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Porn Stripped of Gossip Maven
Noah Shachtman writes for Wired.com 8/13/01:
The battle for the soul of Luke Ford is over.
Ford -- the Web-based gossip columnist universally reviled and universally read by the porn industry he covered -- left the smut business behind last week.
But unlike so many retiring dot-commers, Ford's reasons for bowing have nothing to do with slumping ad revenues or fed-up investors.
Instead, Ford is calling it quits because of his religious beliefs.
Ford's triple-X connections had long been in simmering conflict with his involvement in Los Angeles' Orthodox Jewish community.
For years, the gossip lived "constantly on the knife's edge," knowing that he'd be tossed out of...his strictly-observant synagogue -- where he studied Talmud every morning -- if the leadership found out about his website -- where he dished out equal portions of news and half-truths every night.
In late June, the tension reached its boiling point.
"I should've known something was wrong when I walked into shul (Yiddish for synagogue) this morning," Ford wrote. "I'd forgotten my yarmulke (skullcap) and had to scrounge around the children's toys cupboard to find one. It was painted with ghosts."
After prayers, [the rabbi] informed his congregant that he had discovered the truth about Ford's "double life."
"You can imagine how humiliated we feel now," [the rabbi] told Ford. "I brought you into my own house for Passover and introduced you to my family."
Ford left [the synagogue]. Six weeks later, he had sold his trash-talking LukeFord.com site to online smut center Netvideogirls.com for $25,000 and began making plans to move to Jerusalem.
This wasn't the first time he'd been booted from a congregation. In December, 1997 -- months after constructing his site from the material gathered for his book, A History of X -- Ford's then-Rabbi asked him to end his adult industry involvement. When Ford failed to do so by April of 1998, he was told to get out.
This spiritual nadir came as his career began to peak. In the same month, Ford landed his biggest scoop: that veteran money-shooter Marc Wallace had HIV. The revelation injected him into the mainstream's consciousness and cemented his infamous reputation in the adult community.
Summing up the porn business' feelings about Ford, Mark Kernes, an editor at Adult Video News (AVN), the porn industry trade magazine, said "Luke Ford is a scumbag. And you can print that."
The abuse only seemed to encourage Ford to outrageous heights, with salacious stories about porn tarts turning tricks, movie moguls dealing with the mob, and down-on-their luck actresses doing it with dogs.
"I'll put up anything someone's willing to put their name on," Ford once boasted. "If someone tells me (AVN founder) Paul Fishbein sticks bananas up his anus in an on-the-record interview, I'll happily publish it."
Strangely enough, Ford -- the converted son of an Australian evangelist -- was also happy to couple this less-than-holy material with lengthy debates of Jewish law and melancholic, angst-filled ruminations on living in the conflicting realms of smut and Sinai.
In response to his free-wheeling posting policies, Ford was sued -- and threatened with lawsuits -- on several occasions.
And he was threatened with worse when he began questioning the financial stability of RJB Telecom, one of the most prominent porno pay site operators.
"Hey Luke if I ever see you in public...I hope you bring that BIG gun...your gonna [sic] need it," posted one angry reader.
But despite such hostility, Ford attracted enough of an income from adult advertisers -- around $45,000 annually -- to keep himself fed and the site afloat. And he got plenty of attention from adult industry insiders, with many of the people who trashed Ford in public perfectly happy to supply him dirt in private.
"A couple of years ago, I would have been jumping up and down for joy to see Luke Ford 'eliminated,'" writes well-known porn performer Asia Carrera. "Then I figured out how to use him to my advantage (having Luke around to disseminate scurrilous 'anonymous scoops' on one's enemies was almost TOO convenient!)"
It's this interest from blue-movie bigwigs that made LukeFord.com an attractive buy for Michael Keene, the Netvideogirls.com chieftain. "We (made the purchase) to introduce ourselves to the players," he said. "Already from the people we've met, we have our money's worth."
Few in the adult community believe Ford will actually leave the industry behind. "He'll be back. He can't stand to be away from this business," said AVN's Kernes.
So Ford has bet over $7,000 with skeptics, like online madam "Nici," that he'll still be out of porn by Oct. 1.
By then, Ford contends, he'll be ready to move to Jerusalem.
"I really think we're going to have a war (in Israel), and I want to be there to cover it," Ford said. He'll upload such material -- along with his religious musings -- to his new LukeFord.net site. "I never covered a war before. But I've certainly dealt with a lot of dangerous people."
He jokes, "I plan to do for the Middle East what I've done for the pornography industry."
Meanwhile, Netvideogirls.com's Keene says LukeFord.com will continue its rowdy ways. "We're not going to be toned down. We're not going to check every story," he said. "We're going to be true to the character of Luke."
Emmanuelle Richard writes for OJR.org 10/5/01:
In late July, during a Torah lecture at a Los Angeles synagogue, Luke Ford experienced an epiphany: After four years of hate mail, death threats, lawsuits, and being ostracized from his local Jewish community, it was suddenly time to walk away from Lukeford.com, his one-man Website of news and gossip covering the adult industry.
Soon after, the boyish 36-year-old Australian known as the "porn Matt Drudge," sold his infamous site to an adult Webmaster for a mere $25,000. He tossed out stacks of smut from his tiny bachelor bungalow, clearing space for even higher piles of Jewish literature and self-help books such as "What You Feel You Can Heal," and prepared to reconcile with a religion that has twice expelled him from orthodox synagogues after rabbis discovered his site.
"Judaism is not something you can do on your own; you have to belong to a community," explains a relieved Ford. "So I had to quit."
Though Ford's final motivation to shut down was certainly unique, the hassles that led him there were largely the same that daunt maverick Web publishers the world over: How do you avoid burnout, when you're the only employee? How do you make a living - especially after the dot-com crash -- and protect yourself from expensive lawsuits? And, if you're one of those lucky enough to have achieved some level of notoriety and traffic, how do you walk away from the very thing that made you famous? "I'm overall happier," Ford says, "but if it was just between God and me, I would have kept doing my site." But old habits die hard - an active and (mostly) sex-free diary site has popped up at lukeford.net.
As for Luke Ford, he's been flattered by the e-mails of many readers, such as adult star Jeremy Steele, encouraging him to come back in order to hold pornographers more accountable for their behavior: "My biggest supporters would be many of the little people in porn who got stepped on and abused over the years, written bad checks and lied to and nobody would tell their stories until me," he says.
Some days he feels regret for shutting down an endeavor in such a secretive world that took so long to infiltrate, and he still doesn't know exactly what to do next. But his family is ecstatic. "My dad says, 'It will add years to your life'," he jokes.
His main problem now, is that two months after the sale of LukeFord.com, his former rabbi hasn't welcomed him back to the synagogue. Like former porn stars who discover that videos last forever, Ford will be associated with his online persona for a long time coming. "When people type in 'Luke ford' in search engines, they find my old site. I guess you can't really build yourself a new virginity on the Web."
Is Luke A Spy?
11/11/01
Freelance journalist Emmanuelle Richard appeared on Mojo Magazine on the Toronto radio station AM 640 Mojoradio.com Wednesday morning. She discussed her latest article "Home Alone." Listen to the terrific interview here.
