Mr. Pinup

Why Janet Romano and Rob Zicari have no business being in federal prison.

Greg Beato | October 27, 2009

In late September, as a controversial movie director spent the first week of her year-long sentence at FCI Waseca, a federal prison in Minnesota, Harvey Weinstein didn’t bother to circulate a petition demanding her release. Debra Winger didn’t issue a statement protesting the director’s incarceration and anticipating her next masterwork. Peg Yorkin, founder of the Feminist Majority Foundation, didn’t publicly wonder why the government had spent the last seven years trying to put the director in jail.

Maybe Janet Romano should have drugged and sodomized a 13-year-old. Or, at the very least, had better cinematic taste. Unlike Roman Polanski, Romano has never won an Oscar for Best Picture. In fact, the 31-year-old porn auteur, 
whose credits as a director include Pain and Suffering, I Love to Hurt You, Cannibalism, and Sexual Intrusive Dysfunctional Society 2, has never even won an AVN Award for Most Outrageous Sex Scene.

Still, you’d think many of the creative types rallying around Polanski would be equally sympathetic to Romano’s plight. Essentially, she’s in prison for rape, too—as is her husband, Rob Zicari. But as Whoopi Goldberg might have put it, 
the rape that landed them in the slammer wasn’t actually rape-rape. It wasn’t even ‘70s-style-libertine rape. Instead, it was movie rape, a scene enacted by consenting adults.

via In Defense of Extreme Pornography – Reason Magazine.