1. Tiger Porn

One evening in the late autumn of 2008, Andrew Holland returned from holiday to discover that the front door to his home in Wrexham had been smashed in. Thinking he had been burgled, he phoned the police. They came straight round – and arrested him.

It was the police themselves who had forced entry to his home. They had taken his computers in pursuit of what turned out to be an unfounded allegation; however, in searching the hard drives, they found something else. The original charges were duly dropped and instead, in the spring of 2009, the police indicted him with possession of two images under the new Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. One image was from a sadomasochistic series called the Body Modification Extreme Pain Olympics; the other showed – as the law has it – “an act of intercourse with a live animal”. The animal in question was a tiger.

On the streets of north Wales, in the newspapers and all over the internet, Holland quickly became known as “the tiger-porn guy”. As he told me, the consequences were “worse than being dead”. Vigilantes staked out his house. Hate mail and excrement were posted through his letterbox. He was banned from seeing his daughter for 18 months. He had a heart attack.

Meanwhile, from the roost of his London flat, Myles Jackman was watching. His was a constant vigil – Google alerts, Twitter, the forums, the court reports – for he was a man with a mission so unique that he alone considered Holland’s case to be an opportunity. More than that: a chance to change the world.



Myles Jackman is Britain’s leading obscenity lawyer. But he does not merely defend the accused: his life’s great plan and purpose is to rid this country once and for all of its laws criminalising extreme pornography – laws that he regards as morally and socially iniquitous. Jackman is broad and tall with plaintive eyes and a beard like Bedlam straw. From a distance, he looks vast and indomitable, a figure of great appetites and refusals, the rogue lawman in a spaghetti western. But close up, he’s softer, sensitive, comradely, far more Hagrid than Sergio Leone villain. (The invite for his 40th birthday, last November, asked friends to “a funeral – for the death of youth”.)

Jackman fervently believes he has to lead a crusade against what he sees as the unjust obscenity laws and that he absolutely must succeed – or else fail himself, his allies and the wider cause of civilisation as he sees it. He maintains that pornography is a class issue, a gender issue, a philosophical issue, a freedom issue, an everything issue. (One of his many dicta: “Pornography is the canary in the coal mine of free speech.”) And his campaign is against both state and statutes alike. By day, beneath the dark lawyerly suits that strain to contain him, he likes to wear Batman socks; by night, he wears Batman T-shirts. In the last six years or so, he has transformed himself from being just another lawyer into the Batman of obscenity.

By day, beneath the lawyerly suits that strain to contain him, he wears Batman socks; by night, he wears Batman T-shirts

Back in late 2009, when the crusade was little more than an aspiration, Jackman tried to make contact with Andrew Holland in order to offer his assistance in fighting the “tiger porn” case. But Holland’s legal team didn’t bite. Jackman was unknown and too junior. Then, on 31 December of that year, a surprise: Holland was cleared of possession of the bestiality image. It had emerged in a pre-trial hearing that the photo of the tiger having sex with a woman was not a photo at all, but a still from a video. Astonishingly, the police and the prosecution had failed to play the clip; when the judge ordered the video to be run in court, it was discovered that the animal was not real. Instead, it was a badly Photoshopped tiger that had been superimposed on a man’s body. (At the end of the film, the “tiger” turns to the camera and says: “That’s grrrreat!” and, “That beats doing Frosties ads for a living.”) The Crown Prosecution Service dropped the charge.

For Jackman, this was the perfect development in the perfect case: burdened with questions of obscenity, the law was making an ass of itself. This would be a very public opportunity to launch his wider campaign. But Holland was not yet in the clear – there was still the second clip, from the final round of the Body Modification Extreme Pain Olympics. A friend had sent both films, via Bluetooth, unsolicited, to Holland’s mobile; he had no idea of their contents before opening them. He initially refused to plead guilty, he explained, because “the Pain Olympics video was 2½ minutes long and I watched six seconds of it and turned it off since it wasn’t my cup of tea”. All the same, when the court was shown the second video – genital mutilations, eviscerations, exploding testicles – there were ashen faces all round. And so Holland’s barrister took him off into a side room. After a brief discussion, Holland pleaded guilty and prepared to receive his sentence and the strong possibility of time in jail.

Jackman took a different view – and saw an opportunity. He contacted Holland after the trial, and proposed that it would be possible to “vacate” the guilty plea – a procedure by which a defendant can revert to pleading not guilty after the verdict but before sentencing. Jackman set about convincing Holland that it was worth fighting on. Exhausted but aggrieved, Holland agreed. And so Jackman barrelled north to Mold crown court in Wales, there to begin his work in earnest; he was on the case.