Richard wrote the first profile of me July 9, 1998. "Another Brash Web Columnist."
Radio Host Jeff Marek: "Emmanuelle, you wrote an article "Home Alone" about independent publishers and the death of the dot com. I want to focus on the neat story of Luke Ford. For people who don't know who Luke Ford is, Emmanuelle, can you please explain who this gentleman is?"
Emmanuelle: "Ahh, Luke Ford. Luke Ford is a very weird character on the internet. He's an Australian journalist who came to America with his minister father and family. He started covering the porn industry in Los Angeles. He started knocking on doors and making interviews with actresses, actors, filmmakers and producers. And he started putting all his notes and interviews on his website lukeford.com. Quickly the website lukeford.com became the Matt Drudge of the porn industry. People would log on every day and read the latest news and gossips and scandals about the porn industry."
Jeff: "How did he get into covering pornography? As I understand it, the doors are very firmly shut and they don't like journalists come in and have a peak at what they're doing."
Emmanuelle: "It is really really hard. He is a handsome guy and that helped him meet with the actresses. He is a bit skinny and intellectual and the actresses didn't find him threatening or menacing, and they would talk to him and he would get great stuff from them. And great stories about back stage on the sets."
Radio Host Joanne Wilder: "He was never involved in the porn industry. He was just covering it. Yet people looked at him in a negative light because he was covering the porn industry."
Emmanuelle on Mojoradio.com: "That was his big tragedy. Because he converted to Judaism several years ago and he was expelled from two synagogues after the rabbis found out that the good Luke Ford was actually covering the porn industry and running a porn news website. They didn't want to make a difference between a porn website and a porn news website. So he was kicked out of his synagogues.
"That's why after four years of covering the porn industry. And after his site became more popular and talked about in the press, he decided to just walk away from it and live as a good Orthodox Jew."
Radio Host Jeff Marek: "Luke Ford got kicked out of another synagogue this past week. As I understand it, a lot of rabbis think that he's a spy."
Emmanuelle: "A spy?"
Jeff: "I was told last week by somebody very close to Luke Ford, Marc W., he said that a lot speculate that he's a spy and rabbis are wary of allowing him in to their synagogues."
Emmanuelle: "Luke Ford can be so weird sometimes that you could think anything of him. He could be an alien. He's really a weird character. But what he did was really great. For four years he covered the porn industry and many people who had no interest in pornography would read his site lukeford.com because it was full of secret information. Mainstream journalists would read his site because it was so full very secret information and interesting tidbits of news and gossip about a secret industry that the mainstream media has a very difficult covering properly."
Radio Host Joanne Wilder: "He made quite a living out of this. This was the place to go for news and gossip about the porn industry. How did he just give it up?"
Emmanuelle: "He sold it for almost nothing but he lives very frugally. He lives in a very small bungalow, like a bachelor place, which, as you can imagine, is so messy. He doesn't spend anything except on his shrink... He just goes to synagogue. He will live off this money for a year and try to write about mainstream Hollywood."
Host Jeff Marek: "I imagine that Luke Ford must have had some impact on the pornography industry. No one gets that close and tells that many tales, that many secrets, without the industry changing. Did Luke Ford have an impact on pornography?"
Emmanuelle: "Yes, I really think so. Many professionals in the industry hated him so much because he exposed them. Those people were in the habit of writing bad checks... He would mention that. His biggest scoop was that he revealed a veteran actor three years ago was HIV positive and hid it from people. This guy knew he was positive yet kept acting in movies and infected a few girls. So Luke Ford exposed that and maybe saved lives."
Host Jeff: "It seem to me that Luke Ford was doing was falling on the ethical side of pornography by providing a check to unchecked power in the world of pornography."
Emmanuelle: "Yes. The people in the porn industry used to be so free. They were never scrutinized by the mainstream press. And barely by the police in Los Angeles. He exposed a lot of things that the bigwigs in the porn industry didn't want anyone to know. I think this really helped. Now he's not here anymore. Luke says that the small people in the industry, like the small actors and starlets, who have no power, really regret his departure from covering the porn industry online."
12/17/02
You're Dead! James Brolin's Rep Lets Dirt Digger Have It
From Jose Lambiet's Star Confidential column in the December 17, 2002 issue of the Star tabloid (www.starmagazine.com):
Headline: "You're Dead! James Brolin's Rep Lets Dirt Digger Have It"
With a manager as persuasive as Jeff Wald, it's strange that Mr. Barbra Streisand, James Brolin, doesn't get more work.
Brolin hasn't seen much action since his stint on the syndicated military drama Pensacola: Wings of Gold. I'm sure if Wald behaves with filmmakers the way he recently did with a Tinseltown Internet dirt-digger, he could scare them witless into giving Brolin gigs.
Wald recently left several death-threat-laden messages on Internet scoop Luke Ford's voice mail after Ford ran on his website, lukeford.net, a warts-and-all profile of the former drug addict Wald.
In addition to managing Brolin, Wald has managed at one time or another the likes of deceased singer Marvin Gaye, Sylvester Stallone, Roseanne, disco diva Donna Summer, 1970s singer Helen Reddy - his ex-wife - the band Crosby, Stills & Nash and boxing baddie Mike Tyson.
Some choice passages from Wald's messages: "If I see one more word with your name attached to me on your website, you're (swear word here) dead. Do you understand that? You can tape-record that."
A day later, Wald obviously hadn't let off all his steam. He didn't like Ford's description of his potbelly and other physical unpleasantries. (Remember, this is Hollywood, where you are what you look like!)
"So, I'm fat with a potbelly?" he bellowed. "I can make you not (really bad word here) breathe. Everyone else would be polite and send you a letter. I'll stop you from breathing."
An unapologetic Wald tells Confidential: "Let him go to the (another bad word here) police then!"
Ford isn't going to do that - "I still need to work in this town," he says - but he's been sleeping with a loaded gun under his pillow.
And you thought covering entertainment is for sissies?
The Lesson of Luke Ford
Mickey Kaus writes on Slate.com 10/28/03 :
6. The lesson of Luke Ford: I don't want to minimize the difference between trying out your ideas in private conversations and trying them out on the Internet. I didn't realize just how irresponsible we normally are in everyday private conversations until I encountered L.A. blogger Luke Ford. Ford goes around to parties with a tape recorder and immediately posts snatches of dialogue on the web. His reporting is impeccable. He has faithfully quoted me libeling dozens of people on two separate occasions. The second time I was even trying to be careful--but I was still operating under the conversational illusion that the range of my statements was limited.
7. Speech's Dirty Little Secret: Is there a reason we tolerate greater irresponsibility in private spoken conversation? I'd say yes. It's functional--it helps us probe for information and try out ideas that might not be ready for Broadway. Life would grind to a halt if everyone we met was Luke Ford.
11/13/02
Who, exactly, did the New York Times' Bernard Weinraub plagiarize?
