Protect Fiction Legal Defense Fund

Larry from New Jersey is a 64 year old man whose doll ordered from China was seized in transit. Larry told us, “After the thirty wonderful years of marriage, I just can’t see myself getting married to someone else.  However, I am not ready to give up sex completely.  There are sex toys that can give physical relief, but a doll allows me to pretend I am with a person.” Larry explains his choice of a 40 pound doll by saying, “the smaller size dolls are half the weight of a full size doll and at my age carrying around a 90-100 pound doll did not seem like a good idea.”

Unlike many others in a similar position, Larry is contesting the legality of the seizure of his doll, and Prostasia Foundation is assisting him with this. Larry told us, “I highly resent the government telling me how to live my life. A favorite author of mine, Robert Heinlein, wrote that people don’t say ‘Pass this law to stop me from doing this thing.’ It is always ‘Pass this law to stop him from doing this thing.’ As long as what an adult is doing, in private, is not harming anyone, it should be no business of any government.”

In the case so far, Larry successfully objected to CBP’s determination that his doll was an obscene item. Prostasia Foundation also determined through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that there is no official policy document that authorizes sex dolls to be treated as obscene items. After backing down from this obscenity claim, the government claimed that it was misdescribed and therefore “smuggled” into the United States, which is untrue. Larry requested that this claim be referred to the courts for determination, and rather than allowing this, finally the government backed down in August 2021. Read the full story here.

Update January 2021: The court refused to allow the expert evidence in Mr Arthur’s trial that could have cleared his name, and he will be appealing. We have suspended fundraising for now, but you can donate towards our other work here.

Imagine your home being fired upon and a heavily armed SWAT team busting through your front door, all so that the government can stop people from reading fiction.

It sounds like a scenario from a dystopian novel, but this really happened on November 7, 2019, when FBI agents raided the home of Thomas Arthur, the administrator of an erotic fiction archive, charging him with obscenity-related crimes.

His trial will be an important test case, which will determine whether the government is entitled to do this. Prostasia Foundation is assisting in the defense, by arranging for an art censorship expert to testify as a witness. But we need your help to cover their costs. Once we reach that goal, any excess raised will go towards research into whether fantasy outlets could be a tool for preventing child abuse.

The prosecution of Mr Arthur for hosting text-only stories is outrageous, and it cannot be allowed to succeed. We must never allow the government to control what people read. Criminalizing fiction is thoughtcrime, and this has no place in a democracy.