Naked ambition ... Abbywinters.com CEO Garion Hall. Credit:Andrew Babarczy The magazines started arriving monthly in the mountain farm's mailbox. He wallpapered his bedroom with cut-out pictures and centrefolds. "A teenage boy who likes looking at naked women is hardly unique," he says. "Part of my motivation was to annoy my mother, though. I remember that quite clearly." "I suppose you could say," Jo says today, "that he showed an early interest in his future career." Soon enough he would change his name, choosing a new one from The Belgariad, a fantasy novel by David Eddings about the journey towards self-discovery of an orphaned farm boy called Garion. Garion Hall, 37, is CEO of Abbywinters.com, which was founded 12 years ago in Melbourne. According to website-information company Alexa Traffic, it is number 97 in the top 100 porn sites in the world.

The site comprises photographs and videos of regular young women - many of them uni students in their 20s - engaged in various activities, from undressing and having an "intimate moment" alone to indulging in explicit sex with other girls. It has a sense of humour: one recent Olympic-themed clip showed a dozen fresh-faced girls doing shot put in their undies. Hall is a pioneer of a phenomenon called "reality porn" or "female-friendly ethical erotica". The paid models who pose for him, and who are typically recruited by way of ads placed in street press and on lamp-pole posters, are photographed or filmed - by a mostly female crew - in high definition using natural light, without retouching, in an equally "regular" setting, such as a bedroom with clothes strewn on the floor and posters on the walls. They're paid between $500 and $1400 a time. Hall says his blueprint for business is a reaction against the fakeness of stereotypical porn. "We want wholesomeness, physical naturalness," he says. "No piercings, no shaved pubes, no tramp stamps [lower-back tattoos]. I don't consider these things wholesome." He cites the "fetish value" offered by redheads, for example, and very small and very big breasts. Abbywinters.com has about 35,000 subscribers paying an average of $35 per month; in 2007, when it was at its most successful, the site was making a profit of $8 million a year. The site is tiered; some previews are free.

Many of Hall's models like to use gender theory in their arguments - they talk about seizing back the power that traditional "misogynist" porn has taken away. "Most porn is fluoro-lit and animalistic," says a 20-year-old Melbourne arts student, who appeared in "closed-leg" shoots twice for Abbywinters when she was 18. "There's no comparison. I was impressed by how beautiful everyone looked. I almost didn't consider it porn." Hall's long-time girlfriend, Christina, an oncology and palliative-care nurse, is the secondary shareholder in the business. A Tasmanian Catholic from a family of nine, she is slightly built with a blonde bob. Hall didn't want Good Weekend to speak to Christina. She and Hall met back in the mid '90s at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, where Hall signed on for theatre studies when he left school. After graduating, he worked in Melbourne as a roadie for rock bands, did lighting and sound for Opera Australia, Arts Centre Melbourne and the touring show Fame, and settled in suburban Eaglemont in Melbourne's north-east. Hall claims that, in the late '90s, he met a woman called Abby Winters at the Corner Hotel in Richmond who was interested in making a female-friendly porn site using non-professional models, and that he slowly became more and more involved in the venture as the site attracted customers. He maintains that Winters sold her share of the business to him in 2003, by which time it was run from a converted church in hipster Fitzroy, just off Brunswick Street. By 2007, business was booming. Hall claims the site was making $150,000 a week, and he had what he frequently refers to as the "Abbywinters paradigm" to thank for it. The young women looked healthy and fun and came in all shapes and sizes. Using "site names" such as Kandice, Brooklyn or Sadie, they disported themselves uninhibitedly on film. They took requests from subscribers through the site's forums to wear a certain item, for example, or to perform a particular "task". For this, according to ex-models, they were often paid extra in $200 JB Hi-Fi vouchers. They earned more, say insiders, if they had ample pubic hair.

