicted to either drugs or alcohol," says Los Angeles-based...historian Luke Ford, "particularly those still in touch with the industry."

Gene Ross writes the editorial for the 7/98 edition of Adult Video News

...[T]he industry at one time adopted this site's author, Luke Ford. The industry nurtured him and gave him suckle - only to discover a pen-wielding Rosemary's Baby in its midst...

A keyboard vigilante with a penchant for a hangin', Ford, in my opinion, chooses to essay the role of some bow-wielding William Tell figure whose quest for truth and justice is achieved by methods best understood by the Ku Klux Klan. A British tabloid has nothing on Ford's style of reportage. When it comes to reaching into the bowels of fiction and piling on the manure, Ford's site might best be described as a compost pile vying for the Pulitzer.

What's more, there appears to be some weird obsession with Vito Corleone-type names and lurking Mafioso conspiracies that are somehow deeply entrenched within the catacombs of the adult network. Obviously influenced by Mario Puzo, Ford's daily internet hallucinations compulsively seek Capos behind every bush, dead bodies in every pile of linguine and register a more-than-obvious public vent when neither are to be found.

That would be amusing enough, but Ford's postings are at their hilarious best when they break the tacit industry code of omerta [silence]. Under no intentional circumstances is a performer's identity ever published, yet Ford drops real names with the alarming frequency of a sneeze during hay fever season. His callous disregard is justified by a rather dubious claim that his information has appeared in other source material like AVN. This I would like to see. On very rare occasion such a faux pas has been spotted in AVN, but Ford's collection of a.k.a. revelations rivals the FBI's for volume and circulation.

On further examination, three other initials appear to have captured Ford's morbid fascination: namely, HIV. Being the Internet Chicken Little that he is, Ford is taking credit for "breaking" the current HIV story - which is tantamount to James Cameron claiming originality for the Titanic.

With the bold determination of a Vincent Price character in a Salem Witch Hunt flick, Ford, in my opinion, has single-handedly turned the Internet into a Texas Chainsaw slaughterhouse. Even a spook story maven like Peter Straub might get the shivers from some of the bodies Ford's been dangling from meat hooks. Because of HIV, Marc Wallice's life will never be the same - with no additional prodding, insane conjecture or daily harassment; while performers like John West, Kaitlyn Ashley and Alyssa Love have been tried and sentenced merely on the strength of bizarre logic and absence from the adult industry without Ford's permission. The list of suspects will continue to grow as will the legion of geeks that cling to Ford's every questionable word.

Lord only knows what this guy would do with Jerry Springer.

New York Times journalist Nick Ravo writes on RAME about the 7/98 AVN editorial:

"Ordinarily, I like AVN, have been aided by some writers there and am amazed at its increasing prosperousness. It's a good slick trade magazine, as those journals go. The column by Gene Ross in the most recent issue, however, bashing Luke Ford just plain baffles me; it was also quite discursive. Gene, read the interview with Brooke Ashley on the newsgroup and then ask yourself why a similar no-bull interview wasn't printed in AVN. It's pretty clear that, at a minimum, on the HIV/Marc Wallace (and possibly others) culpability issue, AVN and others in the industry will not investigate or condemn anyone but the media, which is ludicrous. How can any publication bash Luke Ford and the media and not also condemn someone like Wallace, whom most people seem to strongly suspect that knew he was infected and knowingly passed it onto others. The magazine's ire should be directed at Wallace and possibly others -- not the messenger trying to ferret out some truth here. Were it not for the postings on here, I honestly don't think the public would know very much about the seemier side of the business and the HIV testing scandal and Wallace's probable Typhoid Mary-like behavior. Honestly, Gene, I don't think I could have counted on AVN for the real scoop behind this story. And that is disappointing. Besides the Luke postings, some of Pat Riley's postings and some others discussing the Wallice/HIV issue have been right on. My advice is that the best posture for a trade mag like yours might be to just ignore the issue instead of acting as an advocacy organ. I am curious if AVN is also going to take a position on company's selling tapes that feature not only infected talent but the tapes in which they were infected."

From Online Journalism Review (www.ojr.org) 7/9/98

By Emmanuelle Richard, Online Journalism Review Guest Contributor

For anyone who has followed Internet journalism over the past year, his story is eerily familiar:

He is a boyish, self-taught, 32-year-old Web journalist who produces an eponymous one-man news and gossip Web site out of his low-rent bachelor bungalow south of Beverly Hills. He cheerily publishes unchecked and damaging gossip. He is attacked as irresponsible and threatened with lawsuits. Occasionally, he breaks legitimate stories that have a huge impact.

Meet Luke Ford, chronicler of the porn world.