The 2008 Criminal Justice and Immigration Act under which Holland had been charged states that “an ‘extreme image’ is an image which ... is grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character”. For an image to count as “extreme” under this definition, the law says that it must also be “realistic”. (The forensic consideration of these two terms – “extreme” and “realistic” – consumes a great deal of Jackman’s life and the words themselves are often the occasion of great ire.) “So,” as Jackman explained, when I met him at his London office earlier this year, “it was my job to tell the prosecutor that what they were looking at was not pornography and was not extreme or realistic.”

“The thing about the BME Pain Olympics,” he continued, “is that the intention is to amuse or disgust. The prosecutor said there was ejaculation in [the film] and – it is true – there’s a sequence where there’s a penis that shoots out these subdermal implants, which are small round metal ball-bearings. But, at that point, I had to say that I don’t know what happens in Wales, but I can tell you in London no one shoots metal balls out of their cock when they ejaculate. That would be ridiculous.”

Jackman found the people who made the clip and they testified that it was all “tomato sauce and cocktail sausages”. In other words: not realistic. Nine months after the charges were first brought, the prosecution dropped the case. Jackman had won. His mission was go. What he needed to do now was find more cases like this; tiger porn, he knew, would never be enough.

2. The Goal

In simple terms, the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 moved the focus of state intervention from makers and distributors of extreme pornography to consumers. It was this law that lit Jackman’s fuse – passed in the same year that he qualified as a solicitor advocate – because it represented a fundamental shift. Previously, the Obscene Publications Act 1959 was the governing authority in this area. It criminalised distribution – anyone who “circulates, sells, lets on hire, gives, or lends ... items taken as a whole such as to tend to deprave and corrupt”. (“Deprave” and “corrupt”: these are the other two words which incense Jackman – “Corrupt who?” “Deprave who?” “According to whom?”.) The government’s aim in bringing in the 2008 act was broadly to deal with the tsunami of internet pornography – much of which was produced outside the UK and thus beyond the remit of the Obscene Publications Act.

This gave rise to what Jackman called “consolation prize” prosecutions, such as Andrew Holland and his tiger-porn video – people who have been arrested as the result of allegations that were not substantiated, but who are then prosecuted on the basis of what is found on their electronic devices. The digital register on the hard drive is enough to constitute possession, regardless of how images are come by – Jackman cites numerous cases of people receiving images via WhatsApp and Snapchat, as well as Bluetooth, email and so on. Further, because of the way computers and smartphones cache images, deletion is sometimes not enough to fully erase them; the hard drive often stores files until they are later “written over” according to usage and future memory demands.

Most people have no idea what the law regarding their computers and pornography is – “Why would they?” – and Jackman is at pains to emphasise that, in case after case, the police are using the 2008 act to prosecute people originally investigated for other charges. When the new law came into force, the justice ministry estimated it would lead to about 30 prosecutions a year. In reality, there have been nearly 800 a year – and more than 5,500 prosecutions in total, according to Backlash, a campaign group for the rights of adults to participate in all consensual sexual activities.

This was the “travesty” that Jackman felt he was fighting. One day in April, I met him at the Royal Courts of Justice and he explained how he would proceed. His goal, he said, was to force a reconsideration of the existing law via the launch of a judicial review. A judicial review is the process whereby a judge decides whether there is grounds for a rethink and – if yes – kicks the law back up to parliament for redrafting. In order to have any chance of succeeding, such a judge would have to be presented with very persuasive written arguments as well as numerous examples of injustices, disproportionate sentencing, confusion over definitions, misguided prosecutions and evidence that the legislation was not working as intended.

Myles Jackman outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London. Photograph: Felix Clay

Jackman had just had another win in court that morning and so was feeling exceptionally buoyant. Over a celebratory and comprehensive roast lunch, he expanded further: his grand ambition, he revealed, was actually a Sexual Relations Act – much like the Race Relations Act – something, he said, “that enshrines the idea that people’s private sexuality should not be held against them in any way, whether it’s criminal, civil, for intelligence purposes, or whatever”.

3. The Breakthrough

From 2010 onward, obscenity cases started to seep in Jackman’s direction and he began to make his name – not least because there were very few lawyers working in this unlovely and impecunious area of the law and even fewer with such a detailed grasp of statute, rulings and implication; certainly, nobody with the conviction, outrage, nor the sense of vocation. (“It would be hard to imagine someone who believed more passionately than Myles Jackman in the arguments for sexual freedom,” said Matthew Buckland, a barrister with whom Jackman has worked.) But it wasn’t until 2012 that Jackman finally got the kind of attention he needed.

