LAS VEGAS – First Amendment champion and industry attorney Clyde DeWitt, who has been diagnosed with untreatable cancer, recently spoke with XBIZ and reflected on his remarkable career.
“I have been diagnosed with metastatic lymphatic and lung cancer and because of that I have been relegated to hospice treatment at home in Las Vegas, although I am still doing some work,” DeWitt told XBIZ. “I wanted you to hear it from me first, instead of from hearsay.”
Before DeWitt got involved in the adult industry, he was a prosecutor in Texas for seven years.
“Even though I grew up in Chicago, I swore I would go to law school somewhere that didn’t snow,” he explained. “So said the University of Houston, who led me to the district attorney’s office there.”
In 1979, DeWitt was general counsel to the Houston district attorney’s office, where he was assigned to defend against a challenge to a new Texas statute that “dramatically strengthened Texas’ obscenity laws,” he recalled. That’s how he met “a brilliant man from Beverly Hills named John Weston,” who was a founding member of the First Amendment Lawyers Association (FALA).
“John blindsided me,” DeWitt added. “We became friends during the trial.”
That friendship led DeWitt to establish what he called “a kind of branch office in Houston for the law firm John’s Beverly Hills” in 1980.
At his first FALA meeting a month later, DeWitt met other First Amendment champions such as Paul Cambria, Art Schwartz, Yale Freeman, Steve Beckett and “many others from the old guard,” he said. “I suffered from data overload.”
In 1983, Weston and DeWitt teamed up to challenge an obscenity conviction in Texas. The Court of Criminal Appeals struck down as unconstitutional the same statute that the federal court had refused to strike down when DeWitt defended it as prosecutor a few years earlier.
In 1985, DeWitt moved to Los Angeles, where he remained a FALA stalwart, eventually becoming president in 1991 and serving as a board member for decades.
Standing up for free speech
“In the late 1980s and early 1990s, all hell broke loose in the wake of the 1986 Meese Commission Report,” DeWitt recalls. “In response, the DOJ created the National Obscenity Enforcement Unit (NOEU), which quickly changed its name to the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS).
“It seems the Reagan administration quickly discovered that quite a few people believed that pursuing dirty movies was not the best use of their tax dollars, even though fighting child exploitation was fine,” DeWitt said. “The unit clearly did more of the former than the latter until Bill Clinton came to power in 1993.”
“First, around 1988, the CEOS initiated Operation PostPorn, promising to end the mail order porn industry – remember, this was before the Internet! Then came Operation Woodworm, which was supposed to put an end to the adult video industry. Of course, neither succeeded. As John Weston emphasized in a speech in the late 1990s, after listing all the anti-porn crusaders who had failed, given up or, in one case, been sent to prison: ‘We’re still here – and they’re not ! ”
However, PostPorn and Woodworm have managed to send quite a few people to jail, costing the industry millions of dollars in legal fees.
One Friday – “It always happened on a Friday,” DeWitt noted – Weston poked his head into DeWitt’s office to announce that the FBI was executing a search warrant at the facilities of one of their clients.
“Next would come grand jury subpoenas, in an attempt to turn the subordinates around, and then the indictment,” DeWitt said. “Always in a remote, conservative location, like Broken Arrow, Oklahoma; Tallahassee, FL; Memphis, etc. FALA members championed these causes from coast to coast.”
Eventually the prosecutions would disappear, but during the George W. Bush administration a few new ones were added, and some were successful.
“Always FALA members at the defense table,” DeWitt noted.
A rewarding career
DeWitt described working with Weston for about a quarter century as “an amazing experience.”
“He was as smart a person as I have ever known, and a great mentor,” DeWitt said. “I was always baffled when I explained to him a legal concept he was unfamiliar with. A rare occurrence, but it happened a few times. John’s most striking talent was that he could make an oral argument as persuasive as any I have ever seen – the first one I witnessed was against me. He was a master at doing what I learned from my first day as an assistant district attorney: taking over the courtroom.”
Beginning in the mid-1990s, DeWitt began developing his own client base, and his practice continued to grow, eventually becoming the Los Angeles firm of Weston, Garrou, DeWitt & Walters.
DeWitt handled some of the most important adult industry cases of the period, including a series of lawsuits on behalf of University Books and Videos from 1996 to 2001 that resulted in the defeat of an unconstitutional Dade County ordinance that would have eliminated all bookstores and adult entertainment. in the Miami area.
“In the mid-2000s, I began to conclude that neither Weston, Garrou, DeWitt & Walters nor Los Angeles was where I wanted to ‘play the back nine,’” he said. “I took the Nevada bar exam in 2006 and to my surprise, I passed the most difficult bar exam in the country on the first try. By 2009, I had left the business and bought a house in Las Vegas, where I have been practicing ever since. I started playing golf at the age of 64.
“Representing this industry has been a joy and a rare privilege,” DeWitt told XBIZ. “Truly as rewarding a career as I can imagine. I don’t regret it for a minute!”