The past month has clearly taken its toll on Mooney—not just the usual rigors of a 14-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week work schedule, but also the spate of behind-the-scenes troubles that have befallen her online enterprise. Beginning in September 2005, SuicideGirls weathered a series of allegations leveled by former models. More than 30 women have left since then, some claiming they had been subjected to unfair contracts and financial misdealings, others deriding the site’s girl-positive brand image as a sham and complaining that they had suffered verbal abuse.
At the same time, SG was enjoying the biggest boom in its four-year history, thanks to a string of business deals that brought its instantly recognizable punk pinups to anyone who had cable TV, an iPod or a DVD player. In its expansion from a grassroots, online community to a multimedia corporation, SuicideGirls had garnered more than just name recognition. By the end of 2005, it was also involved in three different court cases and saw several disgruntled ex-models air their dirty laundry in the same types of online communities that SuicideGirls had helped pioneer. Now even the people who have been with the site since its inception are wondering if the idealism it was founded on has been lost. “We were beyond familial,” says Mooney. “The girls expect a lot, and we tried to help. But when you grow, you lose innocence. You realize, reluctantly, how the world works.”
When Mooney launched SuicideGirls in September 2001 with a male friend, Web developer Sean Suhl, she imagined the site as a more of an art project than an entrepreneurial venture. “My passion was taking pictures of these beautiful, strong women I knew,” says Mooney, who was then a Portland, Oregon-based pinup photographer. “I was struck by the confidence they had in themselves and their bodies, and I wanted to share that confidence with the world.” SG differentiated itself from mainstream porn by identifying itself as punk, offering its subscribers interactive bulletin boards, blogs and galleries of models who didn’t represent the usual porn star aesthetic. “It didn’t pander to pornography’s idea of what sexy is,” says author and sex educator Dr. Susan Block. “The women had wit and intelligence about them that was different from the traditional porn slut.”
Slender, pretty, no-bullshit women who dig metal, grindcore and piercings, ex-models Jennifer Caravella (who still goes by her SG screen name Sicily) and Kelly Kleinert (who uses the nickname Shera) embody the archetype that has been integral to the site’s success: hip, empowered young women who have no problem with getting naked or talking back. Kleinert, a 24-year-old college student from Reading, Pennsylvania, joined SuicideGirls in late 2002 because, she says, “I saw there were chicks like me there with tattoos, who seemed cool.” Caravella, a 28-year-old performance artist from San Francisco, signed on a year later. And when the site kicked off a cross-country burlesque tour in May 2004, both women were selected to perform on it, each being paid $100 per show for a total of 41 dates. “There is definitely favoritism,” Caravella says, “And once I joined the tour, I got to be a part of that more favored group of models.”
The excursion is chronicled in the DVD SuicideGirls: The First Tour, a cheery travelogue that juxtaposes strip routines with Real World-style confessionals and scenes of the model causing jovial mayhem in punk clubs and EconoLodge parking lots. What the on-camera bonding doesn’t reveal is the fear and doubt they were starting to feel about the site. “I was so excited about the whole tour,” says Kleinert. “I was so eager to meet people I didn’t realize it was weird the entire time.”
Prior to the tour, SG cofounder Suhl had allowed some of the featured models in the film to live in the bottom-floor apartment of his sprawling home in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz hills. While she and her tourmates rehearsed their choreography, Kleinert says, her interactions with Suhl were growing increasingly negative. “Sean can be the nicest guy,” she says. “Sometimes I’d talk to him and think, ‘I love this guy, he’s going to do so much for me.’ And then he turns on you in a second.” By the time the girls hit the road, verbal attacks from Suhl had become a regular occurrence. “Sean would call the girls on the phone all the time, telling them to pull their performances together or they were off the tour,” says Mike Marshall, the DVD’s director. “I think he was trying to motivate them. It was stressful for [the girls] because they aren’t professional dancers. There were growing pains.” But the targets of Suhl’s criticism saw it differently. “Every day was hell,” says Kleinert. “Sean told us we sucked so much that we made this banner for our costume kit that said SUICIDE GIRLS BURLESQUE YOU SUCK.”