Since February, Ford has broken stories revealing that four porn actresses and one porn actor had tested positive for HIV. The news dropped like a bomb in the Los Angeles region's multibillion-dollar porn industry, where AIDS is everyone's darkest fear. The report was picked up by Adult Video News (AVN), which led to a hastily arranged April meeting of more than 40 film producers, who made an unprecedented agreement to "encourage" the use of condoms on the sets of porn films.

"Luke Ford has been way out front with the HIV porn story," says Nick Ravo, a business writer at the New York Times, who occasionally writes freelance articles about the adult entertainment industry. "[He] is a quirky Matt Drudge character."

Sitting in a tiny, bedless, $400-a-month apartment with little more than a VCR and a floor covered with porn magazines and Jewish theology books, Ford welcomes the comparison.

"We are both eccentric. We're both breaking big stories," says the handsome, casually dressed Australian, speaking in a low tone. "But we've also both made serious mistakes. We both need to work harder on checking our sources. We're both dealing with a lot of gossip and sort of disreputable stuff, except that I cover porn."

Since starting www.lukeford.com in the summer of 1997, Ford has become the favorite whipping boy of the U.S. porn industry, a self-styled "family" of 500 or so performers, directors, producers, distributors, screenwriters and technicians concentrated almost exclusively in the San Fernando Valley. Ford breaks many of the secretive society's taboos: he posts stars' real names, he discusses the role of the "mafia," and he reveals who has had cosmetic surgery.

"The X-rated industry prefers to be a legendary milieu rather than a fact-oriented milieu," laments Bill "Papa Bear" Margold, a 52-year-old former actor who founded the Protecting Adult Welfare foundation, an industry support group with a 24-hour hotline.

A former reporter for the now defunct Santa Monica Outlook, Margold has become an informal industry spokesman.

"Luke Ford is a creation of his time. He's the journalistic suckerfish on the shark of X. We can't get rid of him, and he goes off and does whatever he wants," says Margold. "He's very interesting in a perverse way. But he's a lazy journalist and brings a lot a misery."

In May, for example, Ford brought misery upon retired porn actress Kaithlyn Ashley when he published an erroneous rumor that she was infected with HIV. Ford's friends, it turned out, had confused her name with a Hungarian HIV-positive actress, Caroline, whose real name is similar to Ashley's. Ford quickly printed a retraction.

A few weeks later, he reported that veteran actor Marc Wallice had tested positive and had likely spread the virus to three actresses, including Caroline. Wallice and industry professionals who monitor performers' HIV tests were furious, and they won a retraction. Then, just one week later, Wallice came up positive in a new test.

"Luke Ford is like a blind pig lost in the forest," Margold says. "The pig might find a lot of worms, poison ivy, but sometimes truffles, also. In the Marc Wallice breakout, he was lucky the rumors winded up being factual."

Tousling his teenage haircut, Ford defended posting the rumors without bothering to call Wallice. "I couldn't get a hold of him," he says. The positive test one week later, he says, was no coincidence.

"Give me a break," he squeaks. "Marc Wallice is known to have faked HIV test results two years ago. He has done gay porn and IV drugs. He was semi-blackballed by some producers in the industry for year. He might have been positive two years ago. It's not clear. When sources tipped me about his status, I knew I had news here."

Ford called his error about Kaithlyn Ashley "very embarrassing," but he claimed that the postings on HIV sparked an overwhelming demand for performers like Wallice to take a proper test. The result, says Ravo, has had a strong impact on the industry.

"If it hadn't been for Luke Ford, [this HIV outbreak] may have not gone public and could have been covered up," Ravo says. "I'm not sure AVN would have gone digging and published it."

AVN reporter Mark Kernes says his magazine considers Ford untrustworthy, and says it waited to publish the news about Wallice until "it would turn from rumor into fact."

Margold, whose foundation helps find health care coverage for performers, says the industry didn't need Ford to act against the spreading of AIDS.

"There's nothing we care about with more seriousness than the health and the lives of 'the kids' in the industry," he says. "Calling Luke Ford the Matt Drudge of porn is giving him way too much credit. The news spread perfectly without him."

Anyone familiar with the porn industry would raise an eyebrow at that assertion, considering the distorted quality of news in this rumor-fueled family of frequently bizarre characters.

People traditionally stay informed through casting agencies, friends, or the grapevine, says Jeffrey J. Douglas, an attorney and executive director of the industry's trade association, the Free Speech Coalition.

"Internal information is informal; there is no Hollywood Reporter," says Douglas. AVN, Margold says, is widely seen more as "an advertising orifice" than as an information source.