His first big breakthrough was his involvement in the Peacock trial. This was fought in territory that had become familiar to Jackman – bondage, domination, sadism and masochism (BDSM). In this instance, there were videos of whipping, staged kidnapping and rape play involving fisting and urolagnia (OED: “a tendency to derive sexual pleasure from the sight or thought of urination”) between gay men. None of these acts were illegal to perform. But the defendant, a male escort named Michael Peacock, was filming himself and his clients and selling the DVDs. This was a distributive rather than a possession offence and fell foul not of Jackman’s bete noire, the 2008 act, but the old Obscene Publications Act. But for Jackman, this was all part of the same thing: outdated pornography laws that needed ripping up. And the more publicity given to a BDSM trial the better.

The Peacock material included variously violent scenes, such as a man being punched in the testicles, which the jury were required to watch in order to come to their verdict. Jackman himself, as part of the defence litigation team, had previously spent a long weekend in Charing Cross police station sitting through over 14 hours of the DVDs and taking notes. (He watches whatever material is necessary for the defence of his clients – weekends, nights, bank holidays – all part of the job.)

The jury were sent out. Everything came down to the wording of the law – did they believe that the films would “deprave or corrupt” the viewer? Two hours later, they came back in: “Not guilty”. Unanimous. Peacock was considered a landmark case because it demonstrated – as Jackman’s old boss, Nigel Richardson, said at the time – that “the whole idea of something being depraved or corrupt is outdated”.

Fisting was Jackman’s next focus. His second big trial of 2012 involved Simon Walsh, a barrister and aide to Boris Johnson (and thus further high-profile case material for the campaign). Walsh had been charged with five counts of possession of extreme pornography under the 2008 act: three images of urethral sounding (the insertion of surgical rods into the urethra for the purpose of sexual gratification) and two of anal fisting. Fisting – the insertion of the hand into the vagina or anus – had long been a casus belli for Jackman for two reasons. First, because – “inexplicably” – it remains legal to do but not to film. (Only once an image exists is the law broken.) And second, because fisting is a political subject for feminist and queer film-makers, many of whom are Jackman’s friends.

On this specific point, Jackman referred me to Pandora Blake, a feminist producer who runs a porn website, Dreams of Spanking, where she sells her films. Blake believes that the regulations on fisting “explicitly and disproportionately target” the LGBTQ and the feminist porn community. “Fisting is an act that is absolutely essential to a lot of queer sex,” she explained to me. “It’s not phallic, it’s very much associated with queer history and is a huge part of feminist porn. So for fisting to be banned means lots of feminist porn is banned.”

The defendant, Simon Walsh, had his own legal arrangements; but he had not yet met Jackman. “A friend of ours who is also a magistrate introduced me to [Walsh] the Wednesday before he was due to go on trial,” Jackman recalled. “And I just said to him: ‘Simon, you’re not ready for trial. If you go to trial now, you will be convicted.’” Jackman persuaded Walsh to come with him. “We had him in court by that Friday so that he could his change his representation.”

Walsh had taken the images himself at a party and sent them only to other participants, the court heard. Everything hung on the letter of the law – whether the acts portrayed were “likely to result in a serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals”. So Jackman had no hesitation in putting Ian Jenkins, a colorectal surgeon, into the witness box. (Jenkins: “Myles leaves a big impression and he has his own unique approach.”) He testified that no patient had ever come to him with injuries from fisting. Meanwhile, Jackman had become the first acting solicitor in the UK to obtain permission to tweet live from a trial. Using the hashtag #porntrial, he had amassed a vociferous following of Walsh supporters online. The jury took 90 minutes. Not guilty.

For a few days, Jackman’s life went supersonic. The director of public prosecutions, Alison Saunders, had given the go-ahead for the prosecution and now she had to appear on Newsnight “to justify her behaviour”, as Jackman put it. Walsh was on there, too, making the point that his life had already been ruined, since he had lost his job and career regardless of being found not guilty. “It was one of those turning point moments,” said Jackman. “You really felt that if they could actually say ‘anal fisting’ on Newsnight, then finally we were getting somewhere.”

4. The Man

Out of breath on the street one morning in February – he is always out of breath – Jackman started to explain to me why, in his view, fetish culture was becoming more and more mainstream and why he was therefore challenging everything on behalf of everyone. We had left his Euston office and were on the way to his favourite local cafe, “Coffee, Cake and Kisses” – formerly “and Kink”. (Jackman moves like a one-man tidal surge; to walk the London pavements with him is to experience the rare urban pleasure of straight lines – people get out of the way.) “To use the Batman metaphor,” he said, “there are very few crusading lawyers who are prepared to use the law to change the way we all live.”

