TRUMANN, Ark. — On April 21, Arkansas-based clip artist Mayven Doll and her husband took a plea deal offered by Jonesboro prosecutors over serious felony charges filed against them back in 2017.
After keeping them in legal limbo for almost three years, this week the prosecutors finally allowed them to plead their felony charges — stemming from a few public sex clips uploaded to public and Premium sites — down to the far more common misdemeanor charge of indecent exposure.
Up until the moment their plea deal went through, the couple had been strongly discouraged from telling their side of the story.
Today for the first time, they are finally sharing their experience with the world, through this exclusive XBIZ interview and a newly released video ("Mayven Doll Tells All," embedded below this article).
“We were stifled by everyone to keep quiet until the dust settled with this whole ordeal,” BDSMneam — Mayven Doll’s husband, co-performer and co-producer — told XBIZ. “I can't tell you how liberating it is actually have a chance to reveal to the world the real story of how our state abused their power and how they kept this prosecution in the court system for almost three years because of political elections and other BS.”
The couple had been charged in 2017 with nine felonies each, after police received an anonymous tip about a specific clip they had shot in public places around Jonesboro.
Acting on the anonymous tip, the police had downloaded, reviewed and written descriptions of the clips into a request for an arrest warrant and then raided their home in full force, led by an officer known in the area for “high-risk” SWAT work against “violent criminals.”
The Jonesboro policeman who filed the affidavit to secure their warrant specifically worded his description of the clip to invoke three old Arkansas obscenity statutes about “hard-core film,” that are still in the state’s books.
The statutes are rarely applied to recorded sexual expression and are so overly broad that they penalize even owning a single commercial porn DVD.
After their arrest, sources close to the police immediately leaked information to a local Northeast Arkansas news and gossip site, which included salacious descriptions and stills of their videos, alongside the couple's legal names and other identifying information.
The local coverage was then picked up by the larger Arkansas newspapers and U.K. tabloids. Armed with the couple’s legal names, the British tabloids raided their Facebook pages for personal images, and one even published a photo of two of their three kids, pixilating their faces.
The nine felonies, which could have resulted in 54 years in prison, were held over them for almost three years, as their attorney could not secure a plea deal from the Jonesboro prosecutors to lower the charges to the far more common misdemeanor of indecent exposure.
Then suddenly in the past few weeks, a few days after the original prosecutor finished a political campaign that resulted in his election to a newly created judgeship, prosecutors finally agreed to allow Mayven Doll and BDSMneam to plead the charges down to “indecent exposure.”
Their lives, however, had been irrevocably turned upside down by the ordeal.
Doll and her husband have many reasons to be enraged.
Public records reviewed by XBIZ confirm their theory that, from the very beginning of the investigation, law enforcement chose to phrase things to selectively enforce the outdated Arkansas obscenity statute, then prosecutors followed the police’s lead and charged the couple with multiple felonies for an incident that is usually a fineable indecent exposure misdemeanor.
After each legal filing, court records were made accessible with the performers’ legal names and their unredacted home address, where they lived in a quiet small town with three small children. After each development dragging the case along, the local press would re-broadcast their personal information, which then would get picked up by national and international tabloids for their daily quota of “porn-related” clickbait items.
The couple also believes that their felony charges dragged along because pleading it down to indecent exposure would tamper with the political ambitions of Scott Ellington, the lead prosecuting attorney.
“Ellington was up for a judgeship and didn't want to press us hard in the media because he didn't want to lose votes,” BDSMneam told XBIZ, reporting justifications he kept hearing during the long wait. “And at the same time he didn't want to go soft on us because he could also lose votes, so he chose to continuously push the case back for almost three years so he could get elected.”
“Yes, and after his election they finally came to us with the plea,” added Mayven Doll.
Ellington announced his campaign for Circuit Judge in April 2019. He was elected last month, and days later, Jonesboro prosecutors finally agreed to withdraw the felony obscenity charges as part of the plea agreement.
The Public Sex Niche
Mayven Doll started camming solo at the end of December 2014. According to Doll, she and her husband “slowly moved to making content and filming together by the spring of 2015.”
“We started it as a flexible way to make money and for me be able to stay home with kids,” Doll explained.
Doll and her husband made most of their content at home in Trumann, Arkansas, and in nearby Jonesboro, a much larger town close to the Tennessee border, about an hour northwest from Memphis.
“We have always shot our content here where we live,” Doll told XBIZ. “I thought of traveling to conventions to meet and shoot with other people, but our court dates since the summer of 2017 always seemed to coincide with those.”
Doll has never shot studio porn in the traditional production hubs of Los Angeles, Florida and Las Vegas, but like many models around the U.S., and the world, she has managed to run a successful home-based adult business around her self-produced clips.
