The story looks at Ford's history on the Internet, starting with his first website, LukeFord.com, which started in 1997 and made an impact when it reported the HIV outbreak among adult performers in 1998.
Ford made a similar impact on mainstream politics in January on his LukeFord.net site when he observed that Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had stopped wearing his wedding ring — a story leaked to him by an L.A. Daily News reporter who couldn't get it printed in his own paper.
In 2001 Ford sold his adult news site LukeFord.com and turned to mainstream reporting on LukeFord.net. He came back to adult reporting in 2004 with LukeIsBack.com.
"This [article] will add a whole different layer of intimacy, because the people I go to shul with and the people I spend most of my nonwork time with read the Jewish Journal," Ford told XBIZ. "Almost nobody in my religious community reads the Daily News. When the Jewish Journal writes about you, it has a more intense level of impact."
The Jewish Journal story mentions the sin of "the evil tongue" — "lashon hara" in Hebrew — and points out that "Few sins are as serious as that of lashon hara, the evil tongue ... There are 31 commandments regarding lashon hara. The gist is that it's not only sinful to gossip about someone, but to say negative things at all, even if true, unless there is a compelling reason."
Ford, a practicing Orthodox Jew, has been asked to leave the congregations of several Orthodox synagogues that were unsympathetic to his work reporting on the adult industry. "The antithesis of Torah is porn," one rabbi said in the article.
Asked about the reaction of his current congregation to the article, Ford said, "I don't know what the consequences are. Ask me in a week. On the one hand it's relief, on the other, it's a feeling of dread. At the synagogue where I go for prayers, they stack up the Journal. Everyone's reading it."
To read the entire article, visit the Jewish Journal website.