Coffee, Cake and Kisses described itself as “welcoming of all genders, sexualities, relationship models and lifestyles” but Jackman was aggrieved on the cafe’s behalf that they had felt it necessary to drop the “and Kink”. “The ‘leather pound’ is like the ‘pink pound’”, he asserted – here Jackman meant the purchasing power of the BDSM community – and any minute now, the world would wake up to its great heft. As if to offer our assistance in this awakening, we ordered cakes, pastries and quadruple coffee. (Jackman drinks espressos at the furious double with the appalled expression of a man repeatedly confounded by the minuscule size of the shots.) That day, he seemed frustrated at his lack of progress. He was eager to get started on the next big obscenity trial – scheduled for later in the year. He had a date. Would I be able to attend? It was important, he felt, that I meet a man whose life had been totally ruined by this “senseless” law, then I’d understand the day-to-day reality. I agreed and this seemed to free Jackman up to talk about the genesis of his attitudes and zeal.

Jackman is an only child, the son of two only children. His father was a radiologist and his mother a radiographer. He was born in Basildon hospital, where his father was a consultant. “I met his father in a dark room,” his mother, Susan, told me straight up. “We were doing barium meals and enemas. I was the one who presses the button and tells people to breathe in or stop breathing.”

Jackman with his mother and father. Photograph: Myles Jackman

Jackman himself felt that he had “always had a commonality” with his father. “I know people who, for the sake of argument, have discovered their grandparents’ gas mask in the attic,” he told me at the cafe. “And they have been fascinated by the object and as adults have gravitated towards rubber or masks or whatever it might be. I can’t say for certain whether there is a connection or not. But more than anyone else, [my father] would be an influence on me in terms of looking at the hypocrisy of sexual morality. I can remember from a very young age walking around the National Portrait Gallery and he was able to tell me who was whose mistress and who was sleeping with whom and so on.”

Jackman’s father died when he was 18, while Jackman was reading law at college. “Not ideal,” Susan tightened her lips a fraction. “I think he has found that difficult.”

The fissure between establishment and anti-establishment (up through which the magma bubbles) first cracked open in Jackman’s school days. He was an unhappy boarder at the King’s School, Canterbury. He “caused ructions”, according to his mother. He had seven “last warnings”, according to Jackman himself. “He was bullied at school and that is why he doesn’t like bullies,” according to Charlie, his ex-girlfriend (not her real name). Jackman was highly articulate but underperformed academically. He got into Bristol UWE – “not Bristol” as his mother put it – but then struggled with his law degree, the large amount of reading as well as the tenets. It wasn’t until he was 37 that Jackman was diagnosed as dyslexic. But that same year, 2012, he won the Law Society’s very prestigious Junior Lawyer of the Year Excellence Award “on the basis of his outstanding work on obscenity law [and because] his work has been instrumental in challenging the legal framework in which sexual morality is represented”.

These days, Jackman rents a flat from Charlie high in the courtyard of a 1930s council estate in Somers Town, an area between King’s Cross and Euston in London where Charles Dickens lived for a time as a boy. They split up two years ago because, said Charlie, Jackman is “impossible” to live with and can “only do one thing at a time”. When I visited him “at home” one fog-stirred night last winter, he told me with some sadness that he was scheduled to move out because she wanted the place back. This had been his roost for a long time: bare floors, bare walls, bare everything; pizza boxes piled in precarious diamonds, many books, a vast-screened computer, an exhausted sofa, not much else.

We walked the neighbourhood and Jackman pointed out the old brothels and bemoaned their closing. A new fetish shop had opened up though, which was positive. Even in the murk and loom of the London night, he and Pan, an ancient dog he saved from being shot (Jackman used to be a dog-rescue driver), were warmly hailed by passers-by. We went into his local, the Somers Town Coffee House, for roast beef and a battery of espressos.

“Pornography is the first freedom to die,” he said, as much to the bar staff and their other clientele as to me. “One of the problems that we find with free speech and freedom of expression is these fights are usually in the fringes.” He had previously reprimanded me for using a derogatory term about adult magazines. (In all the hours I spent with Jackman, he never once conceded vulgarity.) Now, he wanted to address my mistaken attitude directly: “What we might consider to be high art is somehow sacrosanct and avoids these kind of critiques. But lower level, less high-minded works is where the struggle is. One can argue that this is entirely classist, so comic books, video nasties, video games.”