The couple still runs thriving clip stores and public pages on tube sites, after building a loyal following for their Arkansas-made content for over five years, half of that time while enduring an unnecessarily drawn-out legal ordeal orchestrated by Jonesboro authorities.
Only a very small percentage of their content could be considered “Public Sex videos.”
Public Sex videos are a niche market in the world of clip making, appealing to both a basic exhibitionist/voyeur dynamic, and also to an adrenaline-driven fetish that toys with the possibility of being caught, and perhaps punished, for the act.
Like a lot of adult content, performers play up the aspects of the fetish to tantalize their audience. Just because a performer in a public sex video states, in character, “This is so naughty, we are so gonna get caught!” it does not necessarily make it more real than two porn stars pretending to be 18-year-old step-siblings hopelessly attracted to each other.
For Mayven Doll and her husband, clips in the Public Sex niche were not even their top earners.
“We started shooting them in 2016, and around the time of the arrest in the summer of 2017 we had actually decided to stop making them,” Doll told XBIZ.
By the time the Jonesboro police department raided their home, the couple had been sharing the public sex videos for about a year on ManyVids, and had uploaded a few onto Pornhub, where Doll has a verified account, only a couple of weeks before.
“We posted them on Pornhub as an update, when I was in the hospital delivering our third child,” Doll explained.
They had initially shot the public sex videos “to be competitive and keep up with trends.”
“We tried the public thing because it seemed popular,” Doll said. “But we preferred making videos with better story lines, so by 2017 we had decided to go that way more.”
Doll said “Cuckolding” is the genre of porn where she gets the most views, sales and engagement.
“'Public' never was a big moneymaker for me — except I did get lots of engagement on the one I got arrested for, because after the arrest people looked it up and it got over two million views,” courtesy of the Jonesboro Police Department and the mainstream and tabloid coverage.
A Policeman Describes Sex Clips
The investigation into the couple’s activities began, according to the Jonesboro Police, when officers with the Street Crimes Unit received an anonymous tip on June 30, 2017 about one of Mayven Doll’s public sex videos.
After “reviewing the video,” the police investigators filed two affidavits on July 10, one against Doll and one against her husband, in order to obtain a search and arrest warrant. The affidavit was filed by Jason Chester, then an investigator with the JPD. Chester joined the force in 2003, after serving in the military, and in 2019 was promoted to Sergeant.
Officer Chester’s affidavits, rife with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, describe the policeman watching the videos and determining that Doll “was performing public hard-core sexual conduct and recording it” [sic] and that the conduct was “occuring [sic] in Jonesboro, AR.”
The affidavit includes several paragraphs of the policeman colorfully describing what he saw in the video including Doll “being taped in a restaurant, a big box home improvement store, Craighead Forest Park at the Rotary Fort playgorund [sic] and the Arkansas Game and Fish Nature Center trail.”
Chester includes oddly specific details, like when Doll “is seen inserting an item [into] her anus while vehicles are driving past,” Doll “at the Rotary Fort masturbating and having an item inserted in her anus,” and then Doll at “the Nature Center trails and shows [her] using a blue dildo on herself and the final scene is [Doll] performing oral sex on a male, and him ejaculating on her face.”
By checking out Mayven Doll’s public Twitter account, the affidavit continues, Sgt. Brandon King with the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Unit later “was able to locate [two] more videos.”
The affidavit targeting BDSMneam describes the same video but adds that Doll’s husband is seen “also operating a pair of wireless vibrating panties that [she] is wearing.”
Both affidavits mentioned that Doll and her husband "were found to have [accounts] on Twitter" and that they use "it daily to promote and sale [sic] pornographic videos through links to other website that [they provide]."
A Full-Force Raid
Exclusively based on his florid, anus-and-blue-dildo description of the videos he had purchased and watched, plus a couple of Twitter searches by another officer — described by the local press as “the real-life ‘To Catch a Predator’” — Officer Chester obtained his arrest warrant on July 13 from Judge Cindy Thyer.
On July 14, 2017, the Jonesboro PD staged a terrifying raid on Mayven Doll and BDSMneam’s sleepy Trumann residence.
“We received absolutely no warning,” BDSMneam told XBIZ, recounting the events of the day that changed their lives.
“We were at home and I was recovering from childbirth with a two-week old,” said Doll. “I was about to lay down for a nap, when we heard a bunch of doors and I saw shadows moving towards our door. Then we heard the knocks and them asking my husband to step outside.”
According to BDSMneam, around 30 police officers “busted in our house, placed me in handcuffs for ‘making pornography.’ They blocked off the neighborhood and upset the local community to the point there were people in our neighborhood who couldn't even leave their homes that day. They broke a few personal items of ours while they were gathering up all the evidence that they said they ‘needed.’”