Prospective models flocked through the doors of the old Fitzroy church to meet demands from subscribers. There was money to be made and Hall says the word-of-mouth around Melbourne at this time was that Abbywinters offered a friendly, girls-only experience. A former model, a Monash University literature student, considered the work an extension of her liberated lifestyle. "It's important to have the kind of porn represented that we would want to see," she says. "I saw it as socially acceptable, almost like having casual sexual partners. This was putting [porn] out in the open, having a conversation about porn and what it is. It was fun. Everyone was very easygoing." Shoots were scheduled all over inner-city Melbourne and the rest of Australia - in vans, motels and public places. Twelve girls frolicked under a waterfall near Cairns; another 12 cavorted freely in the Daintree's Mossman River as the HBO series The Pacific was being filmed nearby. At more humble public locations, such as state and national parks in Victoria, or beside Melbourne's Yarra River or in the city's Royal Botanic Gardens, there would be "spotters" with two-way radios to warn crew of "incoming" members of the public. Abbywinters had 40 staff: photographers, camera people, drivers, editors, location and model bookers, copywriters, interviewers, accountants, web content people, designers, a handyman and IT staff. Many of the film editors were freelancers who also worked for the ABC.

The company expanded into Sydney, spending $1 million on a plush office in Surry Hills near Oxford Street. A retired 58-year-old school administrator from Los Angeles - who asked that her name not be used - came on board as "creative consultant" after subscribing to the site and befriending Hall on its forums. By now, Hall was vice-president of the Canberra-based sex-industry lobby group the Eros Association, which promotes the Australian adult-entertainment industry. "Garion wanted to make the transition into a much larger going concern and I liked the idea of getting involved with sex-positive, responsible porn," she says. She describes Hall as "very sharp, ambitious and hard-working", but the site was, she adds, "getting too big too fast. It was becoming a victim of its own success." In late 2007, $1 million was spent on an assault on the American market through a sex-industry trade show in Las Vegas. "We took 10 models with girl-next-door good looks and a fun demeanour and employed them full-time for two months," Hall recalls. They performed yoga nude every hour, a wildly popular stunt. "We were the talk of the town." Behind the scenes, however, all was not well. Staff turnover at Abbywinters was high and Hall was a polarising figure: some loved him and pledged the loyalty he expected, becoming part of his coterie, but many didn't. "He struck me as immature," says one former staff member, "like a 14- or 15-year-old. He was obsessive and compulsive and the things he wanted on the site, like the pubic hair, were his own particular paradigm - it's what turned him on."

And just who was this person whose name adorned the site? Where was she? Doubt began to circulate widely about the semi-mythical Abby Winters. Hall had always claimed she was the co-founder and the one who came up with the idea of depicting "wholesome" girls in the first place. But when the porn weblog Fleshbot.com ran a photograph of Hall at work with a name tag saying "Abby" and revealed that whoever wrote the site's forum posts as "Abby" sometimes signed them off as "G", it seemed the ruse was up. Critics say Hall concocted the name to make the site appear more female-friendly and "safe". "She's the namesake," Hall tells me, "and I'm the business guy. We met and had the idea in 1999. She's a photographer who went to uni and did arts and wanted to make something different to mainstream porn. Then, around 2003, she didn't want to be involved any more, so I basically bought her out. It suits me that people don't think she's real. It suits her, too. She's not interested in speaking to journalists." Another former staffer describes the work environment from these times as "very strange": "[Hall] had this kind of mothership, a bank of five computer monitors there in the church that he sat behind. He was obsessive and compulsive and pretty weird, really." Despite suffering from Crohn's disease (an autoimmune gastrointestinal disorder) and diabetes, Hall prefers to eat white bread with Vegemite, and drink milk and Coca-Cola, which he specifies must be from a glass bottle. "The Crohn's is a constant annoyance," he says. "[The fact that it's] coupled with diabetes means a certain diet works for me and changes in that can trigger a relapse", which he says can be "extremely painful for months". Of his strange diet, he says, "I am loathe to mess with what works for me."