Jack Shafer writes on Slate.com:
"What can I tell you?" says New York Times Hollywood correspondent Bernard Weinraub. "I screwed up … I'm sorry."
Weinraub's apologies, given hurriedly in a very brief telephone conversation, are for lifting a paragraph from another source to use in his Monday, Nov. 11, bylined story about Hollywood private investigator Anthony Pellicano ("Talk of Wiretaps Rattles Hollywood"). Weinraub confesses to having plagiarized the passage, although identifying the precise party he plagiarized isn't simple.
According to Times editor Paul Fishleder, Weinraub believes he got the passage from a Web page about Pellicano at Lukeford.net. Weinraub wrote:
Mr. Pellicano came to Hollywood under strange circumstances. In 1977, he found the body of Elizabeth Taylor's third husband, Mike Todd, which had been stolen from a Chicago cemetery. In front of a television camera crew, Mr. Pellicano walked about 75 yards from the excavated grave, reached under some leaves and revealed a plastic bag containing Mr. Todd's remains. Mr. Pellicano's rivals claimed he had staged the episode for publicity.
On LukeFord.net, Luke Ford had previously written, typo and all:
In 1977, Pellicano found the body of Elizabeth Taylor's third husband, Mike Todd, which was stolen from a Chicago cemetary. In front of a camera crew from a local news station, Pellicano walked over to place seventy-five yards south of the excavated grave, reached under some leaves, and revealed a plastic bag of Todd's remains. Pellicano's rivals claimed he'd staged the entire episode for publicity.
From page two of the 11/14 edition of NYT: "Editors' Note: An article in Business Day on Tuesday reported on a federal inquiry into suspected illegal wiretapping by a private investigator in Hollywood, Anthony Pellicano. The article incorporated a paragraph about an incident in which Mr. Pellicano recovered the body of Elizabeth Taylor's third husband, Mike Todd, which had been removed from its grave at a Chicago cemetery. That paragraph was reproduced nearly verbatim from a Weblog compiled by a Los Angeles journalist, Luke Ford, who adapted it from a passage in the 2000 book "Dish," by Jeannette Walls. In February 1994, a similar account appeared in Los Angeles magazine. The Times should have credited the Weblog for its version."
11/23/03
Partial transcript of 60 Minutes Show
Pic1 Pic2 Pic3 Luke walking with Steve Kroft Luke, Steve Luke, Steve
Luke Ford, who spent seven years writing an Internet gossip column about the adult entertainment industry for his own his own Internet Web site, isn't sure what to make of it. “It's become popular, cool, acceptable in this 18-to-25 age group. My age group, I'm 37, my age group and up. We think porn is something that's shameful. But for kids half my age, they think it's cool,” says Ford, who guesses it’s an act of rebellion, embracing one of society’s last taboos.
Ford, who is often referred to as the Matt Drudge of porn, gave 60 Minutes a tour of a backyard porn set in a residential neighborhood of Chatsworth that has been used by porn directors for more than 20 years.
“It is just like Hollywood,” he says.
Like the porn industry itself, it becomes less glamorous the closer you get. If you take away the accountants and CEOs, you’re left with a small insular world, filled with renegades and outcasts, who like to flaunt society's rules.
“They come into this industry, because this is the single easiest way that they can earn $1,000 in a day, in two hours,” says Ford. “It's not like we're losing people from going to medical school or business school or becoming lawyers.”
“Most girls who enter this industry do one video and quit. The experience is so painful, horrifying, embarrassing, humiliating for them that they never do it again,” says Ford.
CATHY SEIPP WRITES FOR UPI 11/23/03
LOS ANGELES, Nov. 23 (UPI) -- "Plagiarizing bloggers?" mega-blogger Glenn Reynolds exclaimed last week on his Instapundit.com site. "This has got to be embarrassing for the New York Times."
No kidding. The disdain old media often shows for these upstart gadflies took a big tumble Nov. 13.
That's when Slate.com media critic Jack Shafer posted a piece revealing that Times Hollywood correspondent Bernard Weinraub had lifted -- "nearly verbatim," as the Times admitted a day later in an Editor's Note - a paragraph in a Nov. 11 story about shady private investigator Anthony Pellicano.
The source: Los Angeles blogger Luke Ford's Pellicano archive.
Luke Ford in turn had pinched that graph (but not quite as badly) from "Dish," MSNBC.com gossip Jeannette Walls's book about the gossip industry.
And Walls got the the info (appropriately credited, in her case, in the book's bibliography) from a 1994 Los Angeles magazine piece by John Connelly.
"Ford calls his Pellicano page a clip job, assembled from a variety of sources," Shafer wrote. "A friend of Ford's who had a copy of 'Dish' read the passage to him this afternoon; he recorded it and transcribed it thusly from pages 276-277 ..."
I am that "friend of Ford's." And as such -- as well as a longtime media watcher -- I'd say that Luke does need to be more careful with his block-quote indentations, among other things.
But as I told Shafer -- who called to make sure he was not being "pranked" (very sensible in this post-Stephen Glass/Jayson Blair era) -- Luke is usually quite accurate, all things considered, except for the spelling bloopers.
In a way, he's more accurate than many stuffy proper journos, as at least he admits mistakes and corrects them immediately.
Also, he doesn't worry about offending people, which I think is an underacknowledged impediment to journalistic honesty.
The New York Times plagiarizing Luke Ford created a definite media buzz. "Unbelievable," former Los Angeles Times staffer Kevin Roderick, who runs the L.A. media site LAObserved.com, told me. "Your pal is Zelig."
As it happens, I served as an unpaid fact-checker for the Slate story. Shafer called me again to look up the Connelly citation in the "Dish" bibliography and check that the hardcover publication date was indeed 2000.
Lucky for all concerned, I have a well-organized office with alphabetized books. But you know, anything to help out a scrappy, seat-of-the-pants operation like Microsoft.
Anyway, as Shafer asked rhetorically about Luke Ford in his piece: "Who is he?"
The short answer, as the Online Journalism Review put it in a 1998 article: he's "the Matt Drudge of porn."
A slightly longer answer is, he's a Seventh Day Adventist minister's son, originally from Australia, who was raised to be a Christian missionary but converted to Orthodox Judaism a dozen years ago.
He worked as a sports and news writer for a few Northern California papers and radio stations, then moved to Los Angeles in 1994. After failing to make it here as an actor, he began a porn gossip site, Lukeford.com.
Once an angry subject drove Luke to East L.A., kicked him out of the car, bashed his head against a lamp post a few times, and drove off. That didn't deter his porn muckraking.
But being ejected from four Orthodox synagogues did, so he sold Lukeford.com two years ago. (A fifth has since accepted him.)
Luke always looks handsome and neatly dressed, often in a stylish black suit. But he sleeps on the floor of a 200-square-foot garage apartment and drives an old van so battered most serial killers and dogcatchers would turn up their noses at it.
Although, as he boasted loudly enough for several people to turn their heads as we walked down the street the other day, "Yeah, baby, I got windshield wipers and turn signals now!"
