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Controversial Adult Website Hacked

Andy Patrizio 12/22/1998 CMP TechWeb
Copyright 1998 CMP Media Inc.

Luke Ford, who runs a website about the adult-movie industry, is no stranger to controversy. But a recent interview with a Hollywood "insider" who claimed knowledge about the sex lives of the film-industry elite has made his site the target of a hacker.

Ford's site has drawn the ire of the porn industry, with its behind-the-scenes stories, like one about an actor who allegedly hid his HIV-positive status and continued to work.

But this time, Ford said, his site is being attacked by Hollywood's elite. "I think it was someone in the mainstream industry," he said.

Two weeks ago, Ford published the interview in which the subject made claims about powerful Hollywood figures, their sexuality, and their use of the casting couch. Days later, Ford's two sites, 4Porn.net and Lukeford.com, were attacked by a script that took down the entire server.

His sites were hosted by Voice Media, which hosts five pay sites and 30 free sites, all dedicated to adult content. The attack on Ford's site took down all 35 Voice Media sites, costing it $40,000 in lost revenue and prompting Voice Media to take Ford's site down.

The reaction has been surprising, Ford said, because many who work in the pornography industry, who have criticized him in the past, have written to ask when his site will be back. Ford hopes to have a new host soon and then plans to go hunting for the hacker who shut down his site. "I want to find who did this," he said.

Ford's site is the latest to fall victim to attacks by those who disagreed with its content. The New York Times site was hacked after it ran a series of stories on cybercrime. And Salon received threats after publishing information about an affair Rep. Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee investigating President Clinton, had with a married woman.

"If you print an unpopular point of view, you face the consequences, like a boycott of advertisers or someone throwing rocks through your window," said Jim Balderston, an analyst with Zona Research. Publishers need adequate security for their websites, like the security guards that protect a print newspaper's front door, Balderston said.

From AVN.Com 12/98

For some in the porn industry, Luke Ford and his Web sites were merely an annoyance. For others, including porn stars whose real identity he revealed or whose positive HIV status he disclosed, he was the scourge of the industry. Someone decided to fight back and Ford has been hacked.

His two sites, Lukeford.com and 4porn.net, are down and the company that hosted the sites has lost about $40,000 in revenues from damage done to its server. Ironically, Ford doesn't suspect this was a case of revenge by someone in the porn industry. Instead, he thinks it is related to an interview he posted in early December in which the subject discussed important Hollywood executives and their sexual proclivities. He thinks the hacker was dispatched by the mainstream entertainment industry. The script used by the hacker to take down Ford's sites also affected the other sites hosted by Voice Media, including five pay sites.

If the porn industry is rejoicing over Ford's misfortunes, it is not doing so to his face. Ford reportedly has received many inquiries as to when his sites will return. Soon, he replies. Meanwhile, he intends to hunt down the hacker.

......................................

San Francisco's art magazine, Speak, delves into academia's fascination with porn. Arts editor of San Francisco Metropolitan magazine, Michelle Goldberg, writes in the Jan/Feb 1999 issue of Speak about the "three-day quasi-theoretical celebration of the sex industry called the World Pornography Conference" held in Universal City last August.

Goldberg called the W.P.C. the "apotheosis of a trend that began in 1989 with the publication of Linda Williams' Hard Core, a celebrated anti-censorship analysis of porn films..." Porn study classes have since appeared at UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, Wellesley, UC Santa Barbara, SUNY New Paltz and other schools.

"Through the critical attention of professors - replete with debates about what constitutes an X-rated classic - pornographers have vaulted to artist status. "Indeed, such video porn auteurs as John Stagliano and Ed Powers who came to prominence in the nineties are as creative in their accomplishments as the Mitchell Brothers, Alex deRenzy, Henry Paris or any of the theatrical porn auteurs were in the seventies," writes University of Arizona professor Peter Lehman in his contribution to this burning canonical debate.

"For baby-boomer academics hungry for hipster credibility and for porn stars longing for legitimacy, it's a match made in post-structuralist heaven.

"There are brilliant studies of porn out there - Linda Williams' is one, Northwestern Professor Laura Kipnis' electrifyingly insightful Bound and Gagged is another."

Luke choked when he read that sentence, regarding neither book as above mediocre. The best academic works on porn come from Dr. Joseph Slade and Dr. Robert Stoller. Overall, Luke agrees with Goldberg's observation that "porn studies seem like the dead end of an academy that's come to value subversion over any sense of the sublime or profound."

Michelle Goldberg writes in the Jan/Feb 1999 issue of Speak magazine:

While MacKinnon and Dworkin and Dworkin are often criticized for being blind to the nuances and subtexts that make porn more than just a monolithic oppressor, the pro-porn academics have an opposing delusion - that porn is a sexual utopia, one of the only places in the culture that "women are not punished for knowing, pursuing and finding their pleasure," as Linda Williams writes. It's not surprising that porn scholars fawn over Candida Royalle, since she offers a solution to the dilemma of studying and, at least indirectly, endorsing a product that can hurt people. Focusing on the relatively soft, PC output of Royalle's Femme Productions is a way to circumvent the real ugliness that often infects porn.