"I definitely stumbled into a niche there," says Ford. "There was no one doing what I'm doing now, exploring this virgin territory."

As a child, Ford wanted to become a missionary. His father, a strict Seventh Day Adventist evangelist, was a controversial figure in Australia.

"Sexual sins were the biggest sins, therefore I was attracted and used pornography a lot as a teenager for blasphematory release," Ford recalls.

When he moved to California in 1977, Ford started writing for his high-school paper, developing a taste for unearthing scandals such as favoritism on the football team. He later worked for the news department of KAHI/KHYL radio in Sacramento.

From ages 21-27, Ford was bedridden with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and as he began recovering, he converted to Judaism. Two years later, he moved to Los Angeles, and soon noticed he couldn't find investigative books about the porn industry.

Intrigued, Ford began doing research for his own book, which he says will be published by Prometheus next spring. The first editions of his crudely designed, mono-color Web site were fueled by leftovers from his research, which he supplemented with reports from film sets, gossip lifted from newsgroups, and essays on breast implants.

The site has links to Ford's other site, www.dennisprager.net, an unauthorized collection of information about the Jewish radio theologian. You can also click on titles such as "Girls" and "Cybererotica," which directly link to commercial porn sites.

"I don't like cheesy banners, I don't want naked girls on my site, so I have discreet links to my advertisers," Ford explains. "I know it's confusing but that's how I make my living."

He says he now makes about $3,000 a month, which will allow him to hire an assistant. He claims the site attracts 50,000 hits a day.

It is not a sophisticated site.

"In terms of design, it's certainly the worst site I've seen in the past three or four years," says Mike Godwin, counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet advocacy group. "It does make Matt Drudge look pretty good."

But Godwin is fascinated by Ford's pack-rat instincts of collecting every transcript of every tape-recorded conversation he has. "It gives people from the industry and fans a sense of connection," he says.

Readers can feel like they are part of this strange world, and there is something human about how Ford will write about embarrassing situations, like when a beautiful actress vehemently refuses to accept his offer of a kosher cake, or when superagent Jim South tries to kick him out of his office.

"Unlike Matt Drudge, Ford lets people criticize him and posts the criticism on his site," Godwin notes. "No one else would probably do what he does with so much devotion and work… It's a labor of love."

But subjects of his articles don't paint so rosy a picture.

"Luke first seems extremely pleasant in person, but he has a gift to create controversy and bring out malice," says the Free Speech Coalition's Douglas.

"The bio he wrote on me has been exaggerated, taken out of context, and written in a tone to shock and appall the reader," says recently-retired porn actress Asia Carrera, who now makes her money running her own Web site. "When he came to my house to interview me, he attacked my beliefs, and scoffed at the pain in my past, telling me I needed to 'get over it,'" she says. "Very sensitive journalistic professionalism there."

Brandy Alexandre, a former porn star who says she started the first porn news site in cyberspace in 1993, and whose site has been largely overshadowed by Ford's, says 90% of what Ford posts is erroneous.

"Luke Ford thinks he's more powerful than he really is," Alexandre says. "He can't write, he doesn't have good information. He's an evil little hack."

Adult screenwriter and journalist Martin Brimmer says he uses Ford's site for research and checks it regularly, but takes the information with a grain of salt.

"Luke Ford doesn't stop to apply editorial expertise," Brimmer stresses. "He needs to slow down in that respect. Ninety percent of his content is very good but he needs to corroborate his facts. And he needs to be more respectful towards people in the industry."

Douglas says Ford is not truly useful to the porn community. "Luke is obsessed with the industry, the Jews in the industry, the mafia, which is totally ridiculous, and he's hostile to most of the things he's obsessed with," he says.

"Ford is of no use to anyone," snaps Carrera. "Gossip is of no use to anyone. Ford never chooses to reveal anything positive or enlightening, or even anything remotely close to newsworthy. He's a failed author relegated to the level of yellow journalist."

(This reporter involuntarily experienced Ford's methods when he published an error-filled transcript of an informal conversation we had about the Eastern European porn industry. Ford sent his notes by e-mail and asked for clarifications, but only after he had already posted the imperfect notes on his site. He apologized and quickly retracted the transcript.)

Ford knows his methods make industry people shriek. He's not ashamed of not bothering to call the subject of a story, as in the Marc Wallice case.

"People are not good sources on themselves, generally speaking," he retorts.

"It's a business built on lies. Most people don't use their real names; this business has been illegal until recently and it's still semi-illegal. It's a business of hoods, gangsters, thugs, mafia, pimps and prostitutes, with few real offices or semi-offices. It's very difficult to nail down what is true and it's an endless task."

