Ken Tipton, the mastermind behind Our First Time, where two teenagers were supposed to lose their virginity online, says the fiasco has become a professional and personal nightmare. The event, which was conceived as a theatrical hoax à la Orson Welles' fake radio broadcast War of the Worlds, is now the subject of a bitter legal battle.
Tipton filed a lawsuit for defamation and breach of contract this week against the Internet Entertainment Group, his former ISP partner in the virgin venture. IEG is the company behind one of the most profitable porn sites in the world and owns the rights to the infamous Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee video. Tipton wants US$3-5 million in contract damages and another $10 million for defamation.
"My client has lost millions of dollars in potential ad revenues," claimed Los Angeles attorney Stan Lieber, who has advised Tipton against speaking directly to the press. "Not to mention the permanent damage to his reputation as a filmmaker and an actor."
Lieber said that Seth Warshavsky, IEG's president, pulled the plug on the site in mid-July when he learned that the teenagers were not really going to consummate their rosy, weeks-long online romance with sex, but were instead going to opt for abstinence -- the message being that safe sex, and especially abstinence -- are best.
Warshavsky says that was just part of the problem.
"At first, we thought Tipton, who was calling himself 'Oscar Welles' at that point, was being straight with us, that these 'teenagers' were really who they said they were, and that they were really going to lose their virginity online. After we had signed a contract with Tipton, we started to get suspicious about the whole arrangement.
When Tipton was pressed to have the teenagers -- actually self-promoting actors in their 20s -- sign model releases, Warshavsky said he refused. Then Tipton admitted to the whole event being a sham set up to promote publicity for a movie he was trying to make.
"He was a little tipsy when he confessed, and he tried to persuade us that we were all going to make lots of money by charging $5 a pop to viewers on the day that the two were supposed to lose their virginity online," Warchavsky said.
IEG pulled out of the project a few days later, and posted an angry disclaimer at their club.love site, calling Tipton and company "scammers" who were simply out to rip off the public. The ourfirsttime domain name was sold to another company, according to a press release from Lieber, which did not name the buyer. The new site uses the space to hawk skin flicks and sexual paraphernalia.
"These people have made a mockery of the [Internet] media," proclaimed Warshavsky.
Of course, Lieber and his client tell a different story.
"Tipton was never going to charge for the site," Lieber said. "It was going to be a public service announcement about safe sex. It was only after the threat of legal action from religious right groups that he came up with the safety net plan of charging people a dollar on their credit cards, to prove that they weren't minors."
Tipton is no stranger to pressure from the religious right. He says they were responsible for shutting down his chain of lucrative video stores in St. Louis, because he was distributing X-rated movies.
The movie idea that Tipton hoped to promote with the "Internet Virgins" idea is actually an autobiographical story about his personal and professional struggles after tangling with the religious right. Tipton calls it In the Eye of the Beholder.
Any damage done to the credibility of the medium by the hoax should be minimal, says the Electronic Freedom Foundation's Stanton McCandlish.
"People believe in moderated media, be it print or online or broadcast," he said. "This stunt was unmoderated, so regular users of the Internet were probably skeptical from the beginning.
"The only people who seemed to buy it was not the public, but newspaper editors, who are always scrounging around for dirt about the Internet."
Warshavsky, who was only made aware of the lawsuit against him when a Wired News reporter told him about it on Thursday, said that he and IEG will fight, and may even take counter action against Tipton.