For those deep inside the porn industry, both academic stances toward porn seem foolish. Thirty-two-year-old Luke Ford probably knows more about porn than anyone. Often called the Matt Drudge of the porn world, his website, www.lukeford.com, features breaking news about porn stars (including groundbreaking reports on HIV in the industry). His book, A History of X, is due this spring from Prometheus. Smart, insightful and with a charming Australian accent, Ford is one of the most fascinating characters in the porn world. A convert to Judaism, he's wracked by ambivalence about his role in the industry. Still, unlike most academics, Ford has actually spent a lot of time on porn sets, with casting agents and at production offices. Says David Bookbinder, Hustler's articles editor, "Luke is very controversial in the industry - he's such a loose cannon. But he's looked at as an authority. He really knows as much about the industry as anyone."

Ford says he has mixed feelings about porn studies in the university. "I think there is a legitimacy to it, in that all of life is worthy of study, from mass murder to pornography to oncology. But pretty much everyone who participated in the World Pornography Conference was pro-pornography, so it was more a celebration of pornography than an analysis," he says.

"Unless you're in the industry or you're a big fan of pornography, almost any average person would surely have the most severe misgivings about pornography. Even if you want to leave it legal, there are very strong arguments for it having a negative influence on people's lives and communities and families."

What analysis there was at the conference, he says, was about aesthetics, not content or affects. "This academic conference was the equivalent of looking at Piss Christ [artist Andre Serrano's notorious crucifix submerged in urine] for its composition and lighting, rather than for the fact that it's so sacrilegious and mocking. Everyone who participated in the conference took for granted that pornography was OK, and then they looked at it for its composition and lighting. There was no sober analysis of AIDS and HIV, no talk about the huge role that organized crime has played in the industry, no talk of what the presence of porn shops does to a neighborhood except for in a dismissive panel which said it does no harm."

Why are academics so enamored with porn? Ford's answer is surprisingly traditional. "I would place that infatuation with pornography within the larger context of the dropping of standards in the humanities. There is less and less pursuit of objective truth and notions of beauty and excellence. Academia is so removed from the concerns of ordinary people that it can go off in any direction."

Ford also faults academics for letting the most "sanitized expressions of the industry" stand for the whole. "They almost never meet people in porn except Nina Hartley or Sharon Mitchell or Veronica Hart. The porners who showed up at the conference and were gratified by the academics' interest were the half-dozen most articulate members of the industry."

Besides, he says, "most porn stars don't matter much as far as the workings of the industry. Nina Hartley's articulate, but she's not an important person in the industry. The most important people in porn are the businessmen - Edward Wedelstedt who runs Goalie Entertainment, David Sturman who runs GVA West, Russ Hampshire who runs VCA. These are the most powerful pornographers. I really doubt academics have spent any time with these guys."

Ford also has contempt for Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, yet he won't deny that women are exploited by porn. "I think that most of the people who perform in front of the camera are of low intelligence and will be exploited by life. If these people weren't having sex on camera they'd be working at McDonalds. Generally speaking, they're not people with a lot of options. Most are not very smart and frequently desperate. Most, if they ever get their lives straightened out, will end up regretting what they did."

By focusing attention on the softer, empowering side of dirty movies, the grand dames of the porn industry allow academia to embrace pornography without confronting the tricky issue of real physical exploitation. And using Royalle's work - or even the films of the seventies, with their narratives and higher production values - also deflects attention from the fact that porn is getting meaner, another issue that wasn't discussed at the conference.

"Porn is definitely, no debate, getting nastier," says Ford. The biggest trends in porn, he says, are massive gang bangs and something called "ass-to-mouth," where a woman fellates a (condomless) penis that just came out of her anus. He also believes that the more the mainstream world accepts and legitimizes pornography, the more degrading it will become to retain its aura of the forbidden. "As pornography becomes more accepted, it simultaneously, at least a segment of it, becomes nastier to continue breaking taboos. It is driven to become nastier and nastier and it will do so until it self-destructs and the individuals in it self-destruct, or until it produces such a backlash that the government steps in and restricts things."

Josef Lowski translates Emmanuelle Richards' profile of Luke Ford in the 2/1/99 edition of the French daily Liberacion:

A journalist's website on the L.A. X-rated industry gets everybody hot.

By EMMANUELLE RICHARD
From Los Angeles

From his tiny Los Angeles flat, a young and reclusive journalist drops on a web site some hush hush info with the effects of little bombs getting the hot shots to swallow their cigars and swear in masses. When referring to Luke Ford, one may think of Matt Drudge, the Hollywood's cyberhack famous for his tittle-tattle web site, which unearthed the Lewinsky scandal. However, rather than an interest in the White House's "you-know-who-is doing-you know-what", Luke Ford tells all he knows about the American porn movie industry on www.lukeford.com.

"Without him, a bunch of information of the porn underworld would never had been published", states Nick Ravo, a New York Times journalist and author of articles on the X-rated industry.

Last year, Luke Ford was responsible for a panic-stricken movement in the L.A. porn industry as he revealed a sudden HIV propagation within the closeted community (Liberation, Aug. 12, 1998).

The turmoil caused by these revelations encouraged around 40 porn movies producers to sign a legal agreement to use condoms on stage. "Luke ford was there to gather all the info he could on this crisis" says Nick Ravo who considers: "He is just alike Matt Drudge, just weirder."