While Doll’s husband was handcuffed, the couple says some of the cops expressed disbelief at the raid they had been asked to stage.
“Some of them did everything but apologize to us,” remembered an angry BDSMneam, “saying that they normally wouldn't be even interested in a case like this."
He recalls some of them implying that “the local prosecutors and judges had asked them to ‘push the envelope.’”
After reviewing with XBIZ video and photographs of Officer Chester, Doll and BDSMneam identified him as the “large, heavily armed” policeman who seemed to be in charge of the raid.
Meanwhile, Doll was told they were not cuffing her “because of the baby.”
“They had me hold the baby while we waited on a grandparent but they would not uncuff my husband even though we were cooperative,” Doll said.
“They carried me into the back room to separate me from my wife, to try to pin me down, to get more information out of me. I was extremely cooperative,” BDSMneam confirmed.
“My wife was still breastfeeding her newborn who needed not to be separated from its mother,” BDSMneam said, still outraged at seeing “all of our extremely intimate and personal objects waved in front of our faces,” and with a “low-key implication that our children were involved in our business.”
The couple watched the cops “packing up all of our hard drives computers and cameras and intimate things of ours that should never have been seen by anyone else but us, especially the family photo albums of our children."
The police search went on for hours. To the couple’s knowledge, there was no child psychologist present during the raid. Their two older toddlers “were lucky enough to be gone for the day. We had just dropped them off at a sitter so I could recover with the baby for a bit,” said a still traumatized Doll.
“There was just a bunch of officers, a lot of them I would say were low-level officers doing raid work, bagging up evidence,” said BDSMneam. “They were at our house from 10 a.m. until about 5 p.m. if I remember correctly.”
Militarized Police
It is unclear why or who decided to send heavily militarized, SWAT-trained personnel to arrest Mayven Doll and her husband and ransack their home over a “vibrating panties” video.
Only a few days after the raid, military-inspired sportswear company Goruck posted a promotional video featuring Officer Chester as their spokesperson, speaking candidly about his experience with SWAT teams. (Click "play" above.)
“Things I deal on the daily, I take home,” Chester, dressed in camouflaged fatigues, tells the camera, “They don’t just stop during the day. It’s not like a light switch. I can’t just flip it off. And it affects my life, it affects my wife’s life, and it’ll affect my baby’s life.”
“People never call us for birthday parties to come hang out,” Chester adds, over footage of a training video showing fully militarized Jonesboro police raiding a derelict building. “They don’t call us to go to the skating ring or whatever. Usually when we deal with people, we’re dealing with people at their worst.”
In the video, Officer Chester describes his typical assignments as “not routine calls” but “high-risk” and says “the guys” he goes after are often armed, with violent histories and “more inclined to use force and violence against us than they would on an average call.”
Chester has been involved in controversial incidents regarding his use of force during an arrest, the more recent one resulting in the 2018 death of a disturbed 56-year-old woman at her home.
The Jonesboro prosecutor who recommended not charging Chester and his partner for the death was Scott Ellington.
Obscenity in Arkansas
At the time of the arrest, Mayven Doll was 30 and her husband 33.
On July 14, 2017, after their arrest at their home, they went before Judge Tommy Fowler and were charged by Jonesboro District Prosecutor Scott Ellington — her with eight counts of “public display of hard-core sex conduct” (5-68-307); three counts of “sell or possess obscene film” (5-68-203) and four counts of “promoting obscene performance” (5-68-304); and him with three counts of each charge.
They were freed on a $5,000 bond for each, and given an August 29 court date.
In the language of the bail documents filed, Mayven Doll’s “character and reputation” is described in a handwritten note as “good person [with] no prior criminal record.”
Why was there a militarized raid ordered on the residence of an otherwise law-abiding “good person” with no history of violence? And why were she and her husband charged with felony obscenity instead of public exposure?
There are no answers to this question as of now, but a piece of the puzzle is Officer Jason Chester’s affidavit to obtain the arrest warrant and the language he chose to use to describe the video.
Officer Chester specifically wrote that the couple were recording “hard-core sexual conduct” and that they used their Twitter account “daily to promote and sale [sic] pornographic videos through links to other website.”
This language is taken verbatim from the Arkansas obscenity statute and if the charges sound peculiar and extreme in 2020, it’s because the Arkansas obscenity laws are themselves notoriously peculiar and extreme.
