Everyone can sympathize with the plight of the Martha’s Vineyard homeowner who in good faith rented her house out for the winter and then discovered, much to her chagrin, that her tenants were shooting pornography on her family’s estate.
That’s the gist of a civil lawsuit filed in federal court by Leah Bassett of Skye Lane, which is now scheduled for trial in Boston this summer.
Martha’s Vineyard, of course, is one of the wokest, richest places on earth.
At least for MV’s summer residents, especially the newer ones, everything is about political correctness, which is why Alan Dershowitz became persona non grata overnight when he foolishly insisted that the Bill of Rights applies to Donald Trump as well as to antifa.
Judging from her court filings, Ms. Bassett, the plaintiff, remains quite distraught about her home being used in such an underhanded fashion. But what happened to her could have been worse, at least from the standpoint of political correctness.
I mean, it wasn’t hetero porn, it was gay porn being shot at her house. Isn’t that protected speech now? How can any Social Justice Warrior billionaire hedge funder from New York be offended by gay porn?
Who hangs out on Martha’s Vineyard? The Obamas, the Clintons, John Forbes Kerry, Carly Simon, Spike Lee, David Letterman, Chris Wallace, Diane Sawyer, etc. Jackie Onassis had a big estate there. It’s where Ted Kennedy drowned Mary Jo Kopechne.
For decades the Vineyard was represented in Congress by the late Rep. Gerry Studds, who was censured 420-3 by the House for his seduction of a teenaged male page.
More recently Studds has been named in lawsuits and a report by his former employer (St. Paul’s School, alma mater of John Kerry) as a crotch-grabber who held nude meetings for his all-male prep-school dorm in the 1960s.
Despite the horrific charges, Studds remains a hero on the Vineyard. He still has a “national marine sanctuary” named after him. He was a Democrat.
My point is, does having your house used as a gay-porn studio really get you shunned from polite society on the Vineyard? Even if any of the above Beautiful People were shocked by the goings-on on Skye Lane, in this environment would they dare raise even an eyebrow?
As for Leah, she says she has already been accused of homophobia and, even worse today, transphobia.
Her original complaints, she says, “created a great deal of anger within the gay community, and there were two blogs which had identified me by name and address, and that there was a lot of chatter from people about deliberately renting my house in order to have gay sex there.”
Her lawyer, John Anthony Taylor, is the brother of her father’s long-time girlfriend. In his filings, you begin to get a sense of the fine gradations of social caste on the Vineyard.
Taylor describes Leah as “a 7th-generation Vineyarder.” Her father owns “one of New England’s most venerable charter yachts” — which he brags has been rented to the Obamas.
“There is grave concern,” Taylor writes, “that having the Bassett family’s good name tarnished by this unwitting and unwanted association with renting (their) properties for the production and propagation of graphic porn will have a long-lasting impact on Ms. Bassett’s entire family.”
By the way, the Bassetts’ estate is in the town of Aquinnah. Until 1998, Aquinnah was known as … Gay Head. Just sayin’.
This whole tawdry tale began back in 2015. Leah was looking for a tenant for the off-season. Some guy showed up with a female. He wanted to do a few “photo shoots.”
“He introduced Ms. Bassett to his very personable girlfriend,” Taylor writes, “whether in retrospect it was a real or a faux relationship, for the purpose of using her to impress my client with his stature as a responsible, sincere and ‘normal’ guy.”
Notice Taylor’s use of quotation marks around “normal.” Counselor, people get canceled every day for much less than those triggering quotes of yours.
Get woke or go broke, and do it before jury selection.
Anyway, it wasn’t long before the guy vanished from Leah’s house and was replaced by a woman who turns out to be a well-known, uh, adult-film maker. Suddenly there were strange people around, much noise, very un-seventh-generation Vineyarder stuff.
Leah was out of the country, but her parents noticed.
“And then a male friend made Ms. Bassett aware that he had just seen a gay male porn video that appeared to have been ‘shot’ at her residence! Upon reviewing that video herself, she was, among a host of other strong emotions, stunned, sickened, and outraged.”
Among the films: “School Boy Fantasies Vol. 2,” “Gay Massage House Vol. 3,” “Daddy’s Big Boy” and “His Son’s Best Friend.”
Leah sued, and according to her filings, the pornographers’ defense was “that I knew about the porn from the start!”
By her own account, Leah freaked out.
“I had random people approaching me in the super market, on the street, at parties, restaurants, everywhere. Mostly sympathetic conversations, but who wants to talk about porn in the vegetable aisles at the grocery store with a distant acquaintance?!”
Finally, six years later, the case is going to trial.
Do you think Kevin Spacey will be following it, because I don’t think he’s going back to Nantucket anytime soon?