Installed in his bungalow crammed with porn-magazines and books on Jewish theology, Ford willingly accepts to be compared with Drudge. "Both of us are eccentric who are in the know," says this good looking aussie, coolly dressed in jeans and sneakers. But I admit that we can be wrong sometimes, for that is difficult to cross examine our sources".

Luke Ford breaks all the rules of the business. He gives away the porn stars real names, talks about the involvement of the Mob, exposes the distress of an actor compelled to take Viagra to finish a shot or the lot of a flat broke actress promoting her own death to boost her fan-club
The web site, almost updated daily, re-enacts talks with breast-enhanced starlets, pig-bellied producers and the gossips picked here and there in the various web porn forums.

"A filthy blind pig"

"Talk to me about this nark!" shouts Bill Margold, a mustached vet actor nick named "Daddy Bear". The talk groups (web forums), it's Halloween : some forums packed with anonymous rotten swine
and cockroaches in hiding under idiotic nick names to better spread their filth."

The veteran has talked to Luke Ford over the phone, right before he would hang up to him during last summer's "HIV crisis". The young Australian confused the name of a beginner Hungarian actress tested HIV positive, with another actress. He also was responsible for posting a rumor according which the actor Marc Wallice was the zero patient (the first AIDS case known), a week before he could get confirmation of it. "Luke is like a blind pig, explains Bill Margold. He unearths a good load of worms, and sometimes he finds truffles. In Wallice*s case, he*s been lucky the rumor has proven to be founded."

There, Scoop Luke did not manage to get in touch with Marc Wallice, but he cross examined several of his colleagues' accounts suspecting Marc Wallice to hide the truth about his serological status.

"People are not the best source of information about themselves, defends Luke Ford. "Porn stars are used to live in their own world, they're seldom get in contact with journalists."

You will be a missionary, my son

As a child, Luke Ford wanted to be a missionary, following his dad's footsteps, a controversial evangelist in Australia. "Certainly because of this, I was fascinated by pornographic materials, and, as a teenager, I made great use of it in a blasphemous way, to calm myself down."

His family finally lands in California. When he is 21 year old, he finds himself stricken by CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). He lays in bed for 6 years and convert himself to Judaism. It is while in Los Angeles that he learns about Internet and makes the decision to write a book about the porn industry. His web site is summing up years of research on the American X-rated industry, he reports from film shootings, writes biographies and contributes to the knowledge of caesarean performed on actresses or the kosher menus of the Jewish in the business.

" A labor of love".

By always telling his tales with everybody who's somebody in the X biz, Luke Ford brings his fans along with him in this biosphere. "You would just buy it...As you read his lines, you clearly hear the sniff of the coke inside the nostrils."

Mike Godwin, a member of Electronic Frontier Foundation (An Internet defense group), likes the broadminded Luke Ford: "Much on the contrary to Drudge, Luke Ford welcomes criticisms, and put them on his site. Nobody else could gather so much information with so much heart. It's a labor or love."

But, "Even thought the guy looks nice, Luke is really gifted to spark controversial arguments", the bearded lawyer Jeffrey Douglas, Director for the Freedom of speech coalition, (the professional X-rated movies syndicate) is less enthusiastic. Martin Brimmer, a script-writer for porn movies states: "90 % of its content is very good, but Ford should distant a little bit more from his sources to cross examine his info. And show respect to the people in the business." According to Jeffrey Douglas, three quarters of the industry American players have access to Internet.

A lot of them pay some visits to Luke Ford's website. More than the usual gossip, actresses can get some casual information such as what producer signs rubber checks. As a matter of principle the lawyer doubts all the information put on the site : "Luke has obsessions for the porn, the Jews and the porn, and the Mob and the porn, which is absolutely ridiculous, and he is hostile to most of the things he's obsessed with."

Contrary to Matt Drudge, Luke Ford has not yet been brought to a court room. He posts all the threat letters he gets on his free website. An attempt to get the public to pay for the viewing was short lived when in December his server was hacked and left stalled for 3 weeks. The site is now hosted by a Canadian server and is kept running thanks to the $3,000 (around 17,000 french francs, be it 2,591 euro dollars) of monthly revenues generated by the X-rated ads. Glued to his computer screen, Luke Ford is ambiguous as far as his position.

"What I do, looks sometimes satisfactory to me, sometimes just plain pathetic. People are pointing fingers at me. I have been booted out of my favorite synagogue. My relatives are furious, and so are my friends. Lucky enough for me I have to observe the Sabbath : once in every week, I just put the computer and the porn aside."

New Times 1/28/99 Pic1 Pic2

"Sexual Squealing" by Peter Gilstrap.

Luke Ford is the Matt Drudge of pornography, and his online gossip mongering drives many in the blue-movie biz crazy - whether it's true or not.

Not all of the screwing in the world of adult video takes place on screen.

Oh, it’s enough to rival the level of back-stabbing and venom-spewing commonly found in royal courts and college sorority houses, perhaps even Hollywood. But while Tinseltown has scribes aplenty to monitor and pass on the facts and facsimiles thereof, the XXX community has pretty much kept its dirt all in the family.

