EAST COBB, Georgia — Michael Morrison, owner of the Southern adult boutique chain Tokyo Valentino, gave an interview to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, published yesterday, explaining the ongoing zoning battle provoked by conservative city council politicians and lawyers attempting to chase his business out of two Georgia locations.
“While a court decision could be coming next month for the East Cobb location of Tokyo Valentino, the owner is fighting in court to keep it and a second store in Marietta open,” reported Atlanta’s establishment newspaper.
Morrison told the AJC that “the court battles come with the territory for his retail operations.”
In 1978, Larry Flynt was shot near a Georgia courthouse by a would-be assassin while engaged in a local court battle trying to protect his adult business.
Tokyo Valentino’s two Cobb County locations continue operating while the zoning dispute is litigated.
“I think like any controversial business — whether it’s this, or gentlemen’s clubs or marijuana stores — part of the business model is you have to fight some of this litigation,” Morrison told the AJC. “I think it gets us a lot of publicity, which always helps. But really it hurts the customer because all these fees get passed on in higher prices to the consumer.”
The AJC explained that Tokyo Valentino “operates six different adult novelty establishments throughout the metro area. It has two locations in Atlanta as well as shops in Sandy Springs and Gwinnett County. Tokyo Valentino has a decades-long track record of suing municipalities for the right to operate, despite pushback from residents and elected officials.”
Morrison seemed unfazed and defiant by the political and moral grandstanding of city officials. “We’ve been doing this since 1995,” he added. “We’ve seen situations like this where they change rules to accomplish their own purposes.”
Conflicts of Interest and Moralistic Posturing
As XBIZ has been reporting, the East Cobb and Marietta hearings attempting to shutter Tokyo Valentino are full of conflicts of interest and moralistic posturing by law enforcement and conservative politicians. Some of the supposedly impartial city officials admitted to orchestrating absurd so-called “sting operations” where undercover cops purchased sex toys at the adult boutique, which were then revealed at the hearings for a bizarre “show-and-tell” testimony
In a written counterclaim, the city of Marietta “argued that Tokyo Valentino was not allowed to sell the ‘massive amount of pornography’ that was found in the shop,” the AJC reported.
Marietta business inspectors then claimed “sexually oriented products made up 80-90% of the merchandise on the shelves,” while including in their definition such items as shoes and lotions.
"Pornographic" Shoes
During a July 2020 hearing, the Tokyo Valentino lawyer asked one of the undercover cops about the merchandise he had classified as being “sexually related.”
“Lotions and gels,” the lawyer asked. “Are they considered 'sexual devices?'”
“It wasn’t a lotion I’d seen at [supermarket] Kroger, so it was all geared to sexual activity,” the policeman replied.
The lawyer then asked about the shoes sold by Tokyo Valentino.
“They are not shoes [you'd] see on normal people walking around,” replied the policeman; instead, he described the styles as common to "strippers and ladies of the night.”
The policeman also described the shoes as “seductive in nature.”
“I think this was driven by a bunch of soccer moms in the neighborhood,” Tokyo Valentino’s Morrison told the AJC in the report published yesterday.
“When we first opened up, the [City of Marietta] knew exactly what we were and there was no problem until we opened the store in East Cobb. Now all of a sudden, they want to change their argument and say they had no idea what our stores sell or what we represented," Morrison added.