"He is very, very business-minded," says Melbourne-based Angela White, a professional porn star with a pay-per-view personal website. "He has attempted to make his site as ethical as possible. The mainstream populace sees porn as a degrading thing that exploits workers, and the women involved as drug abusers and somehow lost, whereas Abbywinters promotes an image of healthy women with a healthy lifestyle who enjoy their sexuality." Part of the vision is philanthropic. G Media - the Hall-owned company that operates the website - donates $US1000 a month to charities and causes, including Movember, Lifeline and the Ballarat Cancer Research Centre (recently renamed the Fiona Elsey Cancer Research Institute), according to a list on the website. It donated $78,000 in the aftermath of the Victorian Black Saturday bushfires in 2009. "We get a letter from most of the places we donate to, and put them in a binder we have in our reception area for visitors to browse," says Hall. In December 2007, the latent discontent among staff and ex-staff boiled over. A feminist lesbian porn model using the name Liandra Dahl started anonymously emailing, then talking in person, to crime reporter Keith Moor, from Melbourne's Herald Sun. She claimed that G Media had refused to take down old shots of her from the site after she asked them to. She said that models had been told that only Abbywinters customers could see content - but many had found images of themselves on other websites, particularly a YouTube channel that was being used to promote the site, and in illegal but easily accessible downloads called porn "torrents". She was taking her stand, she wrote on her blog at the time, on behalf of other models. Dahl has since retracted some of what she told Moor so as not to appear pro-censorship and wouldn't talk to Good Weekend. Moor wrote that he had given information to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), which regulates online content, because some of the "sex acts" depicted on Abbywinters - such as urination - were prohibited. ACMA couldn't do anything, however, because, by this time, the company's servers were being hosted in the US. Moor also quoted a "photographer familiar with the website" who revealed that models got cash bonuses in an exploitative "up-sell" for more explicit acts.

In an internal company document obtained by Good Weekend, Hall wrote to staff, in late 2007, informing them that "some" material is given to other websites for promotion; the appearance of the material was being monitored and a staff member had "chased down" infringements. He also wrote that if models on shoots were "comfortable and having a good time", they might be asked to go further for more money, but they didn't have to. By this stage, both the Herald Sun and Victoria Police had sent in an undercover stripper and investigator, respectively, to have a close look at the company's operations. Two senior managers left suddenly; one told former colleagues he'd been in contact with the Australian Federal Police about an under-age model in Perth, a single allegation that would be raised again and again by Hall's critics, despite an ongoing lack of evidence. Then, in 2008, two Abbywinters images were leaked. Both found their way - pixilated - into the mainstream media. One featured a model bearing a striking resemblance to a member of a Queensland pop band; the other was a contestant in TV show The Farmer Wants a Wife. Something had to give and, in mid-2009, it did - Operation Refuge was launched. Victoria Police raided Abbywinters' Fitzroy office in the old church, two storage units owned by Hall and his home in Eaglemont. In reporting the raids, Keith Moor wrote in the Herald Sun that he had given police a "dossier" on G Media.

"Police came to my house at eight in the morning," says Hall. "Plus the offices. They went through all the computers and DVDs and CDs. There'd been no hint of it coming." Hall was charged with 54 counts under State and Commonwealth law of making objection-able films for gain, one count of possessing a commercial quantity of objectionable films for gain and two counts of possessing child pornography. He says that he felt overwhelmed by the "moral panic" that was directed at the company. "By the time of the raid, we had been operating openly for eight years. We had a street address, we had a sign on the door; it wasn't secret, underground stuff. I thought if something was going to happen, it would have been years before that. "I have suspicions about how it all happened. I think it was several people [making the accusations]. If people are out to get you, they will find a way. 'Using under-age models' is an easy accusation to make against a pornographer. It never happened."