Until the arrival of Luke Ford.

He is a boyish, thoughtful 32-year-old chap who comes from Australia and, for going on two years, has taken it upon himself to monitor the comings and goings of the adult industry via his Web site (Lukeford.com), which he says gets some 25,000 hits a day. He is the Louella Parsons of hardcore, the Matt Drudge of the porn racket, posting in-depth performer bios, info on all things sex-related, and searing daily updates that have most of the players in the business waiting in line to throttle him, but good.

Ford has received nasty phone calls, a cease-and-desist order (which he ignored and posted on his site), gallons of bile, and even death threats from those he has written about. A few weeks ago his Web site was hacked into, causing all 35 of the sites on Voice Media, his server, to crash and wreaking $40,000 in damage. He now has a new server, and despite conspiracy rumors that the culprits were enemies within the adult world, the perpetrators remain unknown.

The actual writing on the site is hardly elegant and can be, at times, humorous, intriguing, silly, and confusing, with precious little introduction (if any) to who is being quoted. For the porno fanboys, there is plenty of information about on-screen participants, yet you’d have to be an insider for names like Rob Spallone, Gene Ross, and Russ Hampshire to register. Unlike most XXX-oriented Web sites, you won’t find many lewd photographs on Lukeford.com. Aside from a handful of crudely snapped pictures by Ford from porn sets, the visuals are virtually nonexistent.

Just a lot of words on a screen, but when it comes to people whose most intimate physical details are available to anyone with enough cash to rent a video, it’s the words that make the difference.

Ford claims to be most interested in publishing “big news”; last April he broke the story of HIV entering the porn world via infected actor Marc Wallice. He also was the first to write about ex-porner Hyapatia Lee faking her own death. Yet his stock in tirade is generally comprised of rants and gossip volleyed back and forth from directors, producers, and, of course, the talent.

The man who refers to himself as “Scoop Luke” is known and despised for revealing actor’s real names and writing allegedly damaging innuendo. The wounded say his work is utterly irresponsible, his “facts” unchecked and hurtful.

The son of a noted Christian evangelist, Ford--who converted to Judaism in ’92--says he “wants to do good journalism” and is a “seeker of truth.” He also admits that the claims of sloppiness are not without merit. This from his posted Mission of Purpose:

“I give priority to big news and breaking news and I do not necessarily wait to get the full picture before I publish anything. The breaking news front page of my site and other such fast updates are likely to be the least accurate part of my writing.”

He continues:

“I never publish anything I know to be false unless I am quoting somebody...sometimes I will insert the truth in brackets and sometimes I will not.”

The self-defined standard-bearer of porn journalism also mentions on his site that “I don’t have a policy of not boinking someone in the industry, but I never make the first move. If I developed a reputation for that kind of behavior, it would kill my sources.”

Obviously, one wouldn’t want to jeopardize valuable contacts--or professional credibility, for God’s sake--in the name of boinking.

Talk to people in the porn community, and you’ll get opinions of Ford and his site that range from “who cares” to “I’d like to kill him.” But one thing is certain: Behind the curt dismissals and the clenched fists, he’s making an impact.

“Personally, I think he’s handicapped, and I think anything he finds trivial, he just prints it without asking,” sniffs porn starlet Jasmin St. Claire. “He was printing that I had hepatitis and that I was arrested in Michigan for writing a fake prescription. A) I hadn’t been in Michigan for over two years, b) I was arrested in Canada for selling videotapes, c) I’ve never had any STD in my entire life. I had a urinary-tract infection and a yeast infection twice in my life and that’s it,” says St. Claire.

“Also, he was printing I was dating a certain guy in the industry that I haven’t been with; we’re just friends. I date rock stars. I don’t date losers that fuck for money. I think he causes a lot of problems for people, and he should check his points.”

While it may seem odd that a woman whose proudest professional accomplishment to date is starring as the human pin cushion to multitudes of male pricks in The World’s Biggest Gangbang 2 is upset about a dating reference on a fairly obscure Web site, when it comes to journalism--be it about the president or porn queens--a fact should still be a fact.

And sometimes his misinformation comes in king-sized doses. Last year Ford ran a story/rumor stating incorrectly that retired actress Kaithlyn Ashley was infected with HIV. It was not a case of the deadly virus but a case of a deadly lack of fact-checking. Ford later ran a retraction.

“He lives for negative attention,” says Mike Albo, executive editor of Hustler Erotic Video Guide. “He plagiarizes material, he lies, he’s probably the most unscrupulous person masquerading as a journalist I’ve ever had the misfortune to run into.

“This is the kind of business where we don’t have a lot of credibility to begin with, but in the last few years I think the writing for a lot of the magazines has gotten a lot better, and Luke is single-handedly tearing all that down with not only poorly researched and written stuff, but with this attitude that he can do whatever he wants and there’s no consequences to be paid for it.”

Ford does have his supporters, however.

“This is a multimillion dollar industry that’s basically run by children, and it’s quite amusing to me to see someone who’s actually holding a mirror up to the society he’s writing about and letting them see themselves,” says David Aaron Clark, a film director and director of publicity for Chatsworth-based Extreme Video. “I think he’s doing an outstanding job of that. [His site has] gone from being this quirky little thing that hardly anybody knew about to something that everyone in the industry runs to their computer first thing in the morning to read.”

