BARTOW, Florida — Chris Wilson, the operator of a controversial porn Web site, was released from the Polk County Jail after his parents put up $30,100 to arrange his bail.
His lawyer, Lawrence Walters of Orlando, said Wilson’s parents arranged their son’s release Monday but he wasn’t let out of jail until Tuesday afternoon because it took so long to process the 301 bonds — one for each of the 300 misdemeanor counts and one felony count filed against Wilson.
A Sheriff’s Office employee at the jail said that it took all day to process the 301 bonds.
Wilson’s bail had been set at a total of $151,000 for the charges. His parents made arrangements with a bail bond agency to put up the bail and paid the agency a fee of $30,100.
The family had struggled to make bail over the weekend, because Wilson was charged with so many individual obscenity counts.
His lawyer asked the State Attorney’s Office to combine all the charges for the purposes of posting bail, which would have meant his parents would have paid $15,100 — 10 percent of the total bail — to the bond company. The State Attorney’s Office refused, which required the parents to pay $30,100 because state law requires that the minimum paid for each charge be set at no less than $100.
Wilson operated an adult Web site out of his Lakeland apartment. The site became controversial after it started running photos, allegedly sent in by soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, showing scenes of dead men and women, purported to be insurgents. Many of the dead were horribly mutilated.
Wilson defended his Web site in recent interviews, saying that the pictures show the uncensored reality of war.
Wilson was arrested on charges relating to the amateur pornography section of his Web site, not the dead body pictures.
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said that the pornography on the site “shocks the conscience of the community.”