Escort website advertising leads to criminal conviction

The courts classify as "pornographic" images transported on the pick-up truck of a paid dating platform. For the owner, "it's art!"

March 2022, in the middle of the day. A motorist is taken aback by a black pickup parked along Quai Gustave-Ador. On its body, pornographic images. Up close, the pixilated illustration is hard to make out, but as you drive further away, the explicit images of sexual acts become clearly perceptible. 

A few weeks later, the City of Geneva discovered the advertising campaign for an online escort platform and its slogan "Envie de cul-ture? Considering that the posters were likely to shock the public, it reported the matter to the police, who sent the tow truck. The vehicle is confiscated.

5600 francs fine

Today, what was intended as an advertising campaign for the BemyGirl paid dating platform has resulted in a criminal conviction. According to a court order that we have been able to consult, the owner of the vehicle has been given a suspended sentence for pornography and fined a total of 5,600 francs. 

On the one hand, he has been punished for displaying pornographic images in public - making them accessible to people under the age of 16 in particular; on the other, he has been convicted of violating traffic regulations by distracting other road users. 

Contacted, the administrator of the escort company and owner of the pick-up says he "respects the decision of the authorities" although he "disagrees with their interpretation of our images".

"No cultural value"

In this curious case, the convict refers to a misunderstanding. In his view, the images on the rear panel of his vehicle were paintings by contemporary artists, including Jeff Koons. What's more, he claims, passers-by who scanned the QR code were taken to a bibliography of the artists, with explanations of their works. 

Credible? Absolutely not, in the eyes of the courts. In her condemnation, the prosecutor did not attribute "any cultural value" to these representations. 

Although blurred, they "only allow the perception of sexual acts (...) without the works from which these images are taken being recognizable".To arrive at the conviction, the prosecutor then examined the boundary between what belongs to art and pornography, in the legal sense of the term. On this pickup truck, the depictions would have had to "distance the work from the crude and vulgar" and not "overemphasize the genitals" to escape the law. 

This visual campaign was the third of its kind for the founder of BemyGirl. After "Elise à la ferme" (Elise on the farm), depicting a woman sprayed with milk under a goat's udder, and "Tokyo à la neige" (Tokyo in the snow), ""Envie de cul-ture" aimed to shed light on "works chosen for their provocative dimension and their reflection on the representation of sexuality in art". According to the site's administrator, these works are "world-renowned and exhibited in the world's greatest museums".

The publishers said no

If the images ended up in the back of a large car, it's because "we encountered difficulties when we wanted to broadcast these ads, with advertising spaces refusing to display our visuals," explains the entrepreneur. As a result, we decided to adapt our campaigns and display them as stickers on our company vehicle. "The affair is reminiscent of the regularly evocative posters at the V..... trade show. 

The BemyGirl boss describes the competing ads as "denigrating, vulgar and discriminating". He insists that he thought he had found a "delicate balance between art, the representation of sexuality and respect for societal norms". All the more so as the Public Prosecutor's order will not be debated in court. To do so, the convict would have had to appeal his sentence. However, he did not do so, "given the time and high costs involved", he announced. 

The sentence is therefore final.

Luca Di Stefano