His current site, Lukeford.net, revolves not around porn but his many other obsessions: seedy Hollywood characters like Anthony Pellicano; Judaism; his own romantic misadventures (at 37, he has not yet found an Orthodox Jewish bride to bear the 12 children he wants); the Dallas Cowboys; radio talk show host Dennis Prager; media circuses of the moment like the Kobe Bryant rape trial; Hollywood producers; people who write about Hollywood producers; female journalists; and media junkies of all stripes.
It's the convergence of these last two categories that created a special place for me on Lukeford.net's "Hall of Fame for Female Journos" page -- as well as the beginning of a beautiful friendship that is also regularly exasperating.
Luke still comments on the Industry, as those in the porn business always refer to it. The U.K. magazine Arena recently named him one of the 50 most powerful people in porn.
He's appearing as an on-air expert in a "60 Minutes" segment Nov 23. The subject, of course, is porn. But Luke prefers to tell people he'll actually be talking about Jewish theology.
And he doesn't let any of this prevent him from assuming a constant Elmer Gantryish tone of moral superiority.
He dresses me down regularly on his blog for transgressions like wearing sleeveless dresses or temporary tattoos, which he once said made me look like a Hittite priestess on her way to an orgy.
When I once pointed out he really can't have it both ways, he snapped: "I can have it as many ways as I like. ... I'm Luke Ford, your moral leader, and live in a drug-induced fantasy world of unparalleled hypocrisy."
I thought it was odd that someone would read both Luke Ford and Bernard Weinraub closely enough to notice the cribbed paragraph. All Jack Shafer would tell me is that "a little bird" told him, via the Internet. That's one weird little bird.
Luke himself was surprised when Shafer called him at 8:30 a.m. last week, "before I'd even said my prayers."
Mickey Kaus of Slate's Kausfiles.com regularly gives Weinraub a hard time. He wrote last week that one thing Shafer "didn't point out is that [the pinched graph] was the best paragraph in Weinraub's piece." But he told me he wasn't the tipster: "If I'd had it I would have gone with it myself."
Kaus added: "Keep in mind that every reporter was doing Pellicano research. If Luke is a heavily used archive, they'd all have seen his version."
And Lukeford.net is an invaluable resource for continuing notes on certain topics. Last week one of his unnamed sources took issue with another New York Times story about Pellicano, this one co-written by Weinraub and Laura Holson, that described Paul Barresi as a "private investigator."
"If Holson and Weinraub had taken five seconds to Google Barresi," the source wrote, "they would have seen he's not a 'private investigator,' he's a gay porn actor, a shakedown artist and an all-around nut."
Shortly after that, Barresi himself emailed Luke with a one-word insult, duly recorded on Lukeford.net: "Punk."
"It's to his credit that Weinraub is smart enough to read him," a reader commented about Luke last week on the media junkie site Gawker.com. "Anyone getting an actual paycheck to cover Hollywood would be a fool not to. He's the real thing, an obsessive chronicler of the town ... [although] you feel like your own mind is being hijacked when you read him."
As for Luke, he's naturally pleased at this latest turn of events. A New York Times editor called him personally to apologize.
"It sure beats the last time the Times called," he told me. "A reporter wanted to know about spam e-mails for bigger penises."
March, 2004 issue of Los Angeles magazine
From R.J. Smith's column on Bernard Weinraub:
The last year has brought renewed criticism, and the worst mistake of Weinraub's career. On November 11, in a piece about the prosecution of private investigator Anthony Pellicano, Weinraub published under his byline a paragraph copied from an online account by blogger Luke Ford. The Times printed a lengthy and tortured correction three days later.
Ford is a strange one, a self-styled authority on porn and Orthodox Judaism. He has also been obsessed with the Pellicano story and advanced the story a bit -- though Ford's initial posting failed to make clear that the paragraph Weintraub lifted was itself recycled from a book.
Los Angeles Times, 6/10/04
"The real product is for all the men who know what it's like constantly to see an attractive woman who turns them down when he tries to hit on them," said Luke Ford, author of two books on pornography.
"They constantly feel humiliated by the opposite sex, so when [someone] humiliates the beautiful woman on the screen … having her humiliated is the way a guy tries to heal his wounds and his trauma of being rejected."
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Jerusalem Report 8/19/04
...Luke Ford, a convert to Judaism and son of a Christian evangelical, maintains the site's (protocols.blogspot.com) quirky flavor on topics including his conversion and the insularity of Orthodoxy, as this "group of Jews endeavors towards total domination of the blogosphere."
7/30/04
Rabbi Parrots Anti-Feminist Line
By Alana Newhouse for the Forward:
Last week, I caused a bit of a storm with an interview I gave to a journalist named Luke Ford, who is writing a book on Jewish journalism. During the interview, Ford asked me professional questions about arts coverage in Jewish publications, as well as my personal views on religion. Since I was raised in a Modern Orthodox home, most of these questions centered on whether study and interest in the arts are properly cultivated in Orthodox communities.
Curiously, Ford took a detour to ask about my observance of the laws of tzniut, or modesty, which in many Orthodox circles are interpreted as requiring women to wear skirts that cover their knees and shirts that do not reveal their collarbones or elbows. I’m still not sure how or why the interview went in this direction, but it did. I was quoted as saying:
“If I go into a shul, I’m going to be dressed appropriately. But I walk around in pants and shorts. I feel like modesty is more about your character than about what you wear.... There are ways that you can cheapen yourself, and make people feel that you are usable in any number of ways — professionally, emotionally, psychologically, sexually. That is what I mean by immodest.”
The remark provoked a flurry of responses on Ford’s Web site...
11/27/04
Jewish Chronicle of London:
Jenni Frazer's article on blogs in the Jewish Chronicle (London):
This week it was announced that "Protocols," the controversially named, American-based Jewish "blog" - short for "weblog" - was being closed down by its founder, Steven I. Weiss, the latest dramatic event within a mushrooming phenomenon of the Internet age.
Part on-line diaries, part stream-of-consc-iousness musings, blogs have achieved an extra-ordinary popularity world-wide - and have found particular resonance among Jews. Blogs have allowed anyone with access to a computer to express his or her own specific take on Jewish life. And in Protocols - tagged "A group of Jews endeavours towards total domination of the blogosphere" - hot Jewish issues of the day have been freely and fiercely debated.
Where Jewish blogs are not single-issue pro-Israel sites, they are, as in the cases of New York-based JewSchool, JewLicious, or Jews-Week, simply on-line magazines which draw attention to ventures of Jewish interest.
Protocols, however, was different - an opinion site which drew comments from around the world. Steven I. Weiss began it while a freelance journalist with good Jewish community connections. He parlayed these into a staff job at the New York Jewish weekly, the Forward, where he also ran a blog in the on-line edition of the paper. Now freelance again, he says he's "figuring out my next move in the blogging world. I'm trying out a religion blog at Canonist, a food blog at Kosher Bachelor, and a New York blog at The Metro Section." He also has a "home blog" called Iatribe. (As a measure of the impact blogging has had, some American groups have begun to award blog "Oscars," or Bloggies, for best foreign news blog, best sports blog etc.)