The Arkansas obscenity laws are spelled out in Title 5, Subtitle 6, Chapter 68 of the criminal offenses section of the state code. The three statutes Ellington used to charge Mayven Doll and her husband, mirroring Officer Chester’s affidavit which led to Judge Thyer authorization for the military raid on their home, are:
§ 5-68-203. “Obscene Films”: declaring it “unlawful for any person to knowingly exhibit, sell, offer to sell, give away, circulate, produce, distribute, attempt to distribute, or have in his or her possession any obscene film," and any person doing so "guilty of a Class D felony.”
The section defines “film” as “motion picture film, still picture film, slides, and movie film of any type” and “obscene” as material that to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, has a "dominant theme" which “taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest.”
Almost comically for 2020 standards, the same statute also states that that “any person that has in his or her possession an obscene film is guilty of a Class A misdemeanor,” which would allow an overzealous prosecutor to charge Arkansans for owning a DVD, or even a computer file, showing porn.
§ 5-68-304. “Promotion of Obscene Performances”: criminalizing as a Class D felony if a person promotes “an obscene performance if he or she knowingly: (1) directs, manages, finances, or presents an obscene performance; or (2) promotes any obscene performance, as owner, producer, director, manager, or performer.”
§ 5-68-307. “Public Display of Hard-core Sexual Conduct — Prohibition”: making it a Class D felony when a person “commits a public display of hard-core sexual conduct if he or she knowingly engages in hard-core sexual conduct in an open public place.”
The Arkansan lawmakers who drafted this language obviously spent a lot of time thinking about and spelling out exactly what they meant when they criminalized consensual sexual expression.
Thus the statutes define “Hard-core sexual conduct” as “a patently offensive act, exhibition, representation, depiction, or description of: (a) an intrusion, however slight, actual or simulated, by any object, any part of an animal's body, or any part of a person's body into the genital or anal opening of any person's body; or (b) cunnilingus, fellatio, anilingus, bestiality, a lewd exhibition of genitals, or an excretory function, actual or simulated.”
It is unclear why the Arkansas legislators decided to foreground the (fairly rare) animal porn in their salacious definition, or why they decided to specify that “sexual conduct” means “human masturbation or sexual intercourse.”
The statutes also include strangely specific language to specify what “Sadomasochistic abuse” means: “flagellation, mutilation, or torture by or upon a person who is nude or clad in an undergarment or in revealing or bizarre costume, or the condition of being fettered, bound, or otherwise physically restrained on the part of a person so clothed, in a sexual context.”
These oddly worded laws have led censorship group Arkansas Family Coalition to make the case that all pornography is in fact illegal in Arkansas because the First Amendment protections set out by the Supreme Court (enshrined in the 1973 decision Miller v. California) instruct local courts to adhere to community standards, and Arkansas’ standards of obscenity are explicitly defined by these statutes.
“How are community standards determined? The most definitive way is by looking at the laws which have been enacted by the elected representatives of the community,” the Arkansas Family Coalition claims.
"Some states/cities have very strong obscenity laws and go into great detail to define what is considered obscenity in that community," the group argues. "The obscenity laws in places like Arkansas and Utah and many other states fits this description. Alaska and New Mexico on the other hand have no obscenity laws what so ever."
For the Arkansas pro-censorship group, “the primary reason for pornography remaining in our towns is insufficient investigation & insufficient prosecution. The law is on the books, why is it not being enforced?”
A Red County Forever Getting Redder
Out-of-staters might think that in Red State Arkansas, the extreme values of evangelical anti-porn crusaders like the Arkansas Family Coalition hold much political sway, but the reality of the Democratic/Republican balance in the Jonesboro area is complicated by the chumminess of the political and legal establishments, on “both sides of the aisle.”
It is true that Craigshead County, where the prosecution took place, is a staunchly conservative stronghold. In the 2016 presidential election, 64% of the county voted for Trump, 29% voted for Clinton, and 6% for independent candidates. According to the Federal Election Commission, Republican candidates raised $2.1M from Jonesboro residents between 2015 and 2018, versus $575K raised by Democrats.
The county last voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 2000. Over the last 20 years the breach between partisan support has grown steadily, with the county becoming more “Red” with every election cycle.
But Scott Ellington — who was elected last month, without any meaningful opposition, as a judge — has been for decades a consummate political insider in East Arkansas. Ellington is a Democrat.
This politically ambitious judicial insider even ran for U.S. Congress (and lost) as a Democrat in 2012, two years after being elected prosecutor for the first of three terms
Ellington is also known among those interested in the “true crime” genre for his involvement in the infamous West Memphis Three case. Back in 2011, Ellington helped broker an unusual plea deal in which three young men, who had been convicted under controversial circumstances of a triple infanticide in 1994, were allowed to plead guilty while maintaining their innocence, resulting in their release.
West Memphis is an Arkansas town about 45 minutes southeast of Trumann.
