LAS VEGAS — First Amendment champion and industry attorney Clyde DeWitt, who has been diagnosed with untreatable cancer, recently spoke with XBIZ, reflecting on his remarkable career.
“I have been diagnosed with metastatic lymphatic and lung cancer and therefore have been relegated to hospice treatment at home in Las Vegas, although I’m still working a little,” DeWitt told XBIZ. “I wanted you to hear it from me first, rather than rumors.”
Prior to his intersection with the adult industry, DeWitt spent seven years as a prosecutor in Texas.
“Although I grew up in Chicago, I swore I would go to law school somewhere it didn’t snow,” he explained. “Thus the University of Houston, which led me to the DA’s office there.”
In 1979, DeWitt was general counsel to the district attorney in Houston, where he was assigned to defend against a challenge to a new Texas statute that “dramatically souped up Texas obscenity laws,” he recalled. That was how he met “a brilliant guy from Beverly Hills named John Weston,” who was one of the founders of the First Amendment Lawyers Association (FALA).
“John dazzled me,” DeWitt added. “We became friends during the litigation.”
That friendship led to DeWitt setting up, in 1980, what he called “a sort of branch office in Houston for John’s Beverly Hills law firm.”
At his first FALA meeting a month later, DeWitt met other First Amendment champions like Paul Cambria, Art Schwartz, Yale Freeman, Steve Beckett, and “many others of the old guard,” he said. “I was suffering from data overload.”
In 1983, Weston and DeWitt teamed up to challenge an obscenity conviction in Texas. The Court of Criminal Appeals struck down as unconstitutional the same statute that the federal court had refused to strike down when DeWitt was defending it as a DA a few years earlier.
In 1985, DeWitt relocated to Los Angeles, where he remained an FALA stalwart, eventually becoming president in 1991 and serving as a board member for decades thereafter.
Standing Up for Free Speech
“During the late 1980s and early ’90s, all hell broke loose in the wake of the 1986 Meese Commission Report,” DeWitt remembered. “In response to it, the DOJ set up the National Obscenity Enforcement Unit (NOEU), which quickly changed its name to the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS).
“Seems that the Reagan Administration quickly figured out that quite a few people believed that chasing dirty movies was not the best use of their tax dollars, although fighting child exploitation was fine,” DeWitt said. “The Unit clearly did more of the former than the latter until Bill Clinton took office in 1993.”
“First, circa 1988, the CEOS initiated Operation PostPorn, sworn to do away with the mail-order porn industry — remember, this was before the Internet! Next came Operation Woodworm, which was to do away with the adult video industry. Obviously, neither succeeded. As John Weston emphasized in a speech in the late 1990s after enumerating all of the anti-porn crusaders who had failed, given up or, in one case, been sent to prison: ‘We’re still here — and they’re not!’”
PostPorn and Woodworm did, however, succeed in sending quite a few people to jail or prison and costing the industry millions of dollars in legal fees.
One Friday — “It always happened on a Friday,” DeWitt noted — Weston poked his head into DeWitt’s office to announce that the FBI was executing a search warrant at one of their clients’ facilities.
“Next would come grand jury subpoenas, trying to flip the underlings, and then the indictment,” DeWitt said. “Always in some far-flung, conservative locus, such as Broken Arrow, Oklahoma; Tallahassee, Florida; Memphis, etc. FALA members were defending these cases from coast to coast.”
Eventually, prosecutions would die down, but during the George W. Bush administration, a few new ones arose, and some were successful.
“Always FALA members at the defense table,” DeWitt noted.
A Rewarding Career
DeWitt described working with Weston for roughly a quarter century as “an amazing experience.”
“He was as bright a person as I’ve ever known, and a great mentor,” DeWitt said. “I always was flabbergasted when I explained a legal concept to him with which he was unfamiliar. A rare event, but it happened a few times. John’s most notable talent was that he could deliver as persuasive an oral argument as anyone I’ve ever seen — the first one I witnessed being against me. He was a master of doing what I was taught to do from my first day as an assistant district attorney: take over the courtroom.”
Beginning in the mid-1990s, DeWitt began developing a client base of his own, and his practice continued to grow, eventually becoming the Los Angeles firm of Weston, Garrou, DeWitt & Walters.
DeWitt handled some of the most significant adult industry cases of the period, including a series of lawsuits on behalf of University Books and Videos from 1996 until 2001 that resulted in the defeat of an unconstitutional Dade County ordinance that would have eliminated all adult bookstores and entertainment in the Miami area.
“By the mid-2000s, I began to conclude that neither Weston, Garrou, DeWitt & Walters nor Los Angeles was where I wanted to ‘play the back nine,’” he shared. “I took the Nevada bar exam in 2006 and, to my surprise, passed the nation’s most difficult bar exam on the first try. By 2009, I had left the firm and bought a house in Las Vegas, where I have practiced ever since. I took up golf at age 64.
“Representing this industry has been a joy and a rare privilege,” DeWitt told XBIZ. “Really as rewarding a career as I can imagine. I don’t regret a minute of it!”
