Justice Dept. Pulls the Plug on Satellite Pornography

WASHINGTON —  The Justice Department turned off the nation’s only satellite pornography network Thursday, obtaining an agreement from its owners to plead guilty to felony obscenity charges and to cease operations.

The American Exxxstasy station was pioneering a potential new market by broadcasting hard-core adult movies daily to 30,000 nationwide subscribers equipped with their own satellite dishes. The service cost $300 a year.

Justice Department officials said that the proliferation of cable and satellite dish technology had made it necessary to strike quickly at the “pollution” of public airwaves before such enterprises spread.

The obscenity case marks a victory for the Justice Department’s stepped-up campaign to squelch pornography. The effort began in 1987 when then-Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III established the Center for Obscenity Prosecution and created a task force of federal attorneys to lead federal, state and local authorities in cracking down on the pornography industry.

The prosecution was the first ever under a federal law prohibiting satellite and cable broadcasting of obscenity. The law took effect in 1988.

Paul L. Klein and Jeffrey Younger, the two principal officers of the New York-based Home Dish Only Satellite Networks, which operated American Exxxstasy, agreed to pay $150,000 in fines and to turn over their film library to the government.

The company used a Salt Lake City transmitting facility called U.S. Satellite Inc., to transmit its broadcasts to a satellite, which then relayed the signal to individual subscribers throughout the United States.

The indictment cited the company’s broadcast of a 15-minute film, “Hardcore Girlfriends,” that aired last February. The movie short was “nothing but the graphic portrayal of sex acts without any kind of dialogue or story line,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Richard N. W. Lambert in Salt Lake City.

Federal officials do not know where the satellite company obtained the hard-core films, said Justice Department spokesman Doug Tillett.

Because the pornography industry is so widespread, government investigators are focusing on potential mass-producers of obscene material. Thirty such businesses in the Los Angeles area have been searched in the past six months, Tillett said.

The American Civil Liberties Union opposed the federal investigation of the satellite company, contending that obscenity is impossible to define and subjective in nature, said ACLU spokesman Phil Gutis.