When Weiss went to the Forward, he passed the reins of his blog to one of Protocols' most frequent guest bloggers, Luke Ford. Ford, author of an analysis of American Jewish journalism, "Yesterday's News Tomorrow," is one of the most controversial figures in the blogging world. Once a writer about pornography, he is a 38-year-old, California-based convert to Judaism. Protocols' posted items, under Weiss, were short and snappy: Ford began writing much longer pieces, often documenting the progress of his latest book. More recently, the site appears to have become a campaigning blog for attacking rabbis, specifically those in America, who are suspected of sexual impropriety. Indeed, the Protocols seems increasingly to have brought any and all rabbis within its gunsights - including at least one British-born minister whom the blogsite has accused of falsifying academic credentials. The tone and content, particularly in the comments section, became more and more salacious. Weiss has said he will announce the reasons for closing the blog on December 8 - in, literally, the last post. Ford, for his part, says: "We remain friends. This is not the result of a falling out between Steven and I. He's never told me what stories to write or not to write."
2/15/05
Mike Brunker writes for MSNBC:
According to Luke Ford, a pioneer blogger and keen observer of the Internet porn scene, the scheme was able to roll up such huge numbers because of deals Crescent made with two Internet traffic brokers — Serge Birbrair and Yishai Habari — that resulted in millions of porn-seeking surfers a day being directed to the sites.
“Yishai and Serge made millions off the scam and escaped FTC prosecution because they only functioned as traffic brokers,” Ford wrote on his Web site.
3/3/05
Kristian Gravenor writes in the Montreal Mirror:
I rang up Luke Ford, the porn journalist from L.A., to ask if I was being too dainty in thinking it ghoulish to market a film of somebody contracting a deadly disease. The Australian-born Ford is a bit of a celebrity eccentric. He reports on porn scandals while struggling to practice his adopted Jewish faith.
Ford's answer was surprisingly cold. "I don't consider it any more heinous than selling other porn. She signed a contract for the rights of the scene no matter the consequences. It's just like you could still see a ballplayer breaking a leg or spine or getting killed in the performance of his sport. I don't see much of a difference between selling a video wherein somebody contracts a deadly disease to selling a video wherein you see somebody's soul die."
Ford says that he's noticed something "dying within" porn starlets after a while. "The more I see, the more I've become hardened and negative in my views. At first I thought it was just consenting adults doing risqué things. Now I see it as more damaging."
He notes that Brooke Ashley caught HIV in The World's Biggest Anal Gangbang, which was available for all to see. "I don't know a single instance where a producer has been smitten by conscience," Ford says.
4/20/05
'Don Hollywood' Mixes Adult-Film Acting With Legal Work
By Leslie Simmons Daily Journal Staff Writer
LOS ANGELES - For criminal defense attorney Ronald S. Miller, arguing in court is as invigorating as being the sole male in an adult film's ménage-a-trois.
Since 1998, under the moniker Don Hollywood, the 56-year-old Miller has appeared in more than 90 adult films with such titles as "Justice Your Ass" and "The Jerry Shag-Her Show."
Luke Ford, a journalist known as the "Matt Drudge of porn," said Miller was muscled out of Erotica L.A. by Edward Wedelstedt, a Denver-based pornographer.
Federal prosecutors in Texas recently indicted Wedelstedt, who many say is the current king of the porn industry. He is charged with tax evasion and distributing obscenity in 18 states. He could not be reached for comment.
Ford said Wedelstedt summarily decided that Erotica L.A. should belong to Adult Video News, the industry's main trade paper.
"Ron was informed. He didn't have a choice," Ford said. "And he signed over Erotica L.A. to AVN."
Ford described the takeover as "the classic case of a thug applying his brute force."
According to Ford, Miller was paid $110,000 for his interest in the multimillion-dollar event, a sum Miller refused to confirm.
Ford said the couple have "upstanding reputations" in the porn world.
"They bring professional values to an industry known for being an outlaw industry," Ford said. "They show up on time, say what they're going to do and treat people with courtesy."
Miller also has become a leading voice in the adult industry. When most porn shoots were shut down for several weeks last year after five actors tested positive for the AIDS virus, Miller and his wife led the call for regulation.
"If there's going to be any industry policy such as HIV testing, worker safety, you can expect Don and Brooke to have a cogent set of opinions about it," Ford said. "They are spokespeople for the industry and present the industry in a positive and coherent light. They're not going to be on drugs or alcohol or have delusions of grandeur."
Richard Corliss writes 5/7/05 on Time.com:
A more commonly cited number, from a Frank Rich story in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, is $10 billion annually. This stat was widely challenged: by Vivid Video president Bill Asher, who put the take at $4 billion, by porn journalist Luke Ford, who estimated the take at about $3 billion, and by Forbes Magazine's Dan Ackman, who calculated it at about 5% of Rich's figure: "the adult video business grosses at best $520 million" annually, he wrote.
My updated guess would be near Ford's number —which is about what the Lord of the Rings trilogy earned in theaters. Not bad for a segment of the film industry that spends thousands, not a $100 million or more, on an average title.
Dan Kapelovitz writes in the April 20, 2006 LA Weekly:
Often called “the Matt Drudge of Porn,” Web gossipmonger Luke Ford is trying to distance himself from his triple-X past. “My life will forever be associated with the writing I’ve done on the porn industry,” laments Ford. “I still do everything I can to build up a name writing on other topics.” Ford’s other writing obsessions include the Mafia, the media and the mellow sounds of Air Supply.
Ford moved to Los Angeles in 1994. Three years later, after failing to become a successful actor, Ford became famous (at least in smut circles) for his porn-gossip Web site, LukeFord.com.
He quickly earned a reputation for his willingness to post almost anything about anybody, fact-checking be damned. He thrilled to print controversial items, and pissed off porno people when he revealed the real names of blue-screen thespians. The climax of his porn-blogging career was breaking a story about an actor infected with HIV.
“I interview pornographers,” explains Ford. “It’s kind of like a grad student sticking a stick into a cage of insects and seeing how they react.” Unlike most grad students and their insects, however, Ford has had sex with some of his subjects.
Born in Australia 39 years ago to the son of a Seventh-day Adventist minister, Ford has since discovered the joy of Orthodox Judaism. His religious conversion originated from an unlikely source: annoying talk-show host/moralist Dennis Prager.
Ford keeps kosher, observes the Sabbath and attends synagogue every day, but admits that his behavior often falls short of what his adopted religion requires.
After learning of Ford’s Web site, various rabbis banished him, an ordeal he details in his self-published memoir, XXX-Communicated: A Rebel Without a Shul.
Ford gets death threats, and often sleeps with a loaded gun under his pillow. No one has murdered Ford yet, but he has been physically assaulted twice. One porn journalist repeatedly bashed Ford’s head against a light pole.
Ford’s fast-and-loose blogging has also brought him some legal woes...
To move beyond porn and get in good with his coreligionists, Ford sold his Web site for $25,000 and created LukeFord.net. What he did to pornsters, he now does to journalists, clergymen and Hollywood producers, one of whom is in the process of suing him.