Myles Jackman with his dog, Pan. Photograph: Felix Clay

“Let me show you something.” Jackman whipped out his phone. “This is from a case back in 1982 – Holloway – a direct quotation from the judge: ‘Nor do we suggest that a young man who comes into possession of a pornographic videotape and who takes it along to his rugby or cricket club to amuse his friends by showing it should be sentenced to imprisonment.’” (At moments such as these, Jackman’s face would glow like a stoker who has been asked to shovel on all the remaining coal.) “It’s unbelievable! You can see: we’ve got this notion that women don’t look at pornography, that it’s only men and of course rugby clubs, stag nights – the sort of thing that the establishment would be doing. And I find that very offensive, the notion that some people through rarefied means or education are best put to judge such things. It’s sexist, patriarchal bullshit.”

He paused in order to welcome the beef and then he was back to the staging of his argument: “Think about the 1980s – the VCR comes into the home and what happens? The state loses control.” His scorn flattened into sarcasm. “This is the fear of ‘the great unwashed’. What will we do if they get pornography? The good little worker should not be distracted or allowed such self-indulgence. But the intelligentsia or the elite or the establishment or the art crowd or the rugby clubs or whatever you want to call them, they are perfectly prepared to engage hypocritically in activities that they would never countenance publicly.”

Neither is pornography primarily a gender-biased issue, Jackman insisted, or not in the way people think it is. “There is this common assumption that all the men are delighted to be there and that all the women are not, which is not true. That’s before we even get into the vast amount of gay male porn. Then there is ethical porn, vegan, fetish, fem-dom, feminist porn ...”

In particular, Jackman urgently wanted me to understand “the patriarchal bullshit” – so he suggested I join him at the Adult Entertainment Business Conference (“Xbiz”) and meet some of the female producers and performers on whose behalf he believed he was battling. Jackman had arranged for my badge and so I waited for the man himself amid my fellow delegates in the deeper basements of a vast hotel in Paddington. There were conferences, seminars, a keynote. Age verification was under discussion. Current and future market trends, emerging business models, new technologies, the e-billing stability forum. Eventually, Jackman came into view, chugging through all this hubbub like a much-loved tugboat on hand to make safe the harbour. He seemed to know roughly one person in four personally. There were handshakes, nods, affirmations, genuine warmth.

Jackman introduced me to Itzi Urrutia who runs a website called the Urban Chick Supremacy Cell – stated mission: “To destroy the Patriarchy. To hunt down all City Boys and other capitalist sexist male scum vermin ... To crush the cock and destroy the male sex!” There were clips for sale on her site of men bound and gagged and caged and whipped by hooded women. I asked Urrutia about sexual violence. “I think that all informed, consenting adults should be allowed to engage in sexual practices that cause no long term or irreversible harm to any of the participants, even if they are not to the taste of the general public. Disgust should play no part in policing and law making.” This was another of Jackman’s dicta, along with: “Keep the state out of the bedroom.”

Pandora Blake, the spanking producer, expressed it thus: “We’re happy to allow Bruce Lee to risk his body. Why do we not offer adult entertainers the same?” She was angry that the lines “always get drawn in patriarchal ways”. She cited the recent ban on certain forms of face-sitting under the Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014. Autoerotic asphyxiation was fine when a woman was gagging on an erect penis, she pointed out, but not fine for certain forms of face-sitting when the vagina was restricting the air. She wanted to know why. Likewise: male ejaculation was fine but female ejaculation was banned under the new rules. Again: why? Why aren’t women allowed to fantasise about being submissive? Why does society object to women being sexually dominant? “If you can have sex in a feminist way, then you can film it,” she added. “The filming isn’t the difference.”

Jackman and I sluiced some coffee in preparation for the keynote. Sheepishly, I admitted that I was still worried about extreme pornography and, in particular, sexual violence; it was hard not to be squeamish about some of this stuff, I confessed.

“Consent, consent, consent,” Jackman averred. (This is his favourite dictum of all.) “Consent has to be the guiding principle. Consent should be fairly simple to observe – right? Animals, cadavers, children under the age of 16 cannot give consent. People under a mental incapacity are not competent to give consent. Likewise, those who are intoxicated or under any coercion or duress.” He went further. He believed there should be “a societal move” to “enthusiastic positive consent”.

Sure, I agreed, and tried for a more enthusiastic and positive demeanour. But was extreme pornography taking its toll on his psychology at all? “One has to retain a degree of professionalism obviously,” he said, and slammed another espresso.