He says that when he eventually tracks down people and e-mails them his notes, they usually "go ballistic." "They start screaming that I'm publishing lies. But these people are used to being in their own little world; they are not used to dealing with real journalism," Ford says.

Ford is perfectly aware he causes pain, but only, he says, because he is "usually telling the truth."

"People insult me but they still talk to me," he says. "A lot of people have mixed feelings — they hate me but they also respect me. Some think they'd better talk to me if they want to get their message out. They figure they can seduce me."

He says actors use his site to learn about directors they don't know. "They can check [a director's] profile on my site and learn if he has a bad reputation for writing bad checks or working for the mafia," he says.

Ford has yet to be served with court papers. "I get threats all the time, never taken into court yet," he says. "Each time I receive [lawsuit threats], I make a copy and paste it on the Web site, because they are so ludicrous."

His site is free for now, but will go to a subscription-based model some time this fall, says Ron Levy, manager of Voice Media, Inc., which has been Ford's main sponsor since January. "We'll add pictures and we'll revamp it," he says. "I think everybody in the industry would want to subscribe."

Ford says he is still ambivalent about his chosen profession, and is not always comfortable with how it has affected his life.

"Sometimes I think it's acceptable, sometimes disgusting. It costs me a lot of social stigma. I was turned out from my favorite synagogue, my family is furious, my friends too," he says. "I'm lucky I got the Sabbath: at least one day a week I don't touch the computer and I don't deal with porn."

© Copyright 1998 Online Journalism Review

Emmanuelle Richard is the Los Angeles correspondent for Radio France Internationale and France Info.

From www.feedmag.com, an article by Jeff Winbush:

"WHEN IT COMES to reaching into the bowels of fiction and piling on the manure," the op-ed bristled, "the site might best be described as a compost pile vying for the Pulitzer."

This may sound like another old media tirade against the shallow ethics of Matt Drudge, but as it happens the assault was launched not by an editorialist at The New York Times or the Washington Post, but rather by an outraged journalist at Adult Video News, the porn industry's monthly paper of record. Just as traditional publishing has been revolutionized by the web-based Drudgeries of freelance gossip mavens, the porn industry has now attracted its own maverick troublemaker, and he has triggered a feud that -- measured by the sheer vitriol involved -- rivals anything brewing between Blumenthal and Drudge.

The figure at the center of this tempest is Luke Ford, the 32-year-old Los Angeles based freelance writer who has convincingly styled himself as the sex industry's version of Matt Drudge. Declaring himself to be the only serious journalist who makes covering porn peddlers his full-time beat, Ford runs weekly updates on his website on the state of America's most secretive billion-a-year business. Like Drudge, Ford positions himself as a renegade, shaking up the establishment of smut. Of course, we're talking about an industry where "the establishment" is Screw Magazine.

There's something strangely inverted about the whole notion: how can you be a muckraker in a business that prides itself on being dirty?

IF DRUDGE HAS come to be known by his obsession with interns, Ford harbors a comparable fixation with the medical records of his subjects. Mixing gossip, inside information, profiles of adult performers and excerpts from a book he wrote on the history of pornography, Ford claims 50,000 hits to the site daily. But much of his reporting deals with the disease that originally shut down the swinging decade of porn's golden age.

During one of my conversations with Ford, he was trying to verify a tip that two leading ladies have tested positive for HIV. Uncertain he's got enough to go with the story, Ford works the phone and dispatches E-mail to his sources for confirmation. "Every other journalist covering this industry works for the industry -- whether it's for Hustler, Screw or Adult Video News," Ford says. "I've been able to break stories that I wouldn't be able to break if I were working for the industry."

Which is why Ford tends to be disliked by people in the industry, many of whom see him as a loose cannon who dishes dirt and wrecks careers by "outing" HIV-positive performers. Bill Margold, a former actor in X-rated films and now the founder of Protecting Adult Welfare told the Online Journalism Review, "He's the journalistic suckerfish on the shark of X. We can't get rid of him and he goes off and does whatever he wants."

Despite the howls of indignant flesh merchants, Ford is unrepentant. To hear him tell it, he's not simply reporting a good story, he's providing a public service too. If porn is a business that likes being dirty, Ford likes to think he's applying a little disinfectant. "If the person I'm writing about is taking intravenous drugs they are endangering the lives of others because IV drug use is a handy way to transmit HIV," says Ford. "If they're into beating up women that might be gossip, but if they're one of the male performers that use needles to shoot up their penis to get an erection, that's news."

