A report by Washington City Paper intern and “Buttman” trial correspondent Juliana Brint:

The story of how 14 D.C. jurors came to spend 50 minutes viewing a parade of hardcore erotic milk enemas from the jury box begins with the pornographic discretion of FBI Special Agent Dan Bradley.

In December 2007, Bradley—-using a fictitious name, credit card number, and address—ordered copies of Milk Nymphos and Storm Squirters 2: Target Practice from the website EvilAngel.com to a location inside the District of Columbia. John “Buttman” Stagliano, accused of filling Bradley’s order, now stands trial for obscenity charges in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

So how did Bradley decide which of EvilAngel.com’s hundreds of porn titles to purchase? “Looking at the covers [on the website], it appeared that those movies emphasized the excretory function and squirting, so that’s why I ordered them,” Bradley testified yesterday.

Deciding the DVDs—-along with an online trailer for Belladonna: Fetish Fanatic 5—-were crude enough to justify obscenity charges, the government indicted Stagliano for “transportation of obscene matters for sale or distribution” and “engaging in the business of selling or transferring obscene matter” in 2008.

Two years later, District Court Judge Richard Leon was left with deciding just how many milk enemas the jury should be made to watch during the trial. Stagliano’s lawyers motioned to make the jury watch the entire five-and-a-half-hours of prosecuted material during the proceedings. Leon ruled against them, arguing that as long as the whole works were admitted as evidence and available in the jury room, there was no need to show all of them in the courtroom.

“A work need not be viewed in its entirety to be judged on the whole,” Leon ruled.

Leon then went on to dictate how exactly the evidence would be presented during the trial—-to both the jury and the audience of about 50 who came along for the viewing yesterday.

Before starting the porn, court officials examined the IDs of everyone in attendance to verify that they were over the age of 18. Prosecutors briefly fumbled with the DVD system—-the jury caught an extra scene of two women making out in cat costumes—-before arriving at the main event. Milk Nymphos was screened on two large televisions, one on each side of the jury box. While it was certainly possible to catch the on-screen action from many angles in the public viewing area, it was clear that the material was intended for inspection by the jury, not the audience. This point was reinforced by Leon’s decision to play audio through Court-issued headsets, which members of the public were not provided. (Leon made a slight exception for the press, issuing two headsets to be shared among the several reporters present).

Without headsets, the public missed one of the most interesting aspects of the scene that the prosecution decided to show—-the repeated use of racial slurs.

The 50-minute-long Milk Nymphos scene involves two white female performers, one black male performer, and a whole lot of milk entering and exiting various orifices. One of the female performers repeatedly refers to her male co-star as a “nigger,” declaring, for example, “Come on you nigger, fuck me in the ass,” and imploring the other female performer to “look in his eyes when you suck his nigger cock.”

Rarely has dialog been so central to the reception of a hardcore pornographic film. But are the epithets enough to convince jurors that the film’s anal milk fountains “cross the line” into obscenity? If the prosecution was hoping the slurs would get a rise out of the jurors—-11 of 14 of whom are black—-it was unclear whether they succeeded. Although some of the jurors seemed to flinch at the epithets and a few removed their headsets well before the end of the film, there were few signals of outright disgust. After 50 minutes of milk play, the group generally looked more tired than scandalized.

Let’s hope they got some rest: When the trial reconvenes today at 10 a.m., the prosecution promises to show significant excerpts from Storm Squirters 2: Target Practice.

Photo via Gravityx9, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0