If that’s not living dangerously enough, Ford is working on a book about Orthodox rabbis who are sexual predators.
God help him.
The Valley Exposed: Luke Ford, the outsider
Blogger dishes the naked truth on porn
BY TONY CASTRO, Staff Writer Article Last Updated: 06/05/2007 05:19:56
PM PDT
From the fury and intensity with which Luke Ford is reviled in the American porn industry, you would think he's with the FBI or a rabid evangelist crusading against any incursion on family values.
Ford, though, is a lowly author who over the past 10 years has made a career of writing and blogging on pornography - and who, on any day, wields an extraordinary influence over the industry unmatched by any news organization.
"I'm not a crusader against the industry," says Ford, 40, who blogs at www.LukeIsBack.com after making a name for himself at www.LukeFord.com. "But there is very little filter between me and my readers. There is no glorification or celebration of the industry, just fact-based reporting on issues and stories that the industry would just as soon not have made public."
Over the years, Ford has broken the stories of four porn actresses and one porn actor who tested positive for HIV, a health scare that temporarily shut down film production in the industry and led to some voluntary safeguards and monthly HIV testing.
"Luke Ford (was) way out front with the HIV porn story," acknowledged former New York Times business writer Nick Ravo.
There have been other stories that Ford has been "way out front" with as well: the role of the Mafia in pornography up until the late 1990s, especially in distribution, and Internet credit-card scams of some pornography firms.
"I've always looked for important stories that deserved to be told," he said. "I've never lived for the pornography life. I haven't watched a porn movie in eight years. I don't review porn movies. I don't have pornography in my apartment.
"It's never been a lifestyle I've lived."
For Ford, though, his coverage of the industry has not been without its drawbacks - the biggest of them personal and spiritual - that culminate a journey of discovery, growth and heartbreak.
The son of a strict Seventh-day Adventist Australian evangelist, Ford became a convert to Orthodox Judaism in the 1990s, about the same time he began researching a book on pornography and began writing on his first Web site about news and gossip in that industry. Posting porn stars' real names, writing about the role of the mob and revealing which actors had had cosmetic surgery, the site became an immediate, controversial sensation in the industry.
"The X-rated industry prefers to be a legendary milieu rather than a fact-oriented milieu," says Bill "The Bear" Margold, a former actor who founded an industry support group with a 24-hour hotline and is looked upon as an informal industry spokesman. "Luke Ford is exactly what we deserve. ... Luke's not really a blogger as much as he is an Internet journalist."
Former Times reporter Ravo agrees. "He was way ahead of the curve in critiquing, in his own comic way, the pornography industry, and - Internet historians of the future should note this - he was one of the first bloggers in any field. He was doing it before they even called it blogging. He doesn't get credit for that."
But Ford has also sometimes had sloppiness in his reporting - once misidentifying porn actress Christi Lake in a bestiality photograph and another time accusing the widow of legendary actor John Holmes of prostitution on the set, which led to lawsuits.
But for him, those weren't the most troublesome aspects of his career as a porn industry blogger. Ford had kept his professional life a secret from Young Israel of Century City, the strictly observant orthodox synagogue where he studied Talmud every morning, and the eventual revelation led to his embarrassing ouster from the congregation in 2001.
"You can imagine how humiliated we feel now," Young Israel's Rabbi Elazar Mushkin told Ford. "I brought you into my own house for Passover and introduced you to my family."
It was the second time Ford had been kicked out of a congregation. Four years earlier, not long after he had begun the Web site, he had been booted out of another temple. Since then, two other synagogues have removed Ford from their congregations.
Those incidents led to him writing "A Rebel Without a Shul," one of several self-published books. His book on the pornography industry, "A History of X, 100 Years of Sex in Film," was published by Prometheus Books.
In 2001, Ford finally gave in to the wishes of his rabbi and sold LukeFord.com to the Web site Netvideogirls.com for $25,000, roughly half of what he had been making annually through the sale of ads on his own blog.
Ford immersed himself in his religion and into a new nonporn blog - www.LukeFord.net - specializing in interviews with newsmakers and his personal experiences as a modern-day Orthodox Jew. And he almost went broke.
Even living spartanly in a then-$400-a-month bachelor pad in a predominantly Jewish area south of Beverly Hills, Ford's only income came from freelance writing, his books and occasional consultant jobs related to the porn industry for documentaries, for CBS's "60 Minutes" and the tabloid TV show "A Current Affair."
So in 2004, Ford returned to reporting on pornography, creating yet another blog - www.LukeIsBack.com - while trying to buy back his LukeFord.com domain name, which by then had been sold to yet another buyer.
"For Luke, there are no sacred cows," Margold said. "He takes no prisoners."
August 3, 2007
Brad A. Greenberg writes for the Jewish Journal:
Luke Ford loves gossip.
He loves to dish dirt on rabbis suspected of sleeping around and on pornographers stealing from their customers.
The blogger likes playing the role of the outsider journalist, the little guy willing to fight back, more nimble than those dinosaurs we call newspapers. He is -- to quote Luke Ford himself -- "more a kid who likes to throw manure."
The son of a Seventh-day Adventist evangelist, Ford is named after the gentile physician who wrote one of the Gospels and he shares his last name with one of the most infamously anti-Semitic Americans in history. But that's not why mentioning the contentious Internet journalist, who converted to Judaism 15 years ago, gives some Jews the sensation of nails scraping across a chalkboard.
"He's a lashon hara monger," said one community leader, who like many agreed to speak only anonymously. "He comes up with the most outrageous conclusions and puts them up on his Web site, passing them off as truth. If a rabbi stands up on the pulpit and says something, by Saturday night it is on [Ford's] Web site, twisted, with his perverted insights, as if it is fool-proof truth."
But sometimes, Ford is right. And therein lies this tale: what happens when gossip, roundly despised in Jewish law and tradition, turns out to be true and important? What is the difference between making gossip and breaking news? And how, in the brave new world of blogging, do we answer these questions?
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa might be wondering the same thing. It was Luke Ford who on his blog broke the news that the mayor's marriage had failed. Los Angeles has thousands upon thousands of niche bloggers, and Ford is nowhere near the most read. But he got the ball rolling, and he didn't relent after Villaraigosa vehemently denied the claim.
Eventually, Ford's reporting at LukeFord.net was vindicated, and the Villaraigosa revelation led to radio appearances and regular mentions on notable blogs like Slate.com's Kausfiles and LAObserved.com. Last week, the Los Angeles Times invited Ford to debate blogging and journalism ethics with KTLA reporter Eric Spillman at LATimes.com.
"I'm 41 years old," Ford said over coffee last week, "and it is just so obvious to me that the only thing I am good at is blogging.... As a blogger, I have to pick up the crap; I pick up the droppings that polite reporters don't want to touch."
LukeFord.net is now getting about 4,000 page views per day, according to Blogads, which tracks traffic for advertisement pricing. That's double the eyeballs Ford attracted before the mayor confirmed in June that he and his wife had separated.
And Ford's run is continuing: Last Friday he reported L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca was divorcing his wife; by Monday other media outlets had picked up on it.