Not that everything Ford writes about is life and death. The humor in the interviews with the porn-world's bit players can be slapstick and inane. Consider this excerpt from a recent column:

Bethany, 21, yo, stands 5'5, and approximately measures 36C-25-36. I can put my hands around her waist, which I do with great enthusiasm. We then recline on opposite ends of the couch in Reb's office. With her long red fingernails, Bethany hikes her dress up and down her soft pale thighs. She crosses and uncrosses her legs. She licks her lips. She looks at me and smiles... Bethany says she insists on condoms, but her determination wavers when various producers over the phone offer her and more to do condomless scenes.

Bethany's preference for condoms is part of a theory in porno that playing sex without latex is literally killing the business. Five porn stars have tested positive for HIV in the past six months. Several major production companies -- including VCA and Vivid -- have called for mandatory usage of condoms in their films. Until the recent outbreak of HIV performers, it was up to each sex star to undergo regular HIV testing. However some performers have faked their tests or simply not reported that they were HIV positive.

Depending on who's talking, Ford is widely credited or blamed for forcing the industry to move in a direction they have long resisted. Ford has published the names of those suspected or confirmed of being HIV positive. The dam broke when Ford reported on April 23 that Marc Wallice, a veteran of more than a thousand sex flicks had tested positive. Three days later Ford retracted the story. On April 28, Sharon Mitchell, a official of Protecting Adult Welfare (PAW) an adult industry advocacy group that monitors HIV testing confirmed Wallice was HIV-positive. No less than three women who have performed with Wallice have tested positive. PAW requires performers that test through them to sign release forms that allows PAW to notify porn producers of the actor's HIV status.

Ford says he tries to verify through his sources before he publishes the HIV status of a performer on his web page. He openly admits to being troubled by his rush to publish first. "I am having one of my passing bouts with humanity. No Scoop Luke right now. I must admit that a large part of me wants to be first with the story, and that sometimes the truth suffers in my rush."

Despite his pangs of guilt, Ford continues to slash and burn porn stars, publishing their real names and revealing their private quirks. Ford's casual proclivity to publish first, check the facts second demolishes his mea culpas. The fear of lawsuits is a threat that leaves him unfazed. Ford's banking on the idea that a person that performs sex acts for money and on film would have a tough time convincing a judge that their reputation has been smeared.

As for maintaining a professional distance from his subject, Ford says most of the time it's no problem; he's been on the beat for three years now, hanging out at film shoots and observing a numbing amount of copulation. He's a bit jaded by the all the open carnality and says he doesn't find most porn queens attractive. This, of course, is one problem Drudge doesn't have, assuming that Fox News star hasn't been making late-night forays to the maison Lewinsky. "I don't have a policy of not boinking someone in the industry, but I never make the first move," Ford says. "If I developed a reputation for that type of behavior, it would kill my sources."

DESPITE HIS CLAIMS of a rich news past with stints in radio, television and newspapers, much of Ford's writing would gag a Journalism 101 instructor. Acting as his own editor and fact-checker opens Ford up to criticism that he is simply running a vanity site. His stream-of-consciousness, third person narratives can be annoying and sloppy, lost in a smoggy haze of inane ramblings about his fondness for Taco Bell burritos and brain hiccups like "John's dog Cleo keeps biting people." It's the kind of prose style that makes Drudge start sounding like Walter Winchell after all.

Ford's probably on target when he claims he's hated for his exclusives. Just a few weeks ago, Ford re-posted a strangely rhetorical editorial from the Adult Video News that body-slammed the self-appointed muckraker. "A keyboard vigilante with a penchant for a hangin', Ford in my opinion, chooses to essay the role of some bow-wielding William Tell figure whose quest for truth and justice is achieved by methods best understood by the Ku Klux Klan. A British tabloid has nothing on Ford's style of reportage."

Ford's investigative journalist aspirations are not fully realized, but invective like this from AVN indicates he's getting there. Covering flesh merchants isn't a beat that future David Broders or Bob Woodwards dream about. And even if he does break a high-profile story in the sex industry, he's not likely to picked up by the networks for it. None of this seems to trouble Ford: porn is his niche and he's quite happy to have the exclusive franchise. As for the industry itself, it shouldn't protest too much. Do the producers of "The World's Biggest Anal Gangbang" or "White Trash Whore #5" really expect the mainstream to take them seriously and assign reporters to do in-depth pieces on, say, the rise of ATM (ass-to-mouth) scenes? Porn gets a Luke Ford because it deserves a Luke Ford.

Next year Ford plans the first in a series of porn industry tell-alls for Prometheus Books. His latest obsession: the mob's role in the sex business. According to Ford, the Clinton Administration has been quite good to the domestic sex merchants, with Janet Reno's Justice Department laying off the endless crusades launched by Ed Meese during the Reagan years. Ford can hardly wait to dig into organized crime's control of pornography. The threatening phone calls have already started coming in.