Despite the instrumental role he plays in running SuicideGirls, Suhl remains an enigmatic figure. Before launching the site, the 30-year-old had survived the Internet bust of the 1990s to establish himself as an early proponent of Web communities and blog-based networks. He has become increasingly private since the onslaught of allegations (he declined to be photographed for this story and would only be interviewed by phone, reluctantly), ceding daily involvement and hands-on work to Mooney while concentrating on the site’s development deals. The most personal information available on Suhl appears in his member profile on SuicideGirls.com, where he describes himself as “obsessive-compulsive, slightly agoraphobic,” with a “fear of intimacy,” and lists “McSweeney’s stuff” and Lolita as some of his favorite reads.
Suhl maintains that his critiques of the burlesque shows were merely jokes. “I think if you asked some of the other girls, they would say it was funny, if you ask people who hate me now, they would say it was a horrible, demeaning, abusive act,” he says. “There were still dinners bought, and people continued to live at the house, and it was all fine. Until they decided it wasn’t fine.”
Almost a year after the tour, in July 2005, Suhl allowed Caravella to move into his house. During her stay, Caravella claims, some of the models featured on The First Tour had grown increasingly concerned about receiving the 5-cent-per-disc royalty Suhl had promised them from DVD sales. (A publicist for SuicideGirls says that the women will be paid a royalty once the initial costs of the DVD are recouped.) Caravella says she asked Suhl to produce a contract: “I just wanted the piece of paper with his name on it that marks his word, that’s all.” But when she made the request, she says Suhl refused, then “flipped out.” Shortly thereafter, he told her to move out, and Caravella quit the site.
Suhl doesn’t deny kicking Caravella out of his house and counters that she had been taking advantage of him. “She came to me and said she had nowhere to live and nothing to eat,” he says. “At the time, I did what I thought was right. I feel like taking in that person was a mistake. It wasn’t a good situation.”
This wasn’t the first time Suhl had feuded with his models. Three years ago, Dia Mentia, a Web designer who posed in full-frontal photos wearing black lipstick and drizzling cherry juice over herself, became one of SuicideGirls’ first models to have her own fan base. “I was SuicideGirls’ cash cow,” says the 30-year-old Mentia (who would only be interviewed on the condition that SPIN not publish a real name). But in January 2003, six months after she joined, Suhl asked her to leave the site, allegedly for disparaging other models on its message boards. “I shed no tears,” she says. “I was like, ‘If you’re gonna kick me out, fuck you and I quit.’”
Mentia defected to another site, Deviant Nation, a punk-porn start-up that would have posed direct competition to SuicideGirls had it ever launched launched. In April 2003, SuicideGirls reported to the FBI that Deviant Nation’s Chad Grant had hacked into SG servers; it also attempted to sue Grant in civil court, but when he didn’t show up for the trial, SuicideGirls discovered it had sued the wrong Chad Grant—a different Californian with the same name. The debacle was later settled out of court. “The Chad Grant case was ludicrous,” says Mentia. “Essentially, it was very specific to my leaving.”
Two years later, the real Chad Grant would finally be charged by the FBI for the alleged hack. By then, however, he was just one more participant in an ever-expanding series of battles SuicideGirls was fighting, and Mentia would be there to chr
onicle them all. “Dia was only on the site for six months total,” says Mooney, “but nobody has been as relentless” in attacking SuicideGirls. “At first, no one really listened to her. More recently, she seems to have found an audience.”
While the alternative and online press were covering the release of The First Tour, they were also discovering two websites that had become clearinghouses for SuicideGirls-related complaints and gossip. Tales from the Darksite, a community on the blogging site LiveJournal, had become Mentia’s forum to post updates about women who were quitting SuicideGirls, framegrabs of content that had been deleted from the models’ blogs, and anything else she felt like ranting about.
