If Minnesota’s skin drama has a central villain or hero, it’s Richard Jacobsen, our Larry Flynt of the 10,000 Lakes. He made national news last year for allegedly rigging the city of Coates’ election by getting 94 club supporters to sign voter registration cards indicating that they lived at Jake’s—his strip club. This in a town that has a population of 163. He made news last summer when he dumped 600,000 pennies of fines at the feet of the Coates city council (Larry Flynt dumped bags of cash on a courtroom floor). His father, who owns Class Act, helped diminish the ability of cities to prosecute under obscenity charges, but Rich has, in his 11-year fight to keep Jake’s open, put more on the legal books than any other strip-club owner in the state. Although not the most successful club owner in our region, Rich has profited greatly from taking the most hits. If there’s a guerilla fighter in the moral battle, Rich is, at age 32, one of the more decorated veterans of the nudie trenches.
I meet him first at Class Act, where he temporarily set up shop when Jake’s closed last October. Immediately, he is beguiling—buying me a beer, talking to me against the advice of his attorneys. Thin and tightly wired, he speaks quickly and quietly, his disarming intelligence streaming out in a secretive mumble that I’ve only heard among college professors and fugitives. His face is at war with itself: darting eyes that settle with kindness, hair businessman-slick, although I can picture the mullet he recently trimmed off, a boyish smile that mitigates against his piquant, often libelous tongue. I feel myself having to adapt not only my ear, but the tenets of how I’ve viewed things. Suddenly I feel conservative, wary; sharing a wine cooler with one of the wives now seems more my speed than a beer with the man who’s declared himself “the King of Southern Minnesota Smut.”
“I’ve been called the devil in St. Augusta township, where I had a club,” he whispers. “This old fart stood up in that meeting with nearly 250 people that hated my guts, and he says, ‘We’re all good Christians and you’re the devil!’”
Rich, who considers himself a Libertarian, recently became an ordained minister, apparently for strategic reasons, with Universal Ministries, a non-denominational church in Illinois that offers mail-order licenses. “Next time you think you’re holier than thou, I’m holier than thou. It’s my combat gear. I’m a minister on official business the next time I get pulled over.” His eyes flash around the club and then settle on me. “It’s a moral battle—for some reason they’ve turned business into a religious experience. The two are not related whatsoever. At least what I’m doing is legal. It’s the towns who are breaking constitutional law. I’m just a businessman.”
A graduate of Cannon Falls High, where he got good grades and played raquetball in three state tournaments, Jacobsen went on to Arizona State to major in finance because, as he explains, “I kinda always liked money. I anticipated being a stockbroker, a financial advisor to a bank, but that obviously took a hard left.”
He lights a menthol UltraLite, offers me another beer. “You could be sitting there naked and I probably wouldn’t notice. And if I did, it certainly wouldn’t corrupt my mind. All this Christian crap. All this moralistic bullshit I can’t handle. Sex isn’t a sin… how do you think we got here? And these people aren’t having sex, they’re just running around naked. Hell, my driveway is one third of a mile long and I’ll get the mail naked in the summer. I don’t give a damn. We’re born naked and what the hell’s the matter with taking it off when you’re older?”
Many have stepped forward to answer that question in the 11 years that he’s been a club owner. He has been harangued in city council meetings, had a strip club burned down by an arsonist, and been followed by cops on his way from Coates to his hometown of Prescott, Wisconsin. Over the years, Rich has spent more than $500,000 in court costs, around 15 percent of his income on attorneys, and has been, for the time being, driven out of operating his neon-pink club in Coates.
The 11-year battle exhausted every legal—and sometimes illegal—tactic a city and a strip club can use. It became a costly game of cat-and-mouse, with Mayor Jack Gores and a city council largely tied to the Gores clan on one side, and out-of-towner Rich Jacobsen on the other. (The mayor hung up on me when I asked for an interview, and other Gores have declined interviews.) In 1988, the first fight was about serving liquor with nude dancing, which was upheld as constitutional in two district courts. The decision was reversed in 1994 in the Court of Appeals under the Tenth Amendment, which provides state and local government with regulatory authority known as “Police Power.” It is a doctrine considered by many lawyers to be the worst piece of constitutional illiteracy ever written. Jake’s liquor license was yanked.
While Jake’s appealed the liquor injunction, Rich allowed patrons to bring in their own beverages. But without a bottle-club license, the place was raided by 20 sheriffs, money was seized, and Rich was charged and fined. In 1994, Coates amended an ordinance that made Jake’s adult use illegal, requiring Jake’s to relocate to an agricultural area close by or move entirely by 1998. (Known as “amortizing,” this is when a municipality changes the zoning use on a building, and the owner is made to move after recouping their investment without being paid by eminent domain.) But to the chagrin of Coates, they also had a contradictory ordinance on the books allowing only agriculture uses in agriculture zones. More litigation followed.