The case is notorious worldwide due to out-of-town campaigns by celebrities and documentarians asking the prosecutors to revisit the original, deeply flawed investigation that resulted in the conviction of the West Memphis Three. The case has been made, by the makers of the "Paradise Lost" documentaries and others, that the local police enforcement and prosecutors' obsession with convicting three "weirdos" had less to do with evidence than with their status as outsiders.
Ellington’s peculiar deal with the West Memphis Three can be seen as either an act of brilliant legal maneuvering, or as a slick gambit to uphold the local status-quo and move on. The stepfather of one of the children killed in 1993 and some of the lawyers for the West Memphis Three have accused Ellington of not really doing anything to find the real killers.
Another judicial Democrat in this Red-and-getting-Redder state is Cindy Thyer, the judge who granted Officer Chester’s arrest warrant. Judge Thyer was originally an appointee of extremely evangelical GOP governor Mike Huckabee, but her husband is a Democratic politician and elected official and Democratic Governor Beebe reappointed her.
For alternative-lifestyle, sexually progressive young people like Mayven Doll and her husband, the apparent social incestuousness of the upright citizens that constitute the Northeast Arkansas legal and political establishments, and who live happy, successful lives untouched by the bitter Blue/Red divide in the region and the country, can be a source of disillusion.
The couple’s almost three-years-long brush with the Jonesboro legal system shone for them a light on a conflict-of-interest-ripe minefield of Chamber-of-Commerce types with Karen haircuts and veneers, good ole-boy (and gal) back-scratching and murky motives out of a John Grisham thriller.
“Judges, lawyers, cops, the press — everyone in this area is friends,” Doll told XBIZ. “Even our lawyer and the prosecutors are friends!”
The couple believes “all of this could have been handled better and much more quickly than it was, but it wasn't, because they're all friends. Our lawyer is even semi-good acquaintances with the prosecuting team, and all the while he’s telling us that this deal was our best option. Something tells me we should have just pressed forward.”
“But it is hard to press forward when you have three young kids and both of you could face potential long sentences,” Doll interjected.
A Gossipy Local News Site
The more prestigious local news outlet of record, Jonesboro TV station KAIT’s news site, soberly reported on the arrest of Mayven Doll and her husband the day it happened, after Prosecutor Ellington released a statement with their full legal names (but not their professional names) and mug shots.
The very same day, however, a gossipy local news site called the NEA Report published a much more sensational piece, making light of the arrest, under the headline “Couple Accused of Making Porn in Public,” and outed Mayven Doll’s performer name, the couple’s hometown and provided screen captures of the videos mentioned by the police.
“Although ‘The Truman Show’ was a movie about Jim Carrey living every moment of his life on camera,” the NEA Report writer, Stan Morris, began in tabloid style, “a different type of Trumann show involved too much on camera — and in public places.”
The NEA Report article alleged close familiarity with the police investigation and claimed that “using tips from numerous sources” they found the actual videos, which they proceeded to paraphrase salaciously.
The article appears to have been posted the day of the raid and the arrests, confirming its claim that the origin of this material was people close to the Jonesboro PD.
“Doll and an off-camera associate, possibly [BDSMneam],” wrote Morris, “are seen in one video going into Home Depot in Jonesboro. However, before they walk in, [Doll] engages in sexual behavior with several toys in the parking lot. At one point, an unaware area man is focused on by the camera as the two giggle. With [Doll] showing her underwear, the two walk into the store as they film.”
"Other scenes include [Doll] dining at what appears to be Cheddar’s on Red Wolf in Jonesboro. A type of public sex-fetish work, the video shows her seated at the table. A number of likely unconsenting [sic] elderly women appear in the background of the video. A short time later, the camera cuts to underneath the table, as [Doll] masterbates [sic]."
NEA Report’s Morris claims that “after several off-record conversations with law enforcement, it appeared their concern was more with the behavior taking place in public and in proximity to locations like playgrounds, public benches and the like.”
On July 15, the Arkansas Times reported under the headline “Jonesboro Cops Bust Couple Over Sex Videos,” with its editor, Max Brantley, asking himself some questions.
“Was the taping in, say, the hardware store done while others watched or were the public places identifiable only from the videos?” Brantley asked his reader. “Have you made a public display if no member of the public (except your videographer) observes it? Is it a crime to display sexual conduct on the internet and promote it, even for sale?”
“If so, the Jonesboro police have a lot of arresting to do,” Brantley quipped. “Or so I am led to understand about what’s available on the internet.”
“I’m thinking there could be some constitutional issues at work here,” Brantley added, “not to mention questions about how Jonesboro cops occupy their time.”
Brantley praises “the dogged NEA reporter,” for doing “the thankless work of following up tips to locate the videos on the web and describe what they depicted. By that account, some salacious activity in the video occurred while others are nearby, but perhaps unaware of what was transpiring, for example, beneath a restaurant table.”
