from www.adultcybermart.com/StoryRobinsonKuppsDefense.html – You’ve been in the adult industry a long time if you remember when attorney Lawrence G. Walters used to be known as Larry.

If an adult expo were a yuppie student convention, Larry Walters would have blended in nicely. Walters looked like some scholarly frat guy as he and partner David Wasserman got their First Amendment law practice off the ground by attending porn conclaves with the idea of taking cases and getting their names out there.

Because they were younger and dressed differently from the old school porn lawyer, Walters and Wasserman were perceived as the cool, hip alternative to the avuncular attorneys lecturing you about FBI agents.

I never got the full story why David Wasserman left the legal profession and became a strip club owner, though Wasserman would continue the fight against First Amendment outrages from that perspective.

I know Wasserman was arrested, his law license was suspended and he started living in a $350-a-month Orlando-area apartment. Wasserman, who owned Lake County’s only strip club, Fantasy Gentlemen’s Club, committed suicide at his home in September, 2008. He had battled depression since his mother’s death 16 years earlier.

Yet Wasserman was known as a passionate defender of the First Amendment who, like his former partner, Larry Walters, loved a good fight and reveled in speaking his mind.

It’s when Walters and Wasserman took the case of Tammy Robinson [pictured] that they really made their bones. Robinson’s case got national attention, and she appeared on the Howard Stern show as a result.

When you read the facts in the Robinson case, you can see why Walters would be a natural to represent Kimberly Kupps. Both women lived in Polk County and both women were working out of their homes furnishing content for their websites. Both had to deal with incorrigible law enforcement and a flawed set of moral principles driving it.

Kupps, aka Theresa Taylor, like Tammy Robinson, has the advantage of notoriety. She’s a porn performer and a well known commodity in the big bust market. Earlier this month Kupps and her husband Warren Taylor were arrested by Polk County sheriffs and booked on 13 counts of “wholesale promotion of obscene material” for shooting content out of her home in Lake Wales for her website, www.KimberlyKupps.com.

Kupps, according to news reports, was making about $700 a month with that site selling $20 subscriptions, offering exclusive video downloads and photos for her fans. Kupps’ activities became known to police and prosecutors through her Twitter account.

Prosecutors posing as subscribers downloaded six videos that Kupps made at home. They were presented to former Miami Dade Community College graduate Judge Reinaldo Ojeda for his approval to bring obscenity charges against the couple.

Polk County prosecutors spent three months investigating the content that Kupps and her husband produced before deciding to bring charges.

An investigator for Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd paid the initial $19.95 membership fee to her website, kimberlykupps.com, where he found videos of her having sex with men and women, as well as offering some of the clothes she wore in the videos for sale.

The investigator downloaded six videos, burned them to CDs and allowed County Judge Ojeda to review them. On April 7, Ojeda ruled the videos were obscene material under state law.

The investigator also noted in the arrest report several messages sent by Kupps through her Twitter account since June. In one, Taylor said she had finished filming a porn video at her home with a “good looking male subject from Italy.”

During questioning, Warren Taylor, 58, said he filmed the videos downloaded by the investigator and uploaded them for sale on the website clips4sale.com.

This week Kupps established a legal defense fund, and donations can be sent to Lawrence Walters’ office (wire/credit card info or checks): Kimberly Kupps Legal Defense Fund, c/o Lawrence G. Walters, Trust Account, 781 Douglas Ave., Altamonte Springs, FL 32714. Or call (407) 975-9150.

The first case ever brought against an adult website occurred with Tammy Robinson, also a Polk County housewife and a client of Walters’.

The Robinson case, which happened during the tenure of Sheriff Lawrence Crow, would have to make any free-thinking American sick to their stomach. Because with the Internet on trial for the first time it brought home the fact that law enforcement is capable of abusing its authority and treating citizens with utter contempt and disregard for their constitutional rights.

As we’re happy to report, Sheriff Grady Judd’s continuing that fine tradition of shooting first and never asking questions.

It began with a very graphic e-mailed death threat to Tammy Robinson’s children. It came from someone Tammy Robinson met in a chat room. Robinson who performed under the name Becka Lynn, www.beckalynn.com reported it to the FBI.

Instead of acting on it, the Feds turned the matter over to the Polk County Sheriff’s Dept.’s “Computer Crimes Unit”. The Crimes Unit was a one-man investigation operation run by Deputy Charles Gates Jr., a man reputedly with a checkered past.

Gates’ job was to look for child pornography and obscenity violations.

Gates began investigating the death threats in February, 1999. While at Robinson’s house asking her questions, Gates noticed a photo of her on a website. Robinson discussed her involvement with an amateur site called Cyber Dream Makers which was based in Arizona.

Robinson asked if there was a problem and Gates told her not to worry about it. Which is when she should have started worrying. Because that’s when Gates began investigating Robinson for possible obscenity violations under Florida law.

Posing as a customer [the same ruse employed in the Kupps investigation] Gates logged on to the Beckalynn site and downloaded a number of images.

About the same time, Gates was investigating a teen-age neighbor of the Robinsons for producing fake identification cards on his computer. During an interview with the boy, Gates asked the boy if he knew of anything going on in his neighborhood that shouldn’t be. According to Gates’ deposition, the boy volunteered that the Robinsons were making “dirty pictures” at their home.

The teen also told Gates that Tammy Robinson had given out a password to allow him to look at the pictures. Tammy Robinson denies doing so, saying she gave the password to the teenager’s father.

As in the Kupps case, Gates went to a local judge to get a probable cause determination. A warrant was issued authorizing seizure of all pornography and anything related to it. In March, 1999, a SWAT team of 20 officers showed up at Tammy Robinson’s house and kicked in her door while she was taking a shower.

Before she was allowed to put some clothes on, Robinson was paraded nude through the home as the lawmen cheered.

Robinson and her husband were then taken into separate rooms and interrogated about their involvement with the DreamNet.com website. The investigators also tried to make a child abuse case that Robinson’s children were being exposed to pornography and should be removed from the home.

The Florida Dept. of Children and Family Services immediately dismissed the charges as absurd.

The officers continued to ransack Tammy Robinson’s home and confiscated a video of her giving birth. Ultimately, Robinson and her husband were charged with the wholesale promotion of obscenity.

In court records, Gates said that the pictures he presented to the judge were no worse than other photographs seen on the Internet, but added “a reasonable person would have believed they were obscene.”

As a result of the arrest, Herbert Robinson lost his job at a supermarket chain. Adding insult to injury, the Robinsons were also hit with a forfeiture complaint in which the Sheriff’s department sought all their personal property. At the time of the Robinson case, another obscenity case was going on in Polk County.

When an attorney for the defendants mentioned that adult videos far worse could be found at the local convenience stores, the police raided those stores.

Rather than roll over and play dead, Tammy Robinson fought back by launching a legal defense fund, the same strategy we’re seeing in the Kimberly Kupps case.

Only in her situation Tammy Robinson posted nude photos of herself in exchange for donations, which were significant, since Robinson already had a sizeable following on the Internet.

The donations to her legal expenses backed by overwhelming public support allowed Tammy and Herbert Robinson to file a pair of federal lawsuits against Polk County law enforcement officials, which resulted in the case being dismissed January 29, 2001.

The Robinson case generated such public interest that it was highlighted on Fox Files, 48 Hours and the Oprah Winfrey Show.

But, here we are, 12 years later with the exact same thing with a different cast of characters.

How soon we forget.