The fight continued, and got dirty. Patrons at the nearby bar, The House of Coates, refused drinks that Rich offered, someone poisoned the cat of one of Rich’s associates, Rich threatened to fire any of his employees who went to the Coates Corner gas station. “It got pretty bad,” he admits. “I hired a private investigator to check into their backgrounds. I never used what they found, but I still may. They pissed off the wrong jackass this time.”
In 1998, Coates got further tangled up in their ordinances, which were once again found to be unconstitutional. While they now would allow non-agricultural uses in the agrizone, they required anything built there to be subdivided, with 10 percent of the property devoted to a public park. Problem was, their adult entertainment zoning ordinance said it couldn’t operate within 700 feet of a public park. More litigation ensued, with the city paying $35,000 in fines.
Hope came for Rich in 1998 when the city of St. Louis Park forced a 25-year-old concrete factory to shut down. It was the same way that Coates was attempting to amortize Jake’s. The Supreme Court refused to hear the concrete factory’s case, but the Minnesota business community was outraged that a successful business could be put under by the whim of local government. In the 1998 session, they pushed a bill through which entirely outlawed amortizing any non-conforming uses in the state of Minnesota. Jake’s had, for a priceless moment in legislative history, been supported by business peers as a victim of city zoning, welcomed into the flock of the powerful and the legally vindicated.
Rich and his attorneys had champagne on ice when, in the eleventh hour, DFL Senator John Marty from Roseville, the son of Lutheran theologian Martin Marty and a crusader against adult entertainment, added an amendment exempting adult-oriented businesses, making Minnesota the only state in the union that outlaws the amortization of non-conforming uses for every existing business except adult entertainment.
“Our wonderful governor, who has publicly admitted to patronizing a brothel in Nevada, signed off on it too,” Rich explains. “I was the test case for it in Coates, and I got to set precedence in a bad way. The minute they did to established businesses what they had been doing for years to adult businesses, the community was pissed. Could you imagine if the bill read that you couldn’t amortize any business except Lutheran churches? Everyone else is protected, but not us, because of the content of what we do. That is a bulls-eye violation of the First Amendment. And if the Supreme Court ever finds their balls, it will go down in history as one of Minnesota’s most fucked-up, prejudicial bills ever passed.”
If Richard Jacobsen is the leading villain or hero in this drama, his
principal attorney, Randall Tigue, is the director. Past president and
national chairman of the First Amendment Lawyers Association, and
former president of the Minnesota ACLU, Tigue has represented the
majority of adult businesses in the region and is often the first call
club owners have made over the last 29 years when they’re in a pinch.
Tigue is hands-down the most vocal defender of First Amendment rights
in the state. Sometimes, the messenger gets all the blame: In 1994, he
was shot for his trouble.
While 54-year-old
Tigue lives in the suburbs and has served on the board of his local
First Unitarian Church, his home plate is in court. I meet up with him
at the federal court restaurant just after he has successfully
convinced a federal judge not to dismiss his case representing Tuna’s
Bar vs. the City of Eveleth, whose counsel is provided by the League of
Minnesota Cities.
“This case is the key into your story,” he
says, a slight smile escaping his gnome beard. He paws through his
worn, outdated briefcase, eyes his cell phone, and then tries to settle
his desk frame into a cafeteria chair. “Today was the first step of
taking the bullets out of the biggest weapon cities have against strip
clubs,” he says. “I’m working on the Colt .45, the great equalizer.
That’s what the First Amendment is all about—protecting the most
unpopular beliefs. People who are for God, mother, and the American
flag don’t need protection against censorship.” Tigue explains how the
city of Eveleth had unconstitutional ordinances on its books that they
made no attempt to defend, but rather quickly jumped to amend, the
minute his suit hit the table. The city argued today that the case was
moot just because they’ve agreed not to enforce their errant doctrines.
The judge disagreed, following Tigue’s reasoning that—like the
precedent set by an American Disabilities Act plaintiff who sued for a
wheelchair ramp but was stuck with the legal bill, even though the city
rectified the problem before it went to litigation—the city of Eveleth
can’t play chicken first and then not pay later. For decades, cities
that violated constitutional law had to pay for the plaintiff’s legal
costs, but since 2001 when the Supreme Court overturned the Civil
Rights Attorney’s Fee Act, cities can disregard the law first and wait
for legal complaint second without any consequence. Civil rights has
become, in this context, largely an issue of who can afford to enforce
them. “First time a city did this,” explains Tigue, “I got screwed out
of my legal fees. Now, I’ve attempted to adjust my strategy by putting
in a damages claim. This will give the cities some incentive to stand
up to the religious nuts so they don’t pass ordinances that flat out
disregard our civil rights just so they can keep their posts.”