The World Wide Winchells

By Andy Patrizio on www.techweb.com:

C O N T I N U E D . . .

LUKE FORD

Australian-born Luke Ford, 32, has been labeled "The Matt Drudge of Porno." Like Drudge, he lives like a pauper, runs a primitive, text-only website, and works alone. He's also exposed a potentially hot story on his website: that of an AIDS cover-up.

Following a five-year bout with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and a failed acting career, Ford says he "fell into" writing about the porn industry while he was looking for books on the business out of curiosity. But they were all written from a dry academic slant or from a Christian spin, he says. Having seen a half-dozen movies, Ford decided to write his own history of pornography, which will be published next year.

Ford began making his presence known online by posting his profiles on rec.arts.movies.erotica, a newsgroup for adult-movie fans. To provide a home for all the profiles and cut down on spamming the group, Ford set up his site with every profile he'd written.

Adult stars have complained about inaccuracies in the reports, but were really mad that Ford listed their real names in his profiles. "I have fans who write scary stuff," said adult actress Christy Lake, who tore into Ford during a radio appearance. "And they show up at my appearances. ... Does it take someone getting seriously hurt for you to stop? Do you care? Are you human?"

Ford admits posting the real names was a mistake [LF: not true], but says he won't remove them from his site. "When you star having sex on camera, you can't argue 'please protect my privacy,' " he says. "The price you pay is people are going start poking into your life."

After completing the profiles, Ford began posting daily industry updates as he made contacts within the business. Ford's style is simply to transcribe what he's told with no editing and few follow-ups to statements or claims that are thrown his way.

"People know even if they don't like me or me them, I will simply transcribe what they say and comment very little about it," Ford wrote in an Internet newsgroup as to why he gets access to people.

What really pushed Ford into the spotlight -- and upset a lot of people -- was a story he printed about a male performer who knew he was HIV-positive but used fake test results to keep working. Most adult-movie studios won't let performers work unless they have a current test that says they're negative, but Ford says the actor, Marc Wallace, was allowed to work even though his test results came from a nonindustry-approved source.

The furor over the story forced Wallace to take an extensive test in the presence of the Adult Industry Medicine, an organization that conducts HIV testing for the industry. "They said he was crying when he took the test because he knew he was positive," says Ford. So far, five women have tested HIV-positive this year, four of whom have worked with Wallace.

Regardless, the claim that adult-movie studios looked the other way at Wallace's suspicious test results infuriated people in the porn industry. "Can you think of one reason why the adult-video industry, which makes its living off of people having sex on camera, would possibly in your wildest dreams allow someone they knew was HIV-positive to keep working?" counters Mark Kernes, features editor of Adult Video News, the Billboard of the adult-movie industry, in Van Nuys, Calif., and a major critic of Ford's work.

Kernes says he thinks Ford is sloppy. "There are lies and slanders throughout his posts," he says. "There's no filtering, and the problem is he'll stick to a story even when you point out to him how wrong it is."

Ford concedes numerous attacks in Adult Video News and on the Internet, hate mail, and more than a few death threats on his answering machine are starting to get to him -- but they also motivate him, too. "The way AVN reviles me makes me more determined to get the scoop to get it out there and shove it in their face," he says.

In the 9/98 AVN editorial on page ten, Gene Ross writes about his debate with me on the Ed Powers radio show on KSLX FM 97.1 in LA:

"I just wish you hadn't made that comment about the snuff film."

This was AVN publisher Paul Fishbein cringing the day after my radio confrontation with Internet gadfly Luke Ford.

Ford's a guy about whom I wrote a not-too-complimentary AVN editorial a couple of months ago. Which, by the way, I was soundly criticized for in some quarters on the basis that it perhaps lent Ford too much undue credibility. A contradiction in terms, if you think about it, but it seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. Still does, as a matter of fact, now that I've been up against Ford in sort of a classic Hemingway situation and have seen what all the hubbub is about.

Though he proclaims himself to be an "accredited" journalist, I still contend that Ford's ione of these smear tactic commandos who deploys cryptic sources to do his dirty work, but, himself, isn't able to discern a fact from a fortune cookie. Which explains, possibly, why Ford's adult industry postings read like the dialogue equivalent of kung fu movies.

Ethnicity aside (a subject which Ford can't seem to relinquish in his own articles) myself, Ford, AVN's Mark Kernes and a couple million other people, including Brooke Ashley, one of Ford's frequent targets these days, were invited to cram into a broadcast booth to be on Ed Powers' midnight talk show. KLSX radio 97.1 FM in Los Angeles on your listening dial.