If Ford’s goal is to be noticed, he’s succeeding. Though there are other publications in the adult business that provide news and gossip, he is by far the most aggressive pursuer of information--both factual and fictitious.

Depending on your viewpoint, Ford has found a unique journalistic niche, or he’s just an aberration in an already bizarre profession, someone doing something no one else has any interest in doing. Ford says he earns roughly $3,000 a month from the ads on his site (his sole employment save for the odd freelance gig). He drives a battered van, is in debt, and cannot afford health insurance.

But he is a driven man, a man motivated by two seemingly conflicting things: writing about porn and practicing Judaism.

“Sometimes I get turned off by what I’m doing, and I go to yeshiva and study Talmud,” says the humble Seeker of Truth. “Sometimes I’ll be in synagogue and I’ll be thinking about my work. It’s jarring when I drive from a porn set on a Friday afternoon to synagogue for the sabbath.”

Ex-porn star Gloria Leonard is currently president of an adult trade organization called the Free Speech Coalition. Like Ford, she is Jewish, though unlike him, she was born that way. Leonard--like everybody else--has been stung by his Web site.

“He claims to want to be writing a history of this industry, and in my opinion, he doesn’t know the history,” she states. “I’m certainly not trying to whitewash the industry, but it seems he can never find a bit of sunlight in anything. He’s always negative, and that’s what bothers me. He makes mincemeat out of journalism.”

Is he deliberately evil, inept, or what?

“I think that there’s a set of dynamics at work here because of his religious background,” Leonard says. “First, having been a Christian, now trying to be this highly evangelical Jew, which is usually at odds. Religion is always pushing for punishment, and we’re always pulling for pleasure, and I think he has a real hard time trying to reconcile his religious beliefs with what he does. Why he has chosen this as his field of endeavor is beyond me.

“I’ve never known anybody quite like that,” she continues. “And there’s a part of me that actually
likes him. There’s something very schnooky and putzy about him. But I told him, ‘You make me
embarrassed to be a Jew.’ ”

Ford himself admits to something of a problem in this area.

“The biggest conflict I’ve been having is in the area of gossip,” he says. “Judaism is very
strict. The Torah says do not go about as a tale-bearer. And that’s what I’m doing for a
living.”

The headquarters for Lukeford the Web site are also the abode of Luke Ford the person. His lair
is a tiny apartment behind a house off Wilshire Boulevard, in the shadow of the Larry Flynt
building. There is a sleeping bag on the floor, uneven piles of books and papers, a large
television set, a phone, and a computer.

Ford spends his days flitting from porn sets to porn offices, modeling agencies, and production
facilities. He spends hours on the phone getting dish and tips from his sources, then lumps it all
together here at his spartan pad where it will emerge to titillate and piss off multitudes via the
Internet.

But for all he writes about the folks in the business, there is more on Lukeford.com about
Luke Ford than anyone else. You can click on “Pictures of Luke,” and choose from “View
From Luke’s Bathroom,” “View Out Luke’s Door Past Empty Succah (Booth),” “View of
Larry Flynt Publications as Luke Meanders Down Side Streets To Pick Up His Mail,” or
simply “Luke on La Cienega Blvd.” There are two photos under that title.

Ford’s site also contains “Luke’s Autobiography,” a 16-chapter work clocking in at hundreds of pages. The author approaches his life story with candor absolutely bolted to his sleeve: from the death of his mother when he was four to his six-year bout with chronic fatigue syndrome in his 20s, his feelings about his father’s role as a leader in the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and his long-winded conversations on Judaism with radio host Dennis Prager (which led to his conversion; Ford also has a Web site entirely devoted to his hero). Reading through it is heartbreaking, monotonous, and sometimes yields the uneasy feeling of gawking at a fresh car wreck. A few random excerpts:

“Acting in anger and hatred throughout my life, I frequently precipitated what I feared most, the loss
of friendships and the need to rely upon the verypeople I’d abused.”

“One day in third grade, a friend and I got caught looking at his brother’s porn collection. I have never been so frightened.”

“[In 1982] I picked up Playboy and Penthouse magazines. The exposed creamy flesh transfixed me
more radically than the thousands of hours I had heard about the flesh and blood of Christ. Blood
pounded my temples and my shorts bulged as I stared at cherry lips, big tits and pink cunts.”

“I suffer from the common intellectual tendency to put ideas before people. I better control my
enthusiasm for ideas or I will destroy myself and those around me.”

“I love Judaism because of its detailed step-by-step system for developing the human potential for
goodness.”

“In January 1984, for Spirit Week [at Placer High School in Northern California]...the girls basketball
team nominated me for Spirit King but I lost out to quarterback Mike Trentman. I finished third in the
sexy legs contest.”

Ford grew up in Australia and came to California when he was 10, with his father and stepmother in
1977. He became a citizen in ’91. He says he was a voracious reader of the works of Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and King David, and ended up studying economics at UCLA, though he left before graduating.

Yet none of this explains how Ford came to be the controversial chronicler of the porn universe.

“I’d been looking around for serious books on porn and didn’t find any, so I thought maybe this is what I should do,” he explains. “I was a struggling actor at the time, and I saw it as a professional opportunity.”