Tigue
also takes issue with his opponent, the somewhat sacred League of
Minnesota Cities, an independent organization that offers free lawyers
and money to paying municipal members. Tigue says the League, which
sends out sample ordinances of how to fight adult-oriented businesses
and pays for their defense, is backing towns that have, in essence,
insured themselves against committing a crime. “You can’t slap
something illegal on your books and expect to be covered. This is an
insurance company that regularly defends violations against our First
Amendment. Keep with that logic, and suicide bombers can claim life
insurance.”
Attorney Jim Thompson of Kennedy and Graven, who
has represented a number of cities for adult-use claims on behalf of
the League of Minnesota Cities, believes that Tigue’s claim that the
League unlawfully insures cities against crime is unfounded. “The
League supports public policy across the country by lawfully regulating
adult-oriented businesses. It is the right of cities to do so, and the
League appropriately supports public policy by providing for their
defense.”
Indeed, the Supreme Court has upheld the regulation of
adult-use facilities under the powerful justification that communities
can restrict First Amendment rights if they can prove that their codes
combat the alleged harmful side effects of increased crime and
decreased property values that exotic dance may encourage. In judicial
jargon, this is called the “secondary-effects doctrine.”
Here
are some excerpts of the sample city ordinances that the League of
Minnesota Cities sends out as boilerplate for concerned communities: On
Albert Lea’s books: “Sexually oriented business can have a dehumanizing
and distracting influence on young people and students attending
school, can diminish or destroy the enjoyment and family atmosphere of
persons using parks, playgrounds, forest preserves, and other public
recreational areas, can interfere with or even destroy the spiritual
experience of persons attending church, synagogue, or other places of
worship, and can interfere with or even destroy the opportunity for
solemn and respectful contemplation at cemeteries.” The city of Cloquet
agrees, adding that such businesses also exert a dehumanizing influence
on children attending daycare and people using libraries. Orono’s
ordinance expresses a common fear that “adult businesses can increase
the risk of exposure to communicable diseases, including, but not
limited to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) for which there
is currently no cure.” And although studies exist that prove the
contrary, Orono relies on data that says adult businesses increase the
incidence of “rapes, prostitution, child molestation, indecent
exposure, and other lewd and lascivious behavior.”
Park Rapids
could outlaw popular dance, with its description of sexual activity in
public as “physical contact or simulated physical contact with clothed…
pubic areas or buttocks… or breasts whether alone or between members of
the same or opposite sex.”
Bloomington reserves the right to
deny massage therapists a license if they are “not of good moral
character and repute.” And most cities have issue with displaying
“human excretion” including “menstruation” in public. I have to get out
my dictionary when city ordinances repeatedly refer to the social
dangers of “anilingus, buggery, coprophagy, coprophilia, cunnilingus,
fellatio, necrophilia, pederasty, piquerism, sapphism, zooerasty.”
In
its ordinances, the city of Stillwater makes the dubious claim that the
sex-crime rate in the vicinity of adult business is “on an average six
times” worse.
Randall Tigue yanks at his tie as if the air in
the federal building has gone thin when I ask him about secondary
effects. “The idea that strip clubs hurt a community is mythological.
The Roman Catholic Church has paid out $100 million more in damages for
priests sexually molesting children than the adult entertainment
industry, which hasn’t had to pay a dime. You have absolutely no
evidence that strip clubs do a damn thing to children. But you have all
kinds of evidence that there are priests who have done things to
children. Why have offending Catholic churches never been required to
move to the industrial or agricultural zones and limit their hours of
operation or been amortized out of existence?”
Minnesota cities,
however rural, have based their “proof” on studies conducted in urban
cities. Many believe that these studies do not meet the basic
requirements for the acceptance of scientific evidence established by
professional academic standards. Judith Hanna, senior research scholar
at the University of Maryland, has risked her Ivy League Ph.D. in
anthropology to defend exotic dance as a rightful art form. “These
studies are not valid, reliable or relevant to time, place, or
circumstance. The few studies that are scientifically credible
demonstrate either no negative secondary effects associated with adult
businesses, or, in fact, positive effects such as economic development.”
Hanna,
who is regularly called upon as an expert witness in strip-club cases,
says, “There is absolutely no discernable evidence that exotic dance is
a prelude to prostitution, that it attracts drug use, that it decreases
property values, that it causes disease, or that it exploits, oppresses
or degrades performers. Exotic dance is a lightning rod for the
Religious Right, certain feminists, and the misinformed.” Study it, as
Hanna has for over eight years, and the whole basis of secondary
effects is moot.