Bill Margold also was an invited guest on the program but didn't show for reasons particular to Margold. Something about Margold's having an early a.m. call time, according to Ed Powers. The fact that Margold is a frequent critic of AVN, having many times labeled the magazine "Corrupt," was one particular reason why I was psyching up for the show. At the sound of the bell my strategy was to come flying out of the corner of the ring and go straight for a no-holds-barred submission lock on Margold. Except I was denied. My snitches claim there was another story behind the story of the absence, one too good to pass up. Except my tendency as an accredited journalist (unlike Ford, I've been a reporter for real newspapers) is to consider the source and leave unsubstantiated swill to the Luke Fords of the world. Ford, you see, has a knack for putting tall tales in their undignified and improper perspective. All of which offers explanation why he curries favor with the yarn-spinning Pecos Bills of the adult industry.

By no means a tall tale considering what she's had to endure, particularly as a result of Ford's callous Internet musings, HIV victim Brooke Ashley handled herself adroitly and with quiet courage.

I, on the other hand, lost my cool way before the show even got started and wanted to scramble over the barrier that separated me from Ford to put a "Stone Cold Stunner" on the man. Such is Ford's unenviable ability to make your skin crawl. (Proving I'm not alone in my feelings, Hustler Erotic Video Guide editor Mike Albo called in to the show offering to knock Ford's yarmulke off his head.)

In 20/20 hindsight, I have two, maybe three regrets about that evening. The first one was a decision to wear a "Johnny Bravo" muscle shirt. For whatever aesthetic purpose that achieved, Ford saw fit the following day to comment appreciatively on "my 200 muscular pounds...broad shoulders and thick biceps" for the benefit of the Internet. A simple Sylvester Stallone comparison would have sufficed, but another man's rapt attention to my machismo really wasn't the purpose of the radio debate. (Ford can at least take solace in knowing that if his journalistic career goes belly-up he can get a carnival job as a weight-guesser.)

My second source of contrition resides in my glib remark about snuff films. I'll explain: For some unfathomable reason, host Powers hurled a question at me about what movie I'd like to see Ford in, as if I'd like to see him in any. To which I snappily replied, "a snuff film." Yes, I would give a word-association psychologist fits, this I have to admit. But, because I assumed, judging by the circumsized expression residing on Powers' face, that my remark got bleeped, I didn't elaborate. Not that I'd want to see anything bad happen to Luke Ford. How could I wish that on someone who expresses his undying admiration for my creatine-fueled physique? The point I would have made rests in Ford's bizarre fixations with snuff films and the Mafia as inextricably bound to pornography.

The third regrettable issue of the night was the hand grenade lobbed by Powers in Ford's direction, which I failed, miserably, to act upon. Ed asked Luke if he was an "eggplant," a question similarly posed by Dennis Hopper to Christopher Walken in True Romance. As idiotic as all of this sounds, even Ford's own sister tends to discredit him when she writes on the Internet: "He (Luke) was involved in a motor vehicle accident in which his forehead impacted with a steering wheel...there is medical opinion that this affected his pituitary and resulted in something like a frontal lobe lobotomy...as a result of motor vehicle accident he (Luke) seems to lack a degree of insight and balance in his life."

Idiot me, I never brought this point up.

These gratuitous medical insights, no doubt, come as some small consolation to Brooke Ashley who now says she'd like to "strangle" Ford. Part of Brooke's calm during the radio interview was attributable to the fact that she hadn't read any of Ford's stories about her on the Net. Now she's wiser and mad as hell.

Marc Wallice tells me that he was on the verge of committing suicide after Ford's railings about his condition, and a performer named Kristen has sought psychological counseling, the result of Ford's erroneous postings about her HIV condition.

Several days after the radio interview, Powers had a chummy lunch with Luke Ford. I asked Ed why was he consorting with the enemy.

"He's wounded," said Powers. "He's like a wounded cheetah. It's better not to ignore him." Of course Powers also admitted that he was afraid to leave his jacket draped on a chair to go to the men's room.

"I don't want him to know what I pay for my dry cleaning."

From the 9/21/98 Weekly Standard (By Matt Labash)

Luke is from Cooranbong, outside Sydney. He's a kind of shaggy-haired, acid-washed Brad Pitt, the 32-year old son of a former Seventh Day Adventist evangelist. After a bout with atheism in his twenties, he converted to Judaism on hearing Dennis Prager, the Jewish radio theologian. Luke moved to Los Angeles and decided to write a book on either ethical living or pornography. He settled on porn, and his A History of X will be published next year. In the meantime, he serves as the industry's Matt Drudge, operating a porn-news Web site, where profiles of Wendy Whoppers and Max Hardcore are garnished with Torah references and discussion of whether Jewish porners keep kosher.