In court, he won. Or, at least, had a relative victory. Of the 54 charges, 52 were dropped (including the two child-pornography counts) in a plea bargain that saw Hall cop the lesser charges of possession of a commercial quantity of objectionable films and producing an objectionable film. He was fined $6000. His lawyer was leading Victorian QC Robert Richter. The Eros Association's Robbie Swan, a big supporter of Hall, believes the "objectionable" film Hall was charged with selling was refused classification because it was deemed to show the model urinating, which, under Australian Classification Board rules, constitutes a fetish and is banned. Swan explains that the model was not urinating; rather, she was ejaculating. "It's not illegal to show a man ejaculating; in Australia, it's not considered an offensive fetish and is X-rated. But if a woman does so [on film], it is considered urolagnia [sexual excitement occasioned by urine or urinating]; the film is refused classification and the charges are more serious." Hall concedes that in the early days, between 2000 and 2003, the verification systems for models' ages were still being "refined". Then the company began interlinking and cross-checking several forms of a prospective model's ID. The systems are now foolproof, he says, with two sets of identification being checked six times by different people. In early 2010, Hall dismantled his Melbourne base of operations and left for Amsterdam and the Netherlands' more liberal pornography laws, taking 11 loyal staff with him and hiring 12 more. "It was very disruptive," he says, "and it was a big struggle to set up over there, but it was also kind of an adventure." The Eros Association's Robbie Swan tells me that the case, and its aftermath, was a big reason he and his colleague Fiona Patten set up the Australian Sex Party, as a way of supporting what they see as "ethical" Australian erotica. He says there's a lot of it about, especially in Melbourne.

Hall expected the "Aussie paradigm" to continue once he and Christina settled in Amsterdam, but he got a rude shock. The production of online porn is legal in Holland and the limits of obscenity are fairly wide. Hall could no longer find models who were representative of the Aussie paradigm that pedalled outdoorsy, shiny-eyed girls in the pink of sun-kissed good health. Good natural light was harder to come by and outdoor shoots were impossible in the cold weather. Subscribers weren't happy and many of them left. "We have discussed it a lot, how to make it work," says Hall. "We have the same recruiters and the same systems, but we use Skype now to talk to about half of the prospective models." Hall says he has gained some insight into his need for control. He has learnt to let go a little and has come to the realisation that "taking time to relax is good". In May and June this year, he and Christina drove 19,000 kilometres around Australia in a campervan, listening to "thinky" podcasts from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University as they went. "I'm trying to extricate myself from the day-to-day running of the business," he says, telling me that he has now developed what he calls a "systems fetish" - that is, he has become consumed by developing new business systems, online-billing systems and web-content-management systems, for example, to a point where he can sell them to other businesses. His moral compass hasn't shifted, he says. He still believes in a free internet, is opposed to most censorship and is very firmly of the belief that if a consenting adult agrees to be legally depicted in a certain way online, then that's all the justification he needs. That said, though, he's keen to diversify into other areas of interest.

"The problem I had to solve was how to run a smooth business," he says. "You can endlessly polish. But now it is smooth. Own it and let it run - isn't that what a businessman does?" Hall, says Swan, is a revolutionary pornographer because he kicked against the US and European hegemony of exploitative and misogynist porn. "He set a new standard and it's such a shame they were pushed out of Australia. Feminists call for good porn as a way of dealing with bad porn, and as soon as someone starts doing that, they get pushed out. "We import a lot of US porn because it's hard to make here but, when you do, you also import US values," says Swan. "American sexual values are like American food - big and over the top. Big hair, big nails, big tits, big dicks - it's bullshit, it's fake. What Garion does is real." Back on the lonely goat farm, Jo Hall knows her boy is a rich pornographer. "I don't mind at all," she says. "It's not something I would subscribe to, but there's obviously a need for it. He's told me it's real women and that it's a bit different to the more extreme pornography, like in the magazines and that." Jo doesn't use the internet. Hall has built a website for her dog-breeding business, but she's never seen it. Occasionally, she rings him and asks him to find something online, print the pages out and post them to her. "It's all a bit of a mystery to me," she says.

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