Adult industry photographer and content provider Mike Jones was attending a regional adult industry conference in Chicago back in 2000 when his life and business were suddenly thrown into disarray. Mike was attending the conference to promote his adult content site, CDbabes.com, in the hope of making a few more sales for his up and coming online business.Adult industry photographer and content provider Mike Jones was attending a regional adult industry conference in Chicago back in 2000 when his life and business were suddenly thrown into disarray. Mike was attending the conference to promote his adult content site, CDbabes.com, in the hope of making a few more sales for his up and coming online business. His attorney, J.D. Obenberger of xxxLaw.net, was also attending the gathering. The event started off well enough, but Mike’s day was about to take a serious turn for the worse.

While Mike was at the buffet table of the hotel that was hosting the event, his cell phone started ringing. “It was this big, yellow clunky cell phone, I still remember it,” says Obenberger, who was right next to Mike when the call was answered. “He picks it up and he’s talking to a member of his family and he goes ashen and then his eyes just go completely catatonic, and it was somebody back at his house telling him that the police were all over his house and they were breaking the door in at his studios.”

Let’s back up for a moment. Mike Jones got started in the adult photography business back in the 1990’s after years of working at various jobs, including his own computer retail store. He moved his wife and three children to a home just outside the village of Greenwood, Illinois, sometime around the year 1995; he opened a photography studio at a separate location about a quarter mile from his home. Photography had been Mike’s hobby for years, but the opportunities created by the mainstream’s arrival to the Internet suddenly provided Mike with a chance to take his hobby to a more professional level. His wife was not only aware of Mike’s business and supportive of his work, but she also was an active part of his business operations. Mike was well liked by those in the adult industry who knew him, and it seemed his business was off to a great start.

The village of Greenwood was a small village, however, and some people who lived there had old-fashioned, small town values. When a local woman with a history of initiating legal disputes against the village learned that Mike was operating an adult business, she quickly decided that she wanted Mike to leave the area; she took her objections about Mike’s presence to an acquaintance, who according to police reports that would later come out at court hearings, then began making calls to law enforcement to complain about Mike’s business and urge the local sheriff’s office to act.

Sometime before the police raided Mike’s home and studio, they paid him a visit to inquire about allegations they had received from parties, then undisclosed, that Mike might be taking nude pictures of underage girls. “When the police first came, they told me that it was an anonymous report that came in through Crime Stoppers, and they were investigating it,” explains Jones. “[The police said] that an anonymous report had come in that I had done a video with two thirteen year-old girls.”

Having nothing to hide, Mike invited the officers in to his home, sat them down, and explained to them candidly what he did for a living. The officers seemed to be unaware of the record-keeping requirements set forth by 18 U.S.C. § 2257, so Mike explained that he kept age verification documents for all models that he shot, along with a signed model release. “I told them that if they ever had a question about any of the performers, on any of our Web sites or on CD Babes, that they could feel free to come back to my house at any time and I would provide them with the information on the performer, copies of her ID, etc.,” says Jones.

Mike’s explanation seemed to satisfy the officers, and when they left his home that day it appeared to all that the misunderstanding had been settled. In fact, the investigating officer closed the case in June of that year concluding that the accusations of child pornography were unfounded. Yet the locals who were intent on seeing Mike’s business shut down would call the sheriff’s office again, and even go so far as to convince the village attorney to call and suggest Mike be considered for charges of obscenity for some BDSM images that he sold through his adult content business.

When the police showed back up at Mike’s home for a second visit a few months after their initial visit, this time with a search warrant, it quickly became apparent that all hadn’t been settled as was previously thought, and that Mike Jones was in for a legal fight for his business, and for his very freedom.

The raid on Mike’s home occurred at a time when no adult was present to protect his teenage daughter and young son from a barrage of explicit questions from law enforcement officers. Mike’s eldest eighteen year-old daughter had just cut her hand making a “Tin Man” Halloween costume and was away at the hospital emergency room with her mother, leaving Mike’s fourteen year-old daughter, her boyfriend and his eleven year-old son at the house alone when the police arrived. With no adults to object, the invading officers took Mike’s daughter and son aside and asked them all kind of explicit questions that would make most adults blush.

“They were asking [my children] questions like, do you do nudie pictures for your daddy? Have you ever posed naked for your daddy? Have you ever had sex for your daddy? Have you ever been pregnant? Have you ever had an abortion? Have you ever been married? Have you ever been divorced? That’s what they asked a fourteen year-old girl,” says Jones.

Obenberger says that the police were absolutely invasive in their tactics while executing their search warrant at Mike’s home. “This little girl didn’t even know that there was such a thing as child porn,” says Obenberger. “The whole thing was just a gross and disgusting experience.”

By the time Mike arrived back at his house, the police had left his home but were still going through his studio. The police took everything they could get their hands on that might store information about Mike’s business, even sifting through his daughter’s personal bedroom and taking her personal computer that she used for homework. They took financial records, and they also took adult video tapes that were for personal use.

Stunned by the events of the evening, Mike ordered out for pizza and sat down with his attorney to plan out the defense. Obenberger says he remembers the evening vividly; the mood was one of complete hollowness and dread as the group ate pizza to an uncomfortable silence. Mike’s kids were anxious and uneasy, and found it difficult to look their father in the eye. One of his daughters left the table to be alone.

Just down the road at Mike’s photography studio, another group of officers kicked in the door and seized all kinds of items including business records, photographs, floppy discs, computer equipment, CDs and more. “We went through the studio and it was pathetic,” says Obenberger, describing the scene. “They left a camera, they left a tripod, they left his backdrops, and they left about a thousand 3 x 5 color prints. They took a huge number of color prints, and they took everything else electronic. They took two computers from there, four or five computers from his house, they took over a thousand video tapes, they took hundreds and hundreds if not thousands and thousands of CD ROMs. They completely shut him down, he had no way to do email except the laptop that he had taken with him to the show.” After about ten days, a portion of the materials that had been taken were returned to Mike, but much of his equipment was not returned – his primary business computer remains in police custody to this day.

Mike Jones was eventually arrested and charged with two crimes: distribution of obscene materials, and possession of child pornography. It was the second charge that would ultimately mean hard times for Mike’s business, CD Babes.

“YNOT jumped on the bandwagon right away with the defense fund,” says Jones, referring to an effort made by the YNOT Network LP to raise money for Mike’s defense. Other than that, though, support was hard to find. “Basically for the first thirty to sixty days our business went dead,” says Jones. “People were in a panic, they thought my records had been seized and that people were going to come knocking on their door because they had names and addresses of other Webmasters. They were afraid to buy from me because their information would be on file in my shop.” Mike’s business was cut in half in the first year alone. “The major players wouldn’t play with me because of what was going on.”

The charge of child porn actually was not related to Mike’s business at all. After seizing Mike’s work computer, investigators scoured its hard drive with forensics software designed to recover deleted files. Investigators found several images that they believed could be child pornography. The images were small thumbnail images found in an Internet browser’s cache folder; all of the images had filenames that started with “TN”, and all were downloaded in less than one minute at about 4:57 on August 5, 2000. The images had already been deleted. There was no evidence that Mike had ever sought out child porn, or intentionally stored it on his computer, or was even ever aware that the small thumbnail files had existed at all. No larger counterparts to these thumbnail images were ever recovered.

“It’s apparent to me that some TGP page was accessed by someone using his office computer,” explains Obenberger. “On the basis of those [thumbnail images], he was indicted on several counts of child pornography. We believe the state had zero chance of ever prevailing on child porn.”

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