The pictures of Luciana are not responding." It's 11 p.m. Seth Warshavsky is home, in a spacious condo 23 floors above the Seattle waterfront, but still awake, still working, still on the phone. His day began 20 hours earlier in Miami and, having been gone all of one weekend, a backlog of crises awaits. Most pressing: "The Mick Jagger girl."
His company, Internet Entertainment Group, had just released nude photos of Luciana Giminez on its flagship adult Web site, Club Love, a real coup, Warshavsky says, turning gleeful, since the Brazilian model is rumored to be carrying Jagger's baby.
It's this kind of splashy tabloid porn that has made a 26-year-old with hyperactive business glands into the most infamous pornographer of the Internet Age. Giminez's debut, however, is plagued by glitches. Warshavsky furiously clicks his mouse, but "the mystery adulteress blamed for wrecking the blissful union of Mick Jagger and aging wife Jerry Hall," as the Club Love come-on describes her, refuses to inflate past thumbnail size.
"Call me right back," he says to a tech minion and hangs up.
The photos soon join Warshavsky's online gallery of celebrity shame. He released the Pamela Anderson/Tommy Lee "honeymoon" video after the couple lost their bid for a restraining order. He posted photos of Laura Schlessinger under the promo "amateur slut"--taken decades before her ascent to God-and-family radio personality. A peekaboo shot of Tori Spelling. Images of Keith Richards "getting some self-satisfaction."
Endowed with the nerve to embarrass stars and the legal muscle to duke it out in court, Warshavsky puts Hollywood on edge. Most famously, actor Kelsey Grammer anonymously sued to keep a compromising home video out of cyberspace. Warshavsky denied having the video, then countersued to open court documents describing it. A reenactment ("What You Would Have Seen, Had We Had the Video") went up on the Web instead.
The winning streak ended when he ran afoul of the Roman Catholic Church. IEG laced its Papal Visit site, detailing His Holiness' most recent U.S. trip, with sex jokes and links to porn. Even Warshavsky's counsel, Derek Newman, expresses moral qualms about that one. IEG later settled the case. It is appealing a preliminary injunction forbidding its release of a pre-Tommy video with Pamela Anderson and Poison frontman Bret Michaels.
