LOS ANGELES — What violates community obscenity standards in the nation’s reputed pornography capital? Federal prosecutors think they have a case.
Ira Isaacs readily admits he produced and sold movies depicting bestiality and sexual activity involving feces and urine. The judge warned potential jurors that the hours of fetish videos included violence against women, and many of them said they don’t want to serve because watching would make them sick to their stomachs.
“It’s the most extreme material that’s ever been put on trial. I don’t know of anything more disgusting,” said Roger Jon Diamond — Isaacs’ own defense attorney.
The case is the most visible effort of a new federal task force designed to crack down on smut in America. Isaacs, however, says his work is an extreme but constitutionally protected form of art.
“There’s no question the stuff is disgusting,” said Diamond, who has spent much of his career representing pornographers. “The question is should we throw people in jail for it?”
Isaacs, 57, a Los Angeles advertising agency owner who says he used to market fine art in commercial projects, calls himself a “shock artist” and says he went into distributing and producing films about fetishes because “I wanted to do something extreme.”
“I’m fighting for art,” he said in an interview before his federal trial got underway. “Art is on trial.”
He plans to testify as his own expert witness and said he will cite the historic battles over obscenity involving authors James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence.
Diamond said Isaacs also will tell jurors the works have therapeutic value for people with the same fetishes depicted on screen.
The government obtained an indictment against Isaacs on a variety of obscenity charges, including importation or transportation of obscene material for sale. Prosecutors have declined to comment about the case.
The test of obscenity still hinges on a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that held that a work is not legally obscene if it has “literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”
