All eyes watching Polk porn suit saga

A woman sues after her arrest, saying the county has no right to regulate the online sale of nude photos of her.

By MIKE BRASSFIELD

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 26, 2000

In her mug shot from jail, Tammy Robinson looks like a PTA mom who's been hauled in for baking the wrong cookies. She looks like the suburban housewife and mother of three that she is.

On her Internet site, there are 400 pictures of her naked. Enthusiastically, exuberantly naked. That's what landed her in jail.

Police came to her Lakeland home and charged her with selling obscene photos online. Her arrest 15 months ago was billed as the first of its kind. Mrs. Robinson's court fight is being closely watched by free-speech advocates, vice investigators and the rapidly growing Internet porn industry.

Legally, this is uncharted territory. Florida law says depictions of sex can be considered obscene if they offend community standards. The question is, do local standards of decency apply to cyberspace?

"The Internet is worldwide," Mrs. Robinson says. "Polk County has no right to regulate what's on the Internet."

She argues that she's a 30-year-old woman doing what she wants, and anyone who doesn't like it doesn't have to look. She and her husband, Herbert, are suing the detective who arrested them and the state attorney who's prosecuting them.

The authorities say this is a clear-cut case of a couple selling obscene material out of Polk County, no matter how high-tech the delivery method.

"When they put their bedroom on the Internet, they opened it up to the world," said Maj. Gary Hester, chief of investigations for the Polk County Sheriff's Office. "We know what we're doing is right."

There are hundreds of Web sites just like hers. Her lawyers say the stakes in court are high.

"We see it as a precedent-setting case that'll test the boundaries of what is permissible erotic material on the Internet," said Orlando area attorney Larry Walters. "You can't apply local community standards to anything on the Internet. It's a global medium. There is no local community."

Try telling that to Polk County, which has waged war against adult bookstores, nude clubs and massage parlors. It has closed more than 70 adult businesses in the past dozen years.

This is no different, officials say, even if it is a groundbreaking case.

"I have a hard time believing it's the first one in the country. But I certainly don't apologize for that," Hester said. "What I would hope is that other jurisdictions around the country would apply their laws to try and clean up some of this obscene material."

Site opens with a warning

On the Web, Mrs. Robinson goes by the name Becka Lynn. Her site at www.beckalynn.com opens with her in a bikini posing with an American flag and a "warning" of adult content.

Anyone with a credit card can pay $14 for three months or $30 per year to see nude photos of her, sometimes with other women, sometimes simulating sex acts. She claims to have 5,000 subscribers.

The Robinsons started going online from home and bought a digital camera three years ago.

The photos didn't need to be developed by strangers, so the couple snapped a few in the bedroom and sent them to an Arizona-based Web site where scores of "amateurs" post nude shots that others pay to see.

Mrs. Robinson says she called her local state attorney first, and a secretary told her nobody cared as long as children weren't involved.

Her pictures proved to be popular, so she added more. It was extra money. It was fun and, in a weird way, private. She was showing it all, but she was doing it from home under a pseudonym for an anonymous audience. To the eyes of the authorities, she was invisible -- until she called the police.

Somebody e-mailed her, threatening to rape and kill her children and make her watch. Terrified, she called the FBI and the Polk County Sheriff's Office. That brought the sheriff's computer-crimes detective to her door. She showed him the e-mail and told him about her site. He said he would get back to her.

Then he downloaded 60 photos of her and showed 10 to a local judge who deemed them obscene.

On March 2, 1999, 21/2 months after she reported the threat, the police knocked on Mrs. Robinson's door.

"They took all my clothing and both of my older children's computers, which weren't hooked to the Internet," she said. "They took my sex toys, vibrators, dildos, pornography videos, family vacation videos, even the childbirth video of my daughter."

The charge was wholesale promotion of obscene material, a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.

When the detective applied for a search warrant, he said the couple were making $1,600 a month from the Web site and that four neighborhood youths had accessed it.

