Sorry, ladies -- if you were hoping to star in one of Valley-based Backroom Casting Couch's "reality" porn flicks, we've got some bad news: the website's star -- who's seen on video having unprotected sex with dozens of local women -- has herpes. And he may be in a little trouble with the law.
The mystery man behind the site, who never shows his face while humiliating young girls dumb enough have sex with him on camera, is a guy named Eric Whitaker.
Last year he was booted from his sleazy office/porn set near the Scottsdale Airport after we alerted the building owner what Whitaker was doing in there. Now, apparently, he's contracted the gift that keeps on giving, and could be spreading it to any girl who ends up on his couch.
Whitaker posted the results from his latest STD test on his Twitter page last month, revealing that he tested positive for herpes simplex I -- the more common of the two types of the virus.
See the results of Whitaker's test below.
Whitaker and his cohorts first got on our radar in September, when they apparently started a rumor that an 18-year-old Texas girl lost her academic scholarship at Arizona State University after she appeared having sex with Whitaker on the website.
We debunked the rumor and found out the girl hadn't lost her scholarship, and the rumor that she had was probably started to drive web traffic to Whitaker's site -- all while humiliating the 18-year-old girl, Elizabeth Hawkenson.
See our initial story about Whitaker here.
After Whitaker lied to the girl by telling her the video of the two having sex would only appear on the pay section of the website -- and then blasting it to several free sites with much higher traffic -- the girl decided to spill the beans about how the operation really works.
If you're unfamiliar with the site, here's how Whitaker claims things go down: a guy puts out an ad for adult models. Chicks respond, thinking it's only going to be some nude photos, but the guy holding the audition gradually talks the girls into having sex with him. He tells them he can make them a porn star who earns $5,000 a day. The guy isn't a casting director, and there is no job. The audition supposedly is a hoax just to get the girls to have sex with the guy on a couch in a sleazy Scottsdale office.
It's portrayed as though the girls have no idea what they're getting themselves into, which, Hawkenson told New Times in September, is bullshit.
"The whole thing is scripted," she says. "I knew going in there it was for sex. I knew what I was doing -- I knew I was getting paid."
She says she was paid $2,000 for the scene with Whitaker, despite his claims that he never gives the girls in his videos a dime.
Knowingly transmitting an STD -- in most states -- is illegal, and anyone who does so can be criminally charged with battery, negligence, or the intentional inflection of emotional distress.
Arizona is not one of those states. However, according to the legal website CriminalDefenseLawyer.com, "courts may consider the intentional transmission of an STD to be an aggravated assault" in states like Arizona -- and have done so recently in Texas.
One Valley sex-crimes detective tells New Times he's already looking into that and various other complaints against Whitaker and other creeps associated with the website.
Moral of the story, ladies: don't find yourself on Eric Whitaker's "Backroom Casting Couch" -- you won't become a model, you'll be humiliated on the interwebs, and there's a good chance you'll get herpes.