5. Myles Jackman Comes Out

A few months after the adult industry conference, I got another text from Jackman: did I want to go to the Torture Garden? This was a fetish club, Jackman explained on the phone later, central to the community. There was a night coming up at Elephant and Castle. Everyone would be there. Since I was heterosexual and unschooled – “vanilla” – he thought it important that I understood the scene.

In the queue, there were men dressed as Thor (with hammers), Roman gladiators (with flagella), as doctors (with probes) and cavalry officers (with crops); there were women in elaborate bondage-kinis – leather, spikes, studs – or in PVC, or uniforms, or in body stockings, or latex, or black robes. All this to the more general accompaniment of a visual orchestra of skintight plastic, gas masks, collars, leads, masks, chains, cuffs, whips and the occasional muzzle or hood. Every body size and shape was represented.

Jackman appeared, cleaving his way through the crowds like some kind of prophet-king marshalling his wandering tribe. He was dressed all in black as a cowboy, but with a batman T-shirt. All the same, I got the impression that he was toning it down because I was there. (He later told me that he liked to go out as Pikachu, the chubby yellow-furred character from Pokémon.) Jackman liberated me from the queue; a swift – “Jackman, Myles Jackman” – at the desk and we were straight in. As at Xbiz, he appeared to know dozens of the people we met and he was greeted by name with affection approximately every 15 minutes. There were well over a thousand people there.

We toured the various dungeons together: medical, torture, play. Men and women were locked in cages. Some were being hung or suspended on ropes (“it’s very safe and careful,” Jackman clarified). A woman was having sex with two men at the same time – orally and vaginally. A man with a woman on a lead was “allowing” her to stand on another man. The second man lay on the floor and enthusiastically licked her heels or suffered their pressure on his naked torso. Afterwards, he thanked her. (Her master forbade her from talking to me so I could not find out how she felt.)

I bought Jackman a soft drink (he very seldom “uses” alcohol) and we carried it outside to where he could smoke – rolling tobacco for thrift. (He earns so little money from his work, which is often pro-bono, that his mother is, not unreasonably, worried about where – and how – he is going to live when Charlie takes her flat back.) A thin man in little but a loin cloth scurried by in search of something lost.

Revellers at a Torture Garden event. Photograph: Torture Garden

Jackman wanted to “come out” about his sexuality. He felt that it would be hypocritical not to state on the record that he is an active member of the BDSM community, so he was perfectly happy to proclaim loud and proud: “I’m kinky.” And he wanted to be clear that his BDSM sexuality had “always been there from a very young age”. Sure Jackman’s crusade was professional and principled, but it was also personal. He had asked me out to the club because he wanted to make a confession: that he was not just a lawyer for those charged with obscenity; he was himself a member of a community whose sexual practices were so challenged by these laws.

“I am a bear,” Jackman said as he smoked and nodded his constant greeting to those passing by on the way to the “couples room” in front of us. “I play to a certain type of man or woman who likes a big man with a beard. And that’s actually quite liberating to know that that you may not fulfil conventional notions of attraction and physical appearance, but there are people out there who will find you uniquely desirable. Mainstream society is saying ‘You must be a size 0’, but porn is saying: ‘Hey, you can be whatever you want, it doesn’t matter, someone out there is going to find you sexually desirable.’”

“My fight is broadly against the forces which wish to constrain human sexuality,” Jackman continued. “I’ve always said that the BDSM community is about 20 years behind the LGBTQ community in terms of rights, recognition and visibility.” He framed the “struggle” and the “journey” of the BSDM “community” in these terms: from censure and criminalisation to mainstream acceptance.

'My fight is broadly against the forces which wish to constrain human sexuality' Myles Jackman

We hit another dungeon. A woman in her 20s had five men around her; they were dressed a bit like babies – alabaster-skinned, glabrous, supine, chubby. They stroked her body as she directed. Occasionally, she scolded them with a whip or told them how disappointing they were as men.

6. The Trial

In April, on the first inarguably fine morning of this year, I met Jackman outside a crown court to the south of London. This was the big obscenity trial to which he had previously invited me – my chance, as he had said, to witness the day-to-day actuality of the work, the life, the crusade, the law in action.

Jackman’s client, who I will call “David”, had been arrested for something else – again, an unfounded allegation – and he had been charged, like the others, with possession of extreme pornography under the 2008 act. Routine for Jackman – and when he had told me that this trial would be my opportunity to see for myself “the cost”, he had meant to the defendant rather than to himself. But outside on the steps, I was surprised to find Jackman as tense as I had ever seen him. He was no longer smoking so much as vacuuming his roll-ups. His suit was not coping well with the pressure and would rather have been elsewhere. Matthew Buckland, the barrister with whom Jackman often works – a laconic veteran of murder and drugs – was also feeling it; he was candidly anxious that they were going to lose. He asked me if I’d ever seen any of the images or the films. No. He sucked his teeth.