The couple bailed out of jail. Mr. Robinson was fired from Publix. They rented out their red-brick house, uprooted their children -- ages 11, 9 and 5 -- and moved to Arizona. They're now staying in the Tampa Bay area, although they decline to give an exact location.

Another couple arrested

Another Lakeland couple were arrested the same day on the same charges. They had been filming themselves in their bedroom for a Web site that links customers who watch each other having sex.

Patrick Gilmer and Nicole Weeks lost their jobs, broke off their engagement and moved out of town. The charges were dropped when they killed their Web page and agreed to stay out of the sex business.

They cut a deal rather than fight the government. The Robinsons, on the other hand, filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit against the detective.

"Everyone else rolls over and plays dead," Tammy Robinson said. "I will not go away. I will take this to the Supreme Court if I have to."

The Robinsons hired David Wasserman and Larry Walters, Orlando area lawyers who specialize in First Amendment law and often represent adult businesses.

Their services aren't cheap. Mrs. Robinson started using her Web site to solicit money for legal bills. It won "best political site of the day" from aboutpolitics.com, a site run by an Internet consulting firm.

Publicity followed. "Free Becka Lynn" bumper stickers were printed.

She made the rounds on television -- Oprah, Leeza, Fox Files, Court TV. The CBS program 48 Hours recently profiled her case, portraying Polk County with footage of cows mooing in fields.

About 21/2 months ago, her lawyers told her that prosecutors had agreed to drop the charges if she dropped her lawsuit. She announced this on a local radio show -- disc jockey Bubba the Love Sponge's show on 98 Rock, WXTB-FM.

That may have complicated matters.

"Bubba went on a huge rampage," Mrs. Robinson recalls. 48 Hours filmed the broadcast and bleeped out parts for TV as the controversial shock jock railed about "dumb (deleted), stupid (deleted) prosecutors," calling them "a bunch of (deleted)."

The Robinsons' lawyers say the prosecutors got mad and backed out of the deal. They say so in a federal lawsuit filed May 19 against State Attorney Jerry Hill, the chief prosecutor for Polk, Highlands and Hardee counties.

Prosecutors beg to differ.

"I'm sure we did not agree to drop the charges. If we had, we would have dropped them," said state attorney's spokesman Russell Knowles.

Internet porn a gray area

The legal fight continues next month. Each side is trying to get the other side's court cases thrown out

Internet porn may be a billion-dollar industry, but it's still a gray area. For something to be considered obscene, it must offend community standards.

"In cyberspace, it's not clear what the community is," said Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. "Every case about obscenity in cyberspace is going to be a test case until the courts figure that out."

Deborah Pierce is a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group that advocates free expression on the Internet. She knows of no other cases like the Robinsons'. The closest thing is a 1993 case where a San Francisco area couple were arrested for offering graphic sexual images over a computer bulletin board -- a precursor to the World Wide Web.

Robert and Carleen Thomas were convicted of violating Tennessee community standards when a postal inspector downloaded their photos there. The Thomases got 30 months in prison. They appealed and lost.

In Florida, a Web site called Voyeur Dorm uses 55 cameras to record seven young women showering, dressing and living in a West Tampa home. Tampa says Voyeur Dorm violates zoning laws, so the business is suing Tampa in federal court.

Thursday, a federal appeals court in Philadelphia upheld an injunction against the Child Online Protection Act, a federal law aimed at keeping Internet porn away from children.

The court said the law will likely be ruled unconstitutional, partly because it defines harmful material as that which offends "contemporary community standards" -- a definition the court says is impossible to enforce because community standards vary.

As for Tammy Robinson, she's still taking pictures of herself in the buff. She doesn't sound like a woman worried about prison: "They're wasting taxpayers' money on a guinea-pig case they're going to lose."

The irony is that before all the trouble started, she'd gotten a bit burned out on her Web site. She'd been thinking about pulling the plug on it. "Now I'll never stop," she said. "I'll be 90 years old taking my clothes off if I have to."

- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

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