Research for a planned book on porn is what first gained him entry into the industry’s tightknit circles. Many people interviewed for this story--those with whom Ford spoke and who gave him introductions to others--claim to have been burned by the “book research” that hasn’t yet resulted in anything. Though dropped by his first publisher, Prometheus Books is scheduled to release Ford’s A History of X in March.

“I ended up with thousands of pages of notes, so I put up a Web site in July of ’97. I started covering
breaking porn news in April of ’98, at the HIV outbreak....I make my living at it, and people enjoy
what I’m doing. That’s what’s most pleasing to me.”

But where does the seeker of truth part come in?

“That’s a good question. I’m somewhat into providing a form of truth, in that when someone
calls me up and I print what he tells me, I’m providing a form of truth about that person and how
he sees the world, a form of truth about the porn industry,” Ford says.

“When I run his stuff and I don’t have verification that everything he tells me is the truth, what will
happen is in the following days, I will talk to a lot of other people, and an empirical truth will fall out of that. I get sort of anthropological impressions on the porn scene.”

An intellectual approach to journalism, perhaps, but when it comes to your name in print, well, most
people are not satisfied with waiting for empirical truths to emerge.

“Simply quoting people is a form of truth,” argues Ford. “Does it do more damage or lead to more
misinformation? I would answer no, but if I came to the conclusion that what I’m doing is more
damaging than beneficial, I would either change or quit.”

But has he damaged people, or are all those porners just a bunch of thin-skinned cry babies?

“Yeah, I’ve made a lot of mistakes.”

If you smell contradictory ideas here, you are correct.

“I frequently don’t like what I’m writing about,” Ford says. “I’m revolted by the porn industry and
the people in it, the obscene phone calls I get, people screaming at me.”

Yet Ford is nothing if not dedicated, though his dedication seems to border on masochism. He may
be revolted, but quitting is not an option.

“So I’m going to hang in here and write about it until something changes within me,” says Ford, who
gladly offers that he has been in weekly therapy since May. “I brought myself to this point in time, I
want to understand it more on a psychological level....I’ve always been on the verge of completely
walking away, but on Yom Kippur when the rabbi was speaking I meditated on the virtue of
commitment, and now I’m committed to staying with it for a few years.

“I could not do this if I believed what I was doing is evil,” he stresses. “I believe porn is a vice like smoking and drinking. Is it a dangerous vice? I think in moderation it’s harmless. My religion says that the ideal form of sexual expression is within heterosexual marriage, and I believe that. I make my living writing about a vice.”

Ford has felt the repercussions of his chosen professional path in his chosen religion.

“I was thrown out of one synagogue that was precious to me; the rabbi said as long as I was
connected to the porn industry I couldn’t come back in....And I want to get married, I want to
find a nice Jewish woman, and this is a problem with nice Jewish women-- that I write about
this.”

Beyond the yearning to print the truth, beyond the dark thrill of writing about dirty movies,
some have leveled the charge that Ford’s real concern is getting attention. One such person is
William Margold, who for the last 28 years has functioned in the porn business as a journalist,
performer, and agent. In 1994 he started Protecting Adult Welfare, an unofficial aid group for porners, and is on the board of directors of the Free Speech Coalition.

His business card reads: “God Created Man, William Margold Created Himself.” Margold,
who initially befriended Ford, is currently no fan.

“There’s a point to free speech and then there’s a point to abuse of freedom of speech,” Margold says. “If you are going to take something and abort it, then you have to answer for it, and I don’t think he understands that, and I don’t think he cares. He’s going to sacrifice the truth for notoriety. The end result is he wants Luke Ford to get attention.

“I think he’s interested in self-aggrandizement, and he’s welcome to that. But the way that he
writes about himself now--Luke does this, Luke does that--I’m not even sure if he knows
when he gets out of bed which Luke Ford is getting out of bed.”

“Unfortunately there’s probably something to that,” Ford admits. “I wish I could just dismiss it. My dad is a very controversial figure, and ever since I’ve been able to speak I’ve been pissing people off. I’ve got a fairly good brain, and I often find it easier to use my brain against people rather than for them....I do enjoy attention. I wish I was beyond that.”

Delving into Ford’s motivation ultimately leads back to his father and to Luke’s early years, much of
which is covered extensively in his online bio. After leaving the Seventh Day Adventist church over a
doctrinal dispute in 1980, Dr. Desmond Ford founded Good News Unlimited, a church ministry
based in Auburn, California. It is a Christian organization whose “only purpose is to preach the
gospel,” the father says. His church has been broadcasting on the radio for 20 years, and Dr. Ford
has traveled the world lecturing and teaching since before his son was born.

“My family are religious Christians,” says Ford the younger. “So it’s been very hard on them that I
converted to Judaism and that I’m writing on porn. They’re basically left with two explanations: either
I’m evil or I’m sick. And if I’m sick it’s because I was hit in the head when I ran into a parked school
bus in a Volkswagen bug in 1985.”

Ford, a fine-looking man, still bears a scar from the incident on his forehead.

