Sexual Vigilanteism at the 'New York Post'

Paying for erotic favors is okay, as long as your tastes are generic. That, in a nutshell, is the sexual ethic of the New York Post.

How else do you explain a paper where the top editors hang out at strip clubs at night and spend their days shaming fetish-club patrons by name?

I refer to coverage of the 67-year-old man who had to be hospitalized after an accident at the hands of a dominatrix in a Manhattan establishment called the Nutcracker Suite. Today, the Post crossed into ethically murky territory with a story that named the man (citing "law-enforcement sources"), and described his professional history, hometown and family situation. For good measure, the Post's reporters also took it upon themselves to phone the man's wife and fill her in on the details.

Since the man is not a celebrity, politician or other public figure, it's hard to understand what kind of news value the Post's editors saw in printing his name, or what they accomplished beyond embarrassing him in front of his community and ensuring that the episode will forever be his top Google hit.

I tried to ask metro editor Michelle Gotthelf how she justified the decision, but she referred me to the paper's spokesman, Howard Rubenstein, who offered this statement: "The Post will happily name every adult caught in a dog collar."

But that flip answer hardly does justice to the very serious privacy concerns raised by the Post's reporting. "He's not being charged with anything, so why is his personal information being broadcast in this way?" wonders Susan Wright, founder and spokesperson for the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, a group that defends the right to legal forms of "alternative sexual expression" such as BDSM. "It seems to me he is a victim. This is why people don't use their real names." (The man in the Post's story was carrying no identification at the time of his hospitalization.)

Dan Savage, the syndicated sex-advice columnist and editor in chief of alt-weekly The Stranger, agrees. "No crime was committed. What the house of domination does is legal, patronizing it is legal. Without criminal charges, where's the newsworthiness? It's just an attempt to trot out some salacious details about kinky sex to move some newspapers."

Is it even, though? Or does the contempt expressed in Rubenstein's sneering quote have more to do with it? After all, it's the details of the story that are the juicy part; it's hard to imagine anyone shelling out even a quarter merely to read the name of a non-famous, middle-aged retiree.

"Only the Post could answer the question 'why?'" says Andy Schotz, chairman of the Society of Professional Journalists' ethics committee. "Shame would be a bad motivation for naming him."

It's also bad business, given that the Post serves one of the most sexually liberal cities on earth. "What annoys me is this attitude that nobody who reads the Post is kinky and nobody who works at the Post is kinky," says Savage. "It's completely cruel and unnecessary, and you would think that someone in that newsroom would have had a 'there but for the grace of God go I' moment.

"Honest to God, if my dumb little weekly was in New York instead of in Seattle, I'd have reporters staking out the Nutcracker Suite, pumping the employees to see if they ever serviced a Murdoch," he adds. "Maybe I'll do it."

UPDATE, 2/13/08: Wow. It gets even better: For today's paper, a Post reporter visited the hospital and coaxed an "exclusive" interview out of the man, who is "still disoriented from the three days he spent in a coma." And they splashed it on page one. Maybe I was wrong about it not selling papers.

Also, yesterday's story identified him by the wrong name. Hey, sorry, Richard Benjamin, whoever you are.

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