GloomDolls.com, created by burlesque troupe manager Erin Oliver, published Caravella’s long missives explaining her reasons for leaving the site, supplemented with supposed transcripts of instant-message chats between her and an explosive Suhl. “SG is not a feminist-empowered site,” one of Caravella’s statements read in part, “except that they have two frontwomen posing as spokeswomen. It’s run by a man who is the only owner of the site, who’s not progressive in his views on women. I’m being kind. I feel he’s a raving misogynist and very ugly in how typical he is, though amplified and obviously a bit psychopathic. I and others who have known him feel the same.”
Not all the information offered on the sites turned out to be truthful. Both Darksite and GloomDolls gave attention to a rumor that Suhl had kept models captive in his house, which he denies. “Depending on how you hear the story,” says Suhl, “I’m either someone that beats up, rapes and locks girls in the basement, or I’m just someone who had a lot of hateful, untrue things said about them.”
The websites were also used to publish business documents that models had to sign upon joining SuicideGirls, including, reportedly, the standard SG personal-release form. The one-page contract offers models a fee of $300 per shoot in exchange for granting SuicideGirls “the exclusive, perpetual, and irrevocable right and license to copy, use and reuse, publish, distribute, edit, excerpt, exhibit, copyright and otherwise exploit model’s image, picture likeness, persona, performance and voice in conjunction with the model’s name, identification and related biographical information.” Despite the severe language it uses, the contract may be essentially unenforceable. “The release is so poorly written that it is hard to say with any certainty what it means,” says Barry Adler, a professor of contract law at New York University. “My take is that it was designed to give SG Services an absolute right to use and exploit, in any way, the images and recordings created by the models for the website. In any case, it would be ludicrous for the company to believe it could, with this release, forever stop the models from working on or profiting from other projects of any description.”
Until recently, SuicideGirls limited the outside use of its models’ images to promotional materials, banner ads, skateboard decks, the Playboy website and a photography book published in 2004. But in the summer of 2005, the site licensed the burlesque tour film to Showtime, which would air the documentary throughout the fall. The site also made SG videos available to iPod users (and yielded 500,000 free downloads in the first 24 hours they were available). Some models say they have no problem with this bargain. “We know our pictures will be used everywhere,” says Reagan, a current SuicideGirl. “It’s not their job to tell us where.”
For others, the visibility was an unwelcome surprise. “I always thought fans of SuicideGirls would see the DVD and that’s it—not that everyone and their mom was gonna see me on Showtime,” says Kleinert. “I feel I got really screwed out of the deal. SuicideGirls keeps getting bigger, and I got nothing out of it, and it pisses me off.”
In the two weeks after Caravella left SuicideGirls, Kleinert and original employee Katie Gilbert followed. Both Kleinert and Gilbert began modeling for God’s Girls, another prospective SG competitor that promised similar-looking women but staked no claim to punk ideals. “I thought it would be fun to show alternative models in the same way we see the Pamela Anderson-types,” says God’s Girls founder Lara “Annaliese” Nielsen, 21, who refers to her site’s financial backer, hardcore-porn magnate Gavin Lloyd, as “Uncle Gavin.” “It would be quality photography with good makeup.”
But their previous employers were determined to prevent them from appearing on competing sites. “The day I flew to L.A. for my God’s Girl photo shoot,” says Kleinert, “a packet of paper is sitting on [Nielsen’s] doorstep saying if we did the shoot, SuicideGirls would sue.” In fact, SuicideGirls had already filed suit against Nielsen and God’s Girls, alleging violations of federal and state “unfair competition” laws, poaching models, and interfering with its business relationships. Gilbert, the onetime face of SG, had also been named in the suit for violating modeling and confidentiality agreements; the suit even claimed that God’s Girls “features the same trade dress, including the use of pink as a primary color and the use of the stylized font utilized by SG.” In a separate action, SuicideGirls sued GloomDolls’ Oliver, demanding that she apologize and turn over her website to SG. “The demands are ridiculous, and I would never adhere to them,” Oliver says.