“You need to understand Luke’s background to understand the foolish things that he’s doing,” offers
Dr. Ford. “He was separated from his mother when she was declared to be a terminal patient of cancer when he was 12 months old, and so he had a series of [nannies] for a number of years. Each time he’d get his affection wrapped around one, things would change, and he’d have another person looking after him. This went on until I remarried, and by that time he was something of a psychological case because he’d been deprived over and over.”

Brutal honesty seems to run in the Ford family.

“He was fairly normal until he got chronic fatigue syndrome and he had years of nightmares, thinking he was in pits with snakes,” the doctor continues. “Then he had a car accident [in 1985] that injured perhaps his pituitary and that changed the shape of his face. He has behaved quite out of character since he had CFS and the accident.

“The psychiatrists say that if a child experiences deep anger before the age of five or six, that when
they get a bodily disease they’ll be in trouble in a psychiatric way. We think this is exactly what
happened to Luke. He is narcissistic, seeking excessive amounts of attention, and has chosen a
calling that has given [him] that amount of attention. He’s just not acting sanely because he’s not well.”

And the doctor has an explanation for Luke’s embracing of Judaism as well.

“He wants to be someone in his own right, which is a normal desire, but it’s very difficult for a son
growing up whose father is in public work. He didn’t want to be thought of as a clone of his father, he had to strike out in something different. Judaism for him is a psychological out from being thought of as a clone of his father. He’s not really behaving according to the ethics of Judaism at all. It’s only a front, though he may not know it’s a front.”

Still, it’s his son’s involvement in porn that concerns the doctor most.

“I’m afraid he’ll be shot,” he says. “He’s doing damage to people who have no scruples, so he’s in a
dangerous position and I fear for him very much. We’d rather have him live a quieter life--we love
him dearly--but that would bore him to tears. If people understood his background perhaps they
wouldn’t feel so harsh about his erratic behavior.”

When informed of this conversation, the son’s only comment is, “Oh, my poor father.”

As Bertrand Russell said, “The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a
credit to them.”
 

A few weeks ago, Ford ventured to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show, an annual four-day gathering that draws tens of thousands of industry types. It is the supreme showcase for consumer technology. And that includes dirty videos.

The adult world has its own massive corner of the Sands Convention Center. From video companies to retailers to film makers to the porn stars themselves, anyone who is anyone in the sex realm shows up. Thousands of porn fans also arrive, salivating at the chance get an autograph or photo-op with their favorite, almost-undressed-for-the-occasion starlets.

Ford has never attended the CES and is understandably wary. He will be coming face-to-face with the people he has written about from behind the safe, warm glow of his computer screen, and many of them hate his guts. He has been advised to bring a bodyguard, which he does not do; his only precaution is wearing a name tag that says “Mark Stone.”

Wary though he is, Ford is like a kid on his first trip to Disneyland. Albeit a Disneyland where, instead of lovable cartoon characters prancing about, there are hundreds of lovable young ladies displaying physical delights that, after a while, go from the astonishing to the surreal.

Also on hand are all the behind-the-scenes porno power brokers, the folks in possession of the kind of insider knowledge that Scoop Luke craves.

Ford enters this multiring circus armed with his little Sony tape recorder and begins to wander,
periodically raising the thing to his lips to impart crucial notes and ideas in a loud, Aussie-accented
voice. Men line up for the porn stars right and left, flash bulbs pop, fellows in electric wheel chairs with video cameras mounted on the arm rests cruise by to tape all the action.

Ford stops to press flesh (hands, that is) and chat with producer/director Mike South, a Ford contact whose name pops up frequently on the site. Luke moves on, and South has this to say about him:

“He’s absolutely good for the business,” says South. “Porn is getting more and more mainstream every day. One of these days we’re going to attract the attention of a real attack dog journalist like Mike Wallace or somebody like that. Then they’re going to pray for the days when all they had to deal with was Luke Ford.”

Down the hall Ford travels, and what do you know? Despite the false name tag, he’s stopped by an
actual nonindustry fan, a Memphis, Tennessee, database manager named Mike Cline.

“I’m a big porn fan. I work in the computer industry, so I’m on the Internet every day and I read
him. It’s nice to get current information instead of waiting for AVN and getting two-month-old stuff,”
gushes Cline, referring to the glossy, ad-heavy Adult Video News, a magazine published out of Van Nuys that covers the porn industry. “I do take it with a grain of salt. I don’t think everything he prints is true, but I think it’s good entertainment. People have Entertainment Weekly for the mainstream industry, so it’s nice to have this for porn. I’ve never heard anything bad from a fellow fan about him.”

Porn star Chloe--you may remember her from captivating turns in Hot Tight Asses 19, Rectal
Raiders, or A Terminal Case of Love--takes time out from mingling with the fans to comment on
Ford.

“According to him, I’m fucking the whole world, but it’s news to me,” she says, laughing. “But you get validated--I finally made it into Luke Ford’s site, so I must be somebody now. I think he’s kind of a weasel, and I can’t figure out how he got into this. But he is the gossip columnist in the industry. As if we need one.”

Two of Ford’s industry cronies appear amid the hubbub: Blue Light Pictures director James
DiGiorgio and Rob Spallone, president of Star World Modeling Agency. They look like bouncers
and talk like characters out of a Scorsese film.

