Mike and Diane, the two so-called "18-year-old virgins" slated to have sex live on the Net on 4 August at Our First Time, never intended to go through with it, says Seth Warshavsky, founder of the Internet Entertainment Group. IEG, an adult-site provider, has loudly pulled out of a no-cost sponsorship deal with the site.
On Friday afternoon, IEG posted images of documents at one of its own sites, Club Love, to support its claim that the Our First Time site is a "money-making publicity hoax."
"IEG will not contribute to any hoax or to any scheme designed to mislead the public and the media," reads a fax sent from IEG to Mark Vega, the attorney representing Our First Time founder Ken Tipton.
The site also features candid photographs of "Oscar Wells" -- an alias for Tipton, an aspiring filmmaker who is in seclusion in a hotel room in Los Angeles, Warshavsky says.
The agreement with IEG is co-signed by Tipton.
"We were very excited to host this event. We're passionate subscribers to the First Amendment," says Warshavsky. "But then we found out they were going to go through the whole build-up, get AIDS tests, buy condoms, get a hotel room -- and then decide to abstain."
Though a statement on Our First Time insists that the controversial site is a noncommercial venture, Tipton and lawyer Mark Vega were negotiating with IEG to provide credit-card services to the site for age verification at US$5-a-pop on the day of the supposed deflowering.
Warshavsky quotes Tipton as telling him, "You're not going to believe the money we're going to make from this."
The entire stunt was being staged so that "Oscar Wells" could "slap the religious right," Warshavsky claims.
Tipton could not be reached for comment.
On 20 April, Tipton posted a plea, titled "Filmmaker Desperate For Help," to Film Threat Weekly, a site dedicated to independent filmmaking. In the message, Tipton solicited support for a film he described as "based on the 'true story' [his quotes] of how I lost my family, a multimillion dollar chain of video stores, and almost my life fighting a group of religious fanatics and a corrupt city prosecutor over Martin Scorsese's controversial film, The Last Temptation of Christ."
He also said religious groups were already planning to boycott the film.
The Our First Time site has been widely suspected to be a stunt or scam. On Wednesday, Wired News reported that email widely circulated on Usenet, purportedly from the Christian Coalition demanding that the site be shut down, originated from a phony address. The Dutch ezine Daily Planet also reported on Wednesday that the phone numbers in the InterNIC whois database for Wells and Tipton were the same.
IEG has never shied away from controversy. Last year, IEG won a court case allowing it to show the infamous Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee honeymoon video on the Web.
"We're a very aggressive company," Warshavsky says. "But we don't want to provide illegitimate content."