On September 27, 2005, the case of U.S. v. Chad Grant went to trial in a California court. Though Grant admitted to illegally setting up free SuicideGirls accounts and tampering with one aspiring model’s online application, prosecutors were unable to prove that the site had suffered the damages it claimed. The case hinged on an $18,000 bill for repairs resulting from the hack issued by SuicideGirls’ Web host, 3jane, a company that employs Suhl and is owned by his longtime friend Peter Luttrell. The trial ended in a hung jury, and a retrial is pending.
During the proceedings, SuicideGirls became fearful that images on its website depicting girls doused with fake blood and dressed in bondage gear would catch the attention of the FBI, so SG removed the images preemptively. “We got scared,” says Suhl. “We all agreed that our business is not about bondage or blood. That’s not the ethos of SuicideGirls or what we want to fight for. We took [those photos] down. It’s not very punk rock and we know.”
But some of its most vocal critics claim that the punk-rock spirit left SuicideGirls a long time ago and that punk porn is still porn, no matter how you qualify it. “They draw in girls who don’t realize they’re becoming a part of the sex industry,” says Caravella. “It’s sugar-coated. It’s pink. It does not look like gross, nasty porn. It’s not necessarily anyone’s fault except mine for getting naked on the Internet.”
Faced with the litany of troubles that SuicideGirls has endured over the past year, Suhl concedes that he may have instigated some of them, but he ultimately feels he’s as much a victim as any of his models. “Honestly, I get bulldozed all the time,” he says. “Those girls know how to work me; they know how to get what they want. But maybe I am intimidating. I feel like I give in, that I’m a sucker. Do you know what I mean by a sucker? You know, they give you the eyes, and they know how to talk you into things that sometimes aren’t the most sensible.”
In her pink office, Mooney says that the events of the previous year have made her more guarded and more reluctant to form friendships with people. But she prefers to concentrate on how the site’s continuing expansion is helping to fulfill what she sees as SuicideGirls’ fundamental mission. “It’s shocking to me that people are so focused on the negative and the gossip, when we are doing so many great things with the company,” she says, pointing to future ventures that will see the SuicideGirls brand extended to comic books and clothing lines, and new businesses in Japan and Brazil. “It’s very exciting that I can help another girl’s art get into the hands of millions of people.”
Without speaking the names of the women whose images still surround her every day, Mooney says their grievances are another natural outgrowth of SuicideGirl’s rapid success. “There are going to be disgruntled employees,” she says. “Some people need a scapegoat and want to blame someone else for their decisions.” As much as she may wish circumstances were
different, Mooney knows there are some things about SuicideGirls that even she can’t change. “You can’t be naive forever. It’s a business now.”
HOW SELLING OUT SAVED INDIE ROCK
BuzzFeed, November 2013
It’s 2 p.m., the Friday before Christmas 2012, on the 21st floor of the Leo Burnett building in downtown Chicago. Young executives, creatives, admins and interns are all packed into a large meeting room, giddy and restless; today is special. Canadian sister duo Tegan and Sara step onto a foot-high stage and play three songs—including the first two singles from their seventh album, Heartthrob, which they will release the following month. The fluorescent lights stay on, the city’s skyline splayed out behind them. Afterward, nearly all of the 200-odd employees in attendance will stand in line, phone at the ready, to pose for pictures with the band, just like fans after any concert.
Tegan and Sara, who eventually cracked the Top 20 with Heartthrob’s “Closer,” need to win over this audience just as they would at any concert. A track in the right commercial could bring about the kind of attention that magazine covers and radio play alone can no longer garner. Commercial placement, also known as a “sync,” has evidenced itself as the last unimpeded pathway to our ears—what was once considered to be the lowest form of selling out is now regarded as a crucial cornerstone of success. And as ads have become a lifeline for bands in recent years, the stigma of doing them has all but eroded. But with desperate bands flooding the market, the money at stake has dropped precipitously. Even the life raft has a hole in it.
The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic Page 16