“If you tell him that I shoved this pack of batteries up my ass, he’ll print it tomorrow!” bellows the
battery-wielding Spallone before stalking off.

Like Chloe, DiGorgio sees Ford’s site as a great way to advertise for nothing.

“It’s free publicity,” he says. “In a business where 100 movies a week come out, to make one stand
out is a trick. Luke’s in a place right now where I don’t think he intended to go. I think he originally
saw himself as a chronicler of this very bizarre business, and he became something else. He’s
totally used and exploited now, but he realizes it’s a mutual thing. The people that bitch about him are morons. And believe me, in a world of morons, the porno morons are the biggest morons of all. They haven’t figured out it’s win-win. People ask me, ‘Why do you talk to him?’ What, are you fuckin’ nuts? You’d rather buy AVN ads? Some are slow to wake up to it.”

..........
 

The rest of the CES convention goes swimmingly for Luke Ford. He is interviewed for the Playboy Channel, a Canadian film crew follows him for a day as part of a documentary on Sex and Censorship, and at the black-tie AVN Awards ceremony, he sits at the privileged power table of VCA Pictures boss Russ Hampshire.

A bodyguard proves unnecessary.

Now he’s back in Los Angeles, working the phones, looking for the Next Big Porn Scoop. There is even talk of his going to work for AVN, a move which would compare with Mike Davis taking a job with the L.A. Chamber of Commerce.

“We’ve talked about a lot of possibilities. We’ve talked about him coming to work full time here, or his doing his Web site under AVN, or him doing a separate thing,” says the magazine’s publisher, Paul Fishbein. “I’ll only do it if I can live with the way he does things. The question is, am I going to be open to things like libel. Whereas now he puts up inflammatory stuff about people and they don’t care, if it’s under the guise of AVN, it might be a little dangerous.

“I also frankly don’t care if he’s critical of AVN as long as he does his research. If he wants to take us to task, I don’t have a problem with that, provided he checks his sources and tells both sides of the story. He’s printed so much stuff from anonymous sources about me that is so untrue, and the few true things that he gets is not worth the stuff that is just flat-out wrong. If there’s any power in him drawing people onto his site, there might be a value in incorporating that into what we’re doing.”

But what about Ford and his truth-missionary, beholden-to-none status?

“If they want to give me money to write a column, that’d be really cool,” says Ford. “It might cost me
some sources. I will still have my site. That’s totally independent, and I’ll run whatever the hell I want to on it.”

The adult film world is one of the last outlaw groups in society, yet it’s becoming more and more mainstream every day. Now Ford--whose Mission Statement insists that “I don’t give a damn about the profits of pornographers. I don’t care about industry unity”--seems poised to become part of the family.

“It’s not a very well laid-out site, much of the writing is lazy, much of the fact-checking is lazy, not much of it is very well-written,” says the ever-upfront Ford. “But for all its flaws, I think it’s still the best source of information on the porn industry that’s out there.”

.....................

From Pussycat's gossip column www.unchain.com: "I couldn't bear a Luke-style lynching from my peers, but a LA New Times cover wouldn't kill poor Pussycat either.

"Pussycat just finished reading the glowing article on Luke Ford that is the cover story (pictured with Raylene (at right) and Randi Rage) on this week's LA New Times. Kitty also got a little jealous when she saw Randi Rage licking Lukey's face. Why can't Randi Rage lick my face? When asked by this hard hitting Kitty, "doesn't Raylene smell good?", poor Lukey could only reply, "I don't remember." That's because he was scared out of his mind. Wouldn't you be if you had to crawl in
bed naked with two of the hottest porn stars in the world? Of course you wouldn't but Lukey was!

"As you might know, Kitty hated the rat-bastard when she saw what he was doing to her friends in the business. Pussycat's best friends are porn stars and divulging their real names was a dangerous business. But somehow, he managed to fall into Kitty's good graces. He's the only Australian Jew she will ever meet, so why tempt fate? However, who can fault him for putting these names up? He's certainly just "giving the public what they want", safety be damned. Kitty has a hard time with this overall concept but she has a harder time with people trying to silence someone who's writing under the guise of free speech.

Lately, the porn columns in magazines have been so boring. This one's fucking this one, this one hates this one, it's time that someone shook up the business and love him or hate him. It's the same old stuff every day. You have to admit, even if what he puts up there is wrong, it's completely interesting even to those who are merely fans. To those in the porn industry that get so mad, I have some advice. Take it with a grain of salt. This is your work, not your life.

"Who knew that Rob Black was going to Brazil to find more fuckers?! Who knew Marc Wallice was HIV+? Who knew Joe D'Amato died minutes after it happened? Luke Ford. Now if only he knew what Pussycat does for fun, that would be the scoop... but like I always say, if you want the stuff that has the potential to hurt people, go there. If you want to know what all the sexy porn stars did over the weekend, keep coming back here!

"Now, word has it, Luke Ford has just been hired to write a gossip column for IEG. This is on the heels of the news that AVN wants to hire him too. Luke Ford goes legit. Did he always want this? Recognition and credibility? Is this a way to pay the rent? There goes the underground. Pretty soon my Unchain the Underground editors are going to make me take his place! Who knew, Luke goes legit and Pussycat gets rotten. Stay tuned."

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