Loathed in the porn industry for aggressively reporting stories such as an HIV epidemic that has seen five stars test positive since January, Luke is forced to cadge a Sydney Morning Herald press pass to gain admittance to the conference. I ask him why stays on this beat, and after feeble protestations about being the only critical observer in a racket filled industry shills, he finally shrugs: "Good question - it's something I talk about weekly with my shrink. She's an orthodox Jew."

Like everyone else here, Luke discounts claims by feminists and fundamentalists that pornography leads to violence against women. But unlike anyone else here, he seems perplexed about porn, offering eloquent disquisitions on its corrosive effect and tendency to desensitize.

Luke breaks with the academics and porners who've adopted a chipper Rousseauian view of things: No impulse should be subjugated; porn is nothing but natural man expressing himself in the most natural of ways. He regards pornography as "inherently wild, nasty and vicious." "The male animals is very bad news," he says, "and pornography exemplifies that. These people are divorced from the foundations of our civilization." As Luke sees it, "the best arguments against pornography are religious ones: that sex should be sacred, that the human being contains the image of God, that we should not act like animals but live in a moral, elevated sense. I buy that," he says, "Even if I don't live up to it."

Despite his inner conflict, Luke serves as my Sacajawea, guiding me through the alien biosphere that is convocation, pointing out people I should meet. Because his name is recognized and reviled by industry regulars, Luke intermittently uses an alias, and I join in for sport. We introduce ourselves as retired gay porn stars Dick Dundee and Jack Hammer.

..."Oy vey," says Luke. "Proverbs says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. This conference will show you how incredibly stupid people get when they don't have a fear of God."

He's speaking of the professors, who slither through the halls ogling passing porn actresses...

...the Free Speech Coalition's awards dinner... Luke can't attend as he has to keep the Sabbath holy...

From the 10/98 AVN by Gene Ross:

...Now, if it would only help her stop smoking. Mitchell re-acquired the habit, blaming Luke Ford, the Internet Torquemada and Wallice's chief prosecutor, as the man responsible for driving her back into the nurturing arms of nicotine. Much of it's due to the "slanderous" stuff Ford's been writing about her on his Website, according to Mitchell.

"There are these horrible things that have poured out of that site," Mitchell claims. "Things are being said about me being an active junkie. That hurts me very much. I was in drugs and alcohol for 16 years, and I'm proud of the fact that I'm three years clean and sober."

…Nonetheless, before any of the Wallice DNA-RNA test results were made official, Luke Ford and his band of Internet villagers gathered to light the torches. They mutually concluded that Frankstein Wallice was "Patient Zero" in what was suspected to be an elaborate HIV cover-up within the adult industry. [LF: Sharon Mitchell first applied the term "patient zero" to Wallice in that Thursday, April 30 adult industry meeting.]

"I feel so bad for Marc," says Mitchell, who used to room with Wallice years ago. "This kid has been hit with an HIV-positive and has been accused of spreading this knowingly to other people. This [Ford's] is a criminal assumption."

[LF: I've heard from sources that Mitchell has also seriously considered Wallice as the most likely source of the industry's HIV outbreak.]

In what's taken the proportions of an Agatha Christie whodunit, for starters, there's a 32-man gangbang that was staged in February involving Wallice and fellow HIV+ mate Brooke Ashley. For all intents and purposes, this has been suggested as the logical scene of the crime. With the possible exception of Colonel Mustard in the library with a lead pipe, a number of high-profile suspects in the industry have been linked to a Nixonian conspiracy to fix everything but SAT scores. The select group includes Wallice, Mitchell, South and even Bill Margold, who heads the PAW organization.

"Luke Ford just can't get it right," says Margold wearily, quite aware of Ford's active participation in the Wallice witch hunt. Margold candidly admits that he was the one who let Ford in the adult industry door in the first place, a decision he says he now regrets.

[LF: Though Margold was my first major interview in the industry, not Bill not anybody "let me in the door." I'd been researching the industry for about five months before I talked to Bill and no one was going to shut me out. Bill was not initially a source of referrals to other people to interview though he was and has often served as a valuable and provocative source.]

South bristles at any suggestion of wholesale conspiracies.

"I was one of the original people who came up with the idea of getting people AIDS tests…

"The thing [Wallice's forged test in early 1996 or late 1995] stems from…when Wallice did a deRenzy shoot in San Francisco."

Wallice…claims that Luke Ford has misquoted him by saying it was a VCA shoot. "I don't know where he got that," Wallice says. "I never told him that. He turned everything I said around."

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