“The NEA Report included some still images from the video, suitable for most workplaces if you discount a flash of underwear on the Home Depot parking lot.”
"A Clear Abuse of State Power"
On August 28, 2017, District Prosecutor Ellington filed formal charges against Doll and BDSMneam, revising the July 14 charges to three counts of “public display of hard-core sexual conduct,” three counts of “sale, possession or distribution of obscene film,” and three counts of “promoting obscene performance” for each of the defendants.
“Each charge is a class D felony that can be punished by a prison term of up to six years and a fine of up to $10,000,” the Arkansas Democrat Gazette reported at the time from a press release by Ellington’s office.
The NEA Report’s Stan Morris did the math and told his readers that this meant that the couple “could, in theory, be sentenced to up to 54 years in prison and ordered to pay as much as $90,000 each in fines — if the two are found guilty of all charges.”
The following day the couple pled not guilty. They were now represented by a local attorney, Randel Miller, who on September 2 spoke with the NEA Report, revealing his defense plan: a full-on constitutional challenge to the Arkansas obscenity statutes.
Miller argued that two of the three statutes under which Mayven Doll and her husband were charged are “clearly unconstitutional.”
One of them, he told the NEA Report, would even "prohibit the videoing of two consenting adults in the privacy of their own bedroom.”
“This is such an over-broad statute that it can’t withstand constitutional muster.”
Miller conceded that the statute “dealing with videoing in a public place” was harder to challenge but he thought a possible tactic would be to introduce the question of “whether there [are] any witnesses that observed this [at the time of filming], an actual witness to this.”
Also, Miller insisted that the charges as filed were “grossly disproportionate to the conduct.”
“Clearly, this conduct would have constituted the misdemeanor offense of indecent exposure rather than the more serious felony offense.”
Miller added that the nine felony charges were the result of the case having been “[blown] out of proportion.
“These two otherwise law-abiding adults were in the quiet of their home with their children when the police descended on their home with a search warrant, tore their house apart and terrified their children.”
“This was grossly unnecessary and a clear abuse of state power,” he added.
“These two people should be cleared of the felony charges, and, at worse, found guilty of a misdemeanor offense of indecent exposure,” attorney Randel Miller concluded.
A month-and-a-half after their arrest, Mayven Doll and BDSMneam were looking forward to a speedy trial, with the next dates being set for October 30 and November 13, 2017.
Enter the British Tabloids
But another round of public humiliation, this time more extreme than the one at the time of their arrest, followed Mayven Doll and her husband's not-guilty plea.
On September 5, the July 10 police affidavit written by Officer Jason Chester came to the attention of international crime news gossip site The Smoking Gun, which nicknamed the couple “the Arkansas Auteurs” and blasted to the world (and to their Trumann neighbors) their legal information and personal Facebook photos alongside a paraphrase of the cop’s lurid description of their clips.
“According to police, [Doll] and [BDSMneam] sell homemade porn tapes, which they market via Twitter,” wrote the Smoking Gun writer, also adding to the list of supposed crimes another allegation — that Doll “engaged in a sex act inside a dressing room at a Kohl’s department store.”
That same day, British tabloid The Daily Mail headlined “Arkansas parents 'filmed sex acts in Home Depot’” and in its usual mock-outrage style, described the situation as “married Arkansas parents-of-two 'used wireless vibrating panties and other items to film amateur porn videos to sell online in a children's playground, a restaurant and a Home Depot.’”
The Daily Mail illustrated James Wilkinson’s report, with several personal Facebook photos of the couple, including one showing their two older kids with their faces blurred.
Like Officer Chester, The Daily Mail's Wilkinson also focused on Mayven Doll’s anus.
“The video also showed Sessions inserting an unspecified object into her anus in the Home Depot parking lot while cars were passing,” he wrote. “It climaxed — so to speak — with Sessions performing for camera with a sex toy at the Arkansas Game and Fish Nature Center Trail, then performing oral sex on a man.”
Wilkinson also used innuendo to conflate a case involving consenting adults with child sexual abuse panic: "It's unclear whether there were children present on the playground or any of the scenes where the incidents are said to have taken place."
The next day, the two other major U.K tabloids picked up the Daily Mail’s story. “BONKING AL FRESCO — Randy couple face jail after being caught making hardcore amateur porn movies in PUBLIC places,” headlined The Sun.
“Amateur porn star’s hardcore public romps could land her in jail for SIX YEARS,” gloated in all-caps The Daily Star.