But to Ford's critics, the value of such scoops doesn't justify the less savory aspects of blogging in general, and LukeFord.net specifically. After all, Ford has had a handful of breakthrough stories before, and then returned to obscurity.
"People who act that way can and do get lucky and therefore some credibility is given to them," one Jewish critic said. "It's like B.F. Skinner said about variable reinforcement schedule: If you don't give the rat a pill every time they push the bar, but you give it every third time or every fifth time or at an interval, the rats keep pushing the bar like crazy. And that is what some of these blogs do."
Many Jewish leaders are disgusted by Ford. They say they have befriended him and been betrayed. Who knows what he might catch them saying, or what he might publish somebody else saying about them? Multiple rabbis contacted by The Journal declined to comment; not only that, they didn't even want to be named as having declined comment.
Few sins are as serious as that of lashon hara, the evil tongue, though the severity of gossip and negative speech wasn't widely understood until Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan came along in the late 1800s and published his famous book, "Chofetz Chaim."
There are 31 commandments regarding lashon hara. The gist is that it's not only sinful to gossip about someone, but to say negative things at all, even if true, unless there is a compelling reason.
If a person knows their friend is getting involved romantically with a scoundrel or professionally with a crook, they should dish the dirt -- privately, said Rabbi Avrohom Stulberger, a local Orthodox expert on lashon hara. That's different from making a broad-brush PSA.
"When it is put out in the open like that on the Internet, it almost never becomes acceptable," said Stulberger, principal of Valley Torah High School. "If there is a situation where you have factual clear knowledgeable information and you needed to warn a wide spectrum of people because you couldn't get to everybody personally, I suppose there could be a scenario where it would be justified. But certainly if it is haphazard, if it isn't researched properly, if you haven't thought through the repercussions -- there are so many variables that the Chofetz Chaim talks about, it would be a rare, rare day that something like that would be justified."
Stulberger wasn't familiar with LukeFord.net, but it's hard to imagine the blog fitting the Chofetz Chaim criteria. Though the site is loaded with insightful interviews and profiles of local and national Jewish leaders, the blog does little to distinguish between rumor and reportage.
"Whether blogging about Jews, porners, Australian fauna, my mental health, my dad Desmond and myriad topics, I've never been one to rigorously check my facts before posting," Ford wrote in April. "And I've misused the English language quite regularly. The speed of the Internet doesn't allow for fact checking or being clear when I write. I'm a blogger, mates, and I play by [my] own rules."
The outcome is a mosaic of phone conversations, e-mails, reader comments, personal reflection, questions, opinion and fiction.
"Is New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg Gay?" a July 10 headline asked. "His mannerisms scream gay to me but maybe he's just a perfect gentleman," Ford wrote.
That is not news reporting; it is Ford posting a question in hopes that it will lead him to the answer. (An Associated Press story Sunday about a sexual harassment lawsuit Bloomberg settled in 2000 with a female executive of his financial company ran on LukeFord.net under the headline, "Guess This Answers My Question About Mayor Bloomberg.")
Ford argues that gossip is morally neutral. The benefits of gossip balance out the negatives, he says. But even Ford's favorite Jewish journalist doesn't agree with that.
"I looked up your Web site and have to admit to being troubled ... by the lashon harah aspect of your work," Yossi Klein Halevi, a contributing editor to The New Republic and senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, wrote Ford in a July 2004 e-mail, quoted in Ford's book "Yesterday's News Tomorrow: Inside the World of Jewish Journalism." "It's not at all as straightforward as you put it -- especially the notion midah k'neged midah [measure for measure], which is not in our hands but in God's hands to do."
To which Ford replied: "If we held by the Chofetz Chaim, most of your work, as well as mine, would be forbidden."
Ford got his online start in 1997 after producing and directing an adult film, "What Women Want" -- not to be confused with the Mel Gibson movie -- and acting in a few pictures. (He says he never appeared naked or had sex on camera. Others confirmed this; I was not diligent enough to roll back the tapes.) He had just written "A History of X: 100 Years of Sex in Film," and his curiosity about the business was at a high.
Within months, www.LukeFord.com (a porn blog he sold in 2001) broke the biggest crisis to rock the adult industry in years. HIV had infected five adult performers, and Ford was the only one pushing the story, naming "patient zero" and the infected actresses.
"People were saying, 'He's lying. He's wrong. He can't be trusted.' And he was right. He was way out in front of everybody else on this HIV story," said former New York Times reporter Nick Ravo, who turned to Ford as an industry insider.
Ford was not only ahead of the curve on the HIV story, but on the power of the Internet in general. Before newspapers began worrying about the coming circulation crisis, the Internet savvy of people like Ford was hastening it. With little training and even less money, Ford was uncovering stories about HIV, Mafia ties to the business and pay-for-porn scams with a cheap computer and an inquisitive mind.
His techniques were unorthodox, and not simply because he kept kosher and Shabbat while profiting from pornography. Trading in rumor and innuendo, lawsuits became part of the gig because he was willing to publish one-source stories and anonymous accusations as fact.
"There are three reasons why people come into the adult industry and two of them are wrong. The first is sex, which is mechanical, and the second is money, which is incidental. The primary reason is for the glory, and Luke has made himself glorious," said Bill "Papa Bear" Margold, once dubbed "the renaissance man of porn" by Playboy. "He is the first site you go to see what is going on. Even if he doesn't know what is going on, you go there to see that he doesn't know what is going on."
But his notoriety as an adult-industry blogger complicated Ford's search for a spiritual home in Los Angeles' Orthodox community. The first shul to give him the boot was Aish HaTorah in 1995 for being too antagonistic and again in 1998 when Rabbi Moshe Cohen discovered Ford's double life as a porn journalist.
"He was one of the Torah weirdos," said Rabbi Aryeh Markman, the shul's executive director. "You get all sorts of people showing up in shul and we bust them. 'I'm happy you're looking for a place to daven. But this isn't one of them.' And you throw them out. ... The antithesis of Torah is porn."
Ford journeyed down Pico Boulevard and created a new life for himself at Young Israel of Century City, going by his Hebrew name Levi Ben Avraham. He remained there for three years before being ousted. About the same time, he was tossed from the Rabbinical Council of California's conversion program for "deceit and deception," administrator Rabbi Avrohom Union said. "Don't take anything he says at face value."
Ford sold LukeFord.com in 2001 for $25,000 and started his personal site, LukeFord.net. In 2004, he also returned to adult-industry blogging at www.LukeIsBack.com. Still, Ford has found a place to daven. The one condition for his cooperation on this article was that the shul not be named, although its identity is an open secret in the community.
Back in January, Tony Castro had a sexy story to sell: Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had stopped wearing his wedding ring and hadn't been seen with his wife in months. Castro, a reporter for the L.A. Daily News, knew he'd hit gold. He dug deeper, verified what he'd heard and pitched it for page one. Only, his editors -- who at the time also were my editors -- weren't buying it. They didn't think the story qualified as much more than glorified gossip, even if it was about Los Angeles' most vocal family man. The story appeared destined for a journalistic coma.