“Most trials are about the physical evidence,” Jackman inveighed. “Did he do it or didn’t he? Did this witness see him or not? But here – as with a lot of my stuff – the evidence is not in dispute. What we are trying here is what we think about what we all agree has happened.” There is no victim, he contended, not in the traditional sense, since we have the legal documents used to prove adult performers are over 18 and consenting. Buckland chimed in: “This is where the disputes are, because this is the contested area. Consensual sexual violence is problematic.”

This would all come down again to Jackman’s hated words. Did the images “portray” in an “explicit and realistic way”, either of the following: “(a) an act which threatens a person’s life, (b) an act which results, or is likely to result, in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals”?

“Can you tell me what is the subjective test for realism?” Jackman fumed. Imagine, he said, showing a series of Hollywood car crashes to a group of people who had never watched police-chase movies – the violence, the smashed glass, the blood, the death – would they be able to decide on ‘realism’? Well, this is what is going to happen here, he insisted. Can people with no previous experience of watching this material decide on what is “offensive” or what is “disgusting” or what is “obscene?” Why the morally subjective language? And surely it is legitimate to explore disgust in a consenting sexual context? These are essentially philosophical and aesthetic questions, he believed, not questions of who had the hammer and in which room did they kill Colonel Mustard.

During the pre-trial hearings, the judge was grumpy and irascible to the point of parody, a busy man no doubt plagued by endlessly unhelpful government directives from above and the river of endless human misery passing below. His main concern seemed to be that everything in his court happened as quickly as possible. This was the day-to-day criminal justice system, of course, but for the individual defendant, David, this was his whole life. He was in his 50s and had agreed to speak to me on the condition that I changed his name. Previously, he had been a respected senior professional in a vocational career. Now he was sleeping at a friend’s house in Cardiff and living on the minimum wage. He told me that if he had known anything about the law, he would never have gone near the pornography he has downloaded. “But ... you know, I have never had a criminal thought in my life.” He was a chastened, angry and all-but-forlorn man. “I have lost my job. I have been unable to support my wife and children. It’s almost exactly two years to the day since this started, I have already served all that time. I have been turned from a productive member of society into an unproductive one. This has been ...” He could not finish his sentence.

There were 23 people in the court. Legal officials, the jury, witnesses, the defendant. I was the only person not directly involved in the case; no other press, no members of the public. The judge had decided not to say anything to the jury before they saw the pornographic material so as not to lead them. And the jury – none of whom had the slightest idea what they were in for – were doing a heroic (and almost convincing) job of remaining impassive while the opening arguments were made and it dawned on them how they were going to be spending the days ahead. The prosecution, meanwhile, had wanted to play short clips from the films. But Buckland and Jackman were insisting that the films be played in full – nearly two hours’ worth – as part of their contextualising argument: in short, if you watch all of this, then you’re not going to think it’s realistic.

As the court clerks prepared to play the films, the computer equipment failed. The court could not get anything on screen. We were all suddenly in limbo. Not limbo – worse – some surreal but communal state of dread mingled with anticipation and an unhappy curiosity. Only Jackman was impassive. The jury were sent out. The clerks fiddled with wires – unplugging this, rebooting that – continually assuring the exasperated judge that the extreme porn had played just fine earlier in the morning. At some point, the sun appeared in the high court windows and bathed us all in the apricot light of spring and, for a moment, I thought about what I was witnessing as if I were an anthropological observer from another part of the universe. The sheer existential craziness of the situations that human beings were capable of creating for themselves. That we had come so far, invented the internet, only to then use it stare at each other’s genitals. More than this: to intricately fake their torture. Film it. Arrest one another. Put on wigs. Argue about the realism of it all.

The court officials got a backup system working. The jury trooped back in, still doing their level best against ever-mounting odds to be fair, impassive, patient. All the while, Jackman’s demeanour continued to be an essay in defiance, evinced in his ever so slightly overdone observation of the proprieties and courtesies of the courtroom – most obviously in the way he exaggerated his bows to the judge as he entered and left.

Up came the images. Followed by the films. Out of those high windows went all the calm philosophical discussion. The material was instantly and viscerally shocking. The images were of staged hangings and asphyxiations featuring all kinds of bondage instruments, from clamps on nipples to mouse traps on labia. The films were mainly about kidnap, rape and asphyxiation. One told the story of a fat man, the least convincing actor of all time, strangling his neighbour while muttering the worst monologue ever recorded. In another, two hooded men staged a hanging of a woman to the sound of morbid music. In a third, an escort came to a hotel room to have a bag placed over her head.