The Sun reporter merely paraphrased The Smoking Gun article, but added several provocative upskirt photos of Mayven Doll wearing blue panties, allegedly from the videos in question. The Star went further and reproduced nude pictures from Doll’s videos, exploiting her image by only blurring her nipples as minutely as possible.
A Two-Year Delay
Mayven Doll and BDSMneam were forced to adjust to a new reality of having to live in a small town with the humiliation of court documents being leaked to local and international press.
But, they thought, at least this could be resolved by their lawyer’s speedy constitutional challenge to the Arkansas obscenity statutes, or, hopefully, by a reasonable offer by Ellington to plead the charges down to an indecent exposure misdemeanor.
That is not what happened.
For two years, from October 30 , 2017 until August 30, 2019, their own lawyer, Randel Miller, filed six motions for “continuance” — legalese for postponements — insisting to their clients that this was “the only way” to negotiate a plea deal with Prosecutor Scott Ellington.
In the middle of these delays, on April 29, 2019, Scott Ellington announced his campaign for Circuit Judge in the newly created 12th Division of the Second Judicial District.
The couple is convinced that Ellington’s political campaign, and perhaps not-on-the-case-record communications between their lawyer and the prosecutor’s office, were responsible for the two-year delay in their case. This theory would explain why the case stayed in limbo for almost three years.
“We almost had a plea a year ago,” Doll told XBIZ, “but then Scott Ellington went for the judge position and we heard he said ‘no.’”
The first real motion Randel Miller filed since the summer of 2017, happened on August 30, 2019 — half-way through Ellington’s run for the judgeship.
Miller asked the court “that Arkansas Code Annotated 5-68-307 (which covers the public display of hard-core sexual conduct in an open public place); Arkansas Code 5-68-203 (which covers obscene films) and Arkansas Code 5-68-304 (which covers the promotion of an obscene performance)” be considered unconstitutional.
"All three statutes are unconstitutionally over-broad that unnecessarily infringes on defendants' right to privacy, free expression and constitutes an unwarranted invasion into their personal life," Miller wrote to the court. "An over-broad statute is one that is designed to punish conduct which the state may rightfully punish, but which includes within its sweep constitutionally protected conduct."
"These obscenity laws are unconstitutional under the first and fourteenth amendments to the United States Constitution. Defendant also asserts these statutes violate the Arkansas Constitution."
Miller's 2019 constitutional challenge is identical to what he had told the NEA Report his strategy was going to be exactly two years earlier.
Why did he delay this motion for two years then?
“Delay is the friend of the defense,” a legal source told XBIZ, noting that many attorneys would have kept on filing continuances until the prosecutor’s office “got tired and agreed to offer a plea.”
According to the source, the other option, to go to trial on constitutional grounds, is too expensive for small-town, self-employed pornographers.
"That’s something Larry Flynt can afford, not a couple who runs a clips store,” the sources said.
"All In Bed With One Another"
Last month, on March 4, District Prosecuting Attorney Scott Ellington was elected to a judge seat on the newly created Second Judicial District, District 12.
He ran a campaign in which he identified himself as “someone who was tough on crime and has proven that.”
A few days later, fellow prosecutor Charlene Davidson Henry agreed to allow Mayven Doll and BDSMneam to plead the charges down to indecent exposure and move on with their lives.
“Less than a month after he was elected, they decided to let us have the plea deal,” Doll told XBIZ, with resignation.
The couple sees the toll on their lives as “collateral damage to circumstance.”
BDSMneam describes Jonesboro as “smack dab on the belt buckle of the Bible Belt.”
Moving away has not been an option, however, until now. “We got kind of stuck here because of the court dates,” said Doll.
“NEA Report was one of the first sources that plastered us everywhere,” said BDSMneam, who believes that “around this area most of the politicians and even the new sources are all in bed with one another so they have to tiptoe around what to say and what not to say. They may say that they're after the truth but in reality that truth gets rose-colored glasses because of all the connections.”
After almost three years of reporting their personal information from anonymous police sources, the NEA Report on Tuesday announced the plea deal with the headline “Pornographic Pair Gets Off With Probation.”
The Good Old Wooden Ones
The Jonesboro PD-friendly NEA Report fed the tabloids, which ran with it and distorted the facts, playing their usual game of broken telephone with people’s lives and reputations.
“I feel like the biggest misrepresentation in the media is that most people think we were seen by people and caught in the act,” said Doll.
“There were no witnesses, and we were not caught in the act,” stressed BDSMneam.
At the root of the felony charges and the press distortions, there are Officer Chester's affidavits; that is, just a cop describing Mayven Doll clips he has purchased, most likely with public funds, and carefully watched.
"I think it's hilarious that they had to watch what they think is so terrible," laughed BDSMneam. "Not only that; they had to buy them in order to view them."