But on Jan. 29, while interviewing Ford for the Daily News' series on porn in the Valley, Castro mentioned the mayor's marital troubles. He knew Ford would get the story out. Before the phone conservation was over, Ford had posted this headline at LukeFord.net: "Antonio Villaraigosa's Marriage Kaput."
"The mayor and his wife Corina haven't been seen together in public in about 10 months (since the president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, visited in May 2006)," Ford wrote. "Villaraigosa no longer wears his wedding band (not since the first week of September 2006). His wife does not live with him in the mayor's mansion (I don't think she's ever lived there with him)."
This apparently prompted an L.A. Times reporter to pay an unexpected visited to the Getty House, the mayor's official residence, and prod about the mayor's nuptials. Villaraigosa was adamant that his marriage wasn't over.
"Absolutely not true," he said. "We are not separated."
But then in June, something peculiar happened: Villaraigosa came clean. He and Corina were having serious problems and had separated. The next day, she filed for divorce.
Ford's reporting was not only exonerated but exalted.
Previously, Ford's non-porn reporting was most notable for his profiles of film producers and Jewish journalists and for publishing allegations of people who said they had been sexually harassed or assaulted by Jewish leaders.
Last year, Rabbi Aron Tendler, then the pulpit rabbi at Shaarey Zedek in Valley Village, stepped down after Ford and a few other blogs published accusations of inappropriate sexual relationships with women and girls at Yeshiva of Los Angeles (YULA), as a teacher and later principal there between 1980 and 1999.
...Ford has long been famous for two things: his spartan lifestyle and his propensity for turning gossip into news, thanks to the ever-present digital recorder he uses to capture scuttlebutt at journalism parties and porn functions.
"I didn't realize just how irresponsible we normally are in everyday private conversations until I encountered L.A. blogger Luke Ford," Mickey Kaus of Kausfiles wrote in a 2003 article for Slate.com titled "The Case Against Editors." "Ford goes around to parties and immediately posts snatches of his conversations on the Web. His reporting is impeccable. He has faithfully quoted me libeling dozens of people on two separate occasions."
Kaus, like most of Ford's media connections, was a friend of National Review Online columnist Cathy Seipp. Ford repaid Seipp, who died in March, by eulogizing her on his blog as a "bulldozer" and an unrepentant adulteress who "had an unshakable belief in her own righteousness."
It was classic Ford, throwing stones at the people who would save him from drowning, which is a tale he tells often about falling off a pier as a child after throwing rocks at his sister and she coming to his rescue.
He has no qualms with castigating those who have propped him up in life.
Ford credits his Jewish conversion to the wisdom of talk-radio host Dennis Prager, whom he heard speaking about Judaism when Ford was bed-ridden with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome after dropping out of UCLA. The two began talking regularly by phone, but then Ford bought the domain www.DennisPrager.net and used it to lambast the man he loved like a father. (That info has all been moved over to LukeFord.net.)
Prager has since completely distanced himself.
"He was neither a pupil nor a friend," Prager said in a brief interview. "I think I appealed to something good in him at some point, and I hope I did. But I don't know."
While Seipp's college-age daughter still converses with Ford and he says Kaddish for her every day at shul, most in that circle have written off their friendships with the blogger-without-boundaries.
"I'm barely even an armchair Ford watcher, but it seems like every time there's a brouhaha like this (i.e., every month or so), the conversation turns to whether this time, this time!, he's gone too far, whether it might finally, finally!, be time to write the Vulcan porn gossip out of polite society," Tim Cavanaugh, Web opinion editor of the L.A. Times, wrote on the paper's site. "I suspect the reason he always comes back can be found in this recent defense of a Seipp family enemy. If he were just some amoral jerk who constantly turned on his friends, they would drop him without further thought. But Ford always has some elaborately worked-out justification for doing the wrong thing -- and even if the morality is understood only by Ford himself, there's something compelling in the amount of thought and ethical self-torment that goes into the decision."
Shortly before sundown last Thursday, Ford updates a story about an aide to Villaraigosa who's leaving City Hall. He's seated at his desk in his home south of Pico Boulevard. This is where he spends day and night, only leaving once or twice most days to walk to shul or to get some exercise. Three of four days, he says, he doesn't leave the hood.
He lives in a guesthouse occupying half a converted garage. In a narrow room smaller than a college dorm, a few blankets -- Ford's bed -- lay on the ground between his desk and the bathroom door, against which two white pillows rest. A bookshelf is lined with Judaica items and books on the Talmud, Jewish history and English literature; most of the books he reads come from the library.
There is a fridge and microwave; cassette tapes of recorded phone conversations are piled on the floor, a smorgasbord of bottled vitamins and medication cover a white dresser with gilded accents. "The Hovel," as Ford endearingly refers to it, feels dank and smells worse, but for $600 a month, it's home.
Ford posts the story, slips into the bathroom to wash his hands, then locks up and begins the half-mile schlep to shul.
"This is a good place," an elderly man says to a teenage boy as Ford reads a Talmud commentary before a minyan has arrived. "You're welcome here. You can come in the morning; you can come in the evening. You will feel good here."
Certainly, that is true for Ford. This is the place that gives his life structure and purpose and stability. This is the only shul that's let him continue davening there after discovering the depraved world within which he works. Judaism is not about a personal relationship with God, and without an accepting community there is no religious observance. For a convert like Ford, there is no Jewish identity absent Judaism.
"Orthodox Judaism in general, not just going to shul, gives me much needed structure," Ford says after the service ended. "I have no core. I'm way too flexible on the things I do. This gives me some structure, and it's important for me to bounce off the same people everyday.... It gives my life meaning, it gives my life rhythm, it gives my day a beginning and end. And it reminds me that there is a God."
He returns home and hops in his van -- a distinctly dented and rusted old GTE work van -- and heads out to the Valley. He's got a porn party to infiltrate.
Samantha Wender writes Sept. 11, 2007:
It's the modern day diary, online personal journals or blogs attracting millions of viewers to the Internet. But it's the people behind these blogs who have access to the hottest events, keep tabs on the haves and have nots, and can make or break a career and influence an industry with just a stroke of a keyboard. They are blogebrities -- writers, thinkers and gossipers who have branded themselves by taking over the Web, and have thousands of people awaiting their next postings....Bloggers like Lavanderia, Faran Krentcil of Fashionista.com and Luke Ford of LukeisBack.com top the list of an estimated 101 million blogs that social-media company Technorati tracks. According to Aaron Krane, resident blog expert at Technorati, the blogesphere doubles in size about every six to eight months, to the tune of about 175,000 new blogs every day.
Luke Ford, who dishes on the adult entertainment industry, admits that there are flaws in the medium of blogging. "The overwhelming opinion of blogs is that they are not accountable, that they are not credible and that they're flaky and unreliable and pesky, if not downright malicious, vicious, libelous, irresponsible, just wreaking havoc, divulging all sorts of personal information that doesn't need to be made public and I agree. Almost all the criticisms of blogs are accurate. But just because a medium has flaws, which blogging does and all the criticisms I basically agree with, that's just one side of the story."
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