A rip tide of revulsion all but drowned the court. The urge to reprimand – imprison – someone for this material was near irresistible. And there was David still in the dock. And we had hours yet to sit through. (The truth was that it was all so depressing and grim that I couldn’t watch it. Instead, I opened my laptop and started making notes, deeply relieved that I had something constructive to do.) The volume seemed to be stuck on too loud, too. The afternoon dragged doggedly on to the quadrophonic sound of men grunting to orgasm on the four large courthouse screens.

It was from this bleak vantage that Jackman and Buckland were now required to mobilise their defence. First, they insisted on the credits being played so as to drive home the point that these were films, however dark. Were anyone actually being attacked, might they not appeal in some way to the film crew standing there? These performers had appeared in other films. They were clearly not actually dying. It was ludicrous to call any of this realistic. (By this time, the sharp gradient of the shock had flattened into the longer slog of steady aversion.) And then there was the consent issue, Buckland argued. (His was deft and quiet advocacy in striking counterpoint to his solid scrum-savvy physique.) Sure, we were in the world of BDSM – here Jackman sat forcefully forward as if to will the jury to look at him not the defendant – but the actors were of age and they had consented and had all been paid.

Jackman developed his hatred of the establishment at school. Photograph: Myles Jackman

For Tony Prosser, prosecuting, this was all irrelevant under the law. All the jury needed to decide was if David had been in possession of the material and if the images “realistically portray” acts that threaten life or injury. Prosser was soft-spoken: “I’m not here on a moral crusade,” he told me during a break on the second day. “This is the law and we’re here to try whether these images are on the wrong side of it. And remember: it comes down to the jury. The jury decide.” In this way, he argued, the law moves with the times, just as juries do. Parliament may set the guidelines, but it is the public that defines contemporary standards, through deciding and defining what still counts as extreme at any given time. “There’s no great conspiracy against anyone here,” he said. “We are here to see if the jury agree with the police – does this material fall on the wrong side of the line that parliament has drawn for us?”

Out went said jury. And out went the court. We walked to lunch. Buckland did not eat. He looked pale and exhausted. He told me that he could not remember “feeling so emptied” over a case. Jackman agreed – “the mischief is out of all proportion to the strength of feeling that everyone is experiencing”. (“Mischief” is the lawyerly term for the actual common sense wrongdoing involved in a case – as opposed to what the letter of the law may or may not say.) The uneasiness hung in the air like cordite. The sex cases were not like robbery or violence or the drugs trials, Buckland said, before he disappeared back to court; something about intimacy and tenderness transgressed. Given the emotionally gruelling nature of these kind of trials and the absence of any payment whatsoever for Jackman in this case, I asked him why he hadn’t gone into corporate law or some other more lucrative vein. “Because I love it,” he said, “I just fucking love it.”

We returned to court at 2pm and waited another hour before the jury came back in. Not guilty on one count – “endangering life” – for the images. Guilty on another (the films). But undecided on the third regarding the images – “likely to cause serious injury”. The judge instructed them that they may now go to a majority verdict – 10 out of 12. Out they went again. Another wait. Back in. Not guilty.

David had been acquitted of two out of three charges. But Buckland and Jackman had failed to convince the jury that the films were not extreme. They went to talk with David – “the hardest part of the job” as Jackman said. David looked as wan as the jury did when the films began to roll. He was now a criminal. (He later received an eight-month sentence suspended for two years.)

On the train back to London, Jackman could hardly speak. He was the opposite of everything he had been. The fierce animus gone. He told me that his mouth was dry and that his back ached. He said he just wanted “to go home and cuddle the dog”. There was vulnerability, a sudden lassitude. He was suffering on behalf of his clients. But more than that, the mission, the trials, the life – all were clearly consuming him. He was no further on. And though this was only one case, it was still a setback. From the railway viaduct in Vauxhall, we could see the still-generous sun sinking slowly into the west. I couldn’t imagine having to think about all this again tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.

Jackman submitted the judicial review for funding in March of this year. The Legal Aid Agency turned it down, saying that it was not in the public interest. He immediately appealed that decision and is still awaiting the outcome of that appeal.

Later, on the evening of the trial, Jackman sent me a message with a link to a song by the Clash: I Fought the Law (And the Law Won). He wasn’t conceding the war. No. But he was conceding the latest battle. And when I tried to call, he didn’t pick up.

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