Doll can now find some humor in the policeman's fixation with her "inserting things in her anus."
“Oh yes, the buttplug scandal of Home Depot that no one saw at the time of filming!” Doll said in mock shock. “I leaned out of my seat and put a plug in and then got out of the car. We were parked really far way from anyone, and by anyone I mean the five people out in the 104-degree, humid, July Arkansas weather.”
Also, the cop's reference to "a blue dildo" is completely irrelevant to the supposedly serious charges he is compiling.
“That is funny,” replied BDSMneam. “Well, you know around these parts most of these local ladies still use the good old wooden ones…”
A Church on Every Corner
Doll thinks it is peculiar that they were only charged for three of their videos when they have several other public videos that are more standard for the highly specific “Southern belle summer public sex in nature” subgenre — girls getting a little wild with their significant others, on a party barge on lake Ouachita, stoned and happy while grooving to Creedence Clearwater Revival.
“That is how most of the girls making content around here get off!” Doll revealed. “My other videos were in the woods or around a lake in the state, but they did not care.”
Doll mentioned other local clip makers that she knows from social media. Almost all of them sell Public Sex videos. One of them, Doll said, was caught by police in 2018 “in a town close by during the act of filming. It was handled quickly, not much media stir, and she got a fine for public indecency, which is the norm.”
"Obviously we should have checked," Doll said about the bizarre, extreme, outdated Arkansas statutes available to any zealous prosecutor wanting to be seen as "tough on crime," but she "never thought after seeing other Arkansas girls making it big, that I was doing anything so illegal."
“I knew we were pretty backwards here,” she added, “but my mind was blown after learning about our obscenity laws.”
“Our lawyer said the statutes were used more for pornographic video stores that operated a long time ago, as a way to keep them out of certain areas,” Doll explained. Adult boutique chain Adam & Eve, the couple pointed out, “has been suing the town forever because they cannot open their planned location because [it is] too close to a church.”
The catch? “There is a church on every corner here.”
Stories Around Town
To this day, Mayven Doll and BDSMneam are not sure who provided the initial tip that launched the Jonesboro PD investigation and their nightmarish prosecution.
They “heard stories around town” that one of BDSMneam’s former girlfriends — an ex-lover with whom he had broken up in 2005 long before he met Doll — had been saying she called the cops on them, but the couple also thinks she may have been joking.
Trumann is, according to them, “a very small” Southern town, with all the baggage that entails. Doll says it has a population of 8,000, and is a 15-minute drive to Jonesboro, with 80,000 inhabitants and home to both the police department that raided them and the prosecutorial team that hounded them and outed them as sex workers to their community.
Before the arrests, “nobody knew,” BDSMneam told XBIZ. “Not even family and very few friends. We were outed to the world literally with our real names, and where we lived, and even information about our children. You name it — they put it out there.”
Doll’s standard online sex worker precautions, like geoblocking content, were in vain after the unredacted public documents made their way to tabloid journalists.
"Our area is so small the neighbors practically climbed the fence to question us yesterday," after the new round of media attention following their plea deal this week.
“We can't be embarrassed much further. The media and close-minded hypocrites have pretty much done their part on that job, so what do we have to lose by telling everyone the truth?” said her husband.
For now, the couple is relieved that their unofficial muzzle has been removed.
“I have waited a long time to speak out about this issue until it was final,” Doll told XBIZ. She’s spending the coronavirus quarantine with her three kids, now aged seven, five and two, “trapped inside 24/7 and homeschooling them.”
“We are just so happy people are finally going to know the truth about this rough journey,” offered her husband.
“This has gone on for so long,” an exhausted Doll added.
The couple feels other clip artists and independent performer-producers could learn from their harrowing ordeal.
“I think it is important here for performers to understand how these laws can be easily used against them,” Doll told XBIZ. “I hope at the end of this more performers think to really check into local laws on obscenity charges in general, not just about public sex content. We could have never imagined that authorities would come into our homes, or use such force doing it, merely because of a few unwitnessed old public videos.”
Doll knows many people, even within the adult community, will dismiss their prosecution.
“Some people will say ‘Oh, she made some public videos and got busted, that sucks’ and move on,” she explained. “But this could have happened to any performer in a state with similarly extreme obscenity laws, especially if they may have had some false story sold to the cops about them.”
At the end of the day, Doll and her husband feel that they may never know the reasons behind the selective enforcement against them, or the inexplicably harsh approach taken by Jonesboro police and prosecutors.
“I wish I knew the real reason they were here,” Doll concluded. “Who and why thought our lives were worth ruining? Just because I make content, like so many other people right now? These are questions that I will ask myself forever.”
Gustavo Turner is News Editor at XBIZ. Contact him via Twitter.
