I like to think I’m a very good Airbnb / Stayz tenant. I am clean and quiet. I wash and put away my dishes. I sometimes leave a little bunch of flowers. And, most importantly, I keep my filming of hardcore pornography to an absolute minimum.
But not all tenants are like me. Which is what US artist Leah Bassett discovered when she rented out her place in the swanky Massachusetts enclave Martha’s Vineyard between October 2014 and May 2015 to a photographer and videographer named Joshua Spafford.
Sounds innocuous enough, but according to The Vineyard Gazette, Spafford was in the employ of one Monica Jensen (aka porn star Nica Noelle) at the time, and the pair had plans to film a large amount of staged banging for Mile High Media, an adult film production company.
Neglecting to tell Bassett what they were planning to use her house for, they got down to business for several months, until Spafford informed Bassett that he had vacated the premises. The Vineyard Gazette reports that Bassett sent her parents around to check on it, and they were “shocked by the deplorable state [and] condition” of the house.
When Bassett returned to the house in May, she found that the physical damages to the property was even worse than her parents had told her. A civil case suit filed by Bassett in the US District Court in Massachusetts states that she then “independently made the highly disturbing discovery that her personal residence had been used during the leasehold for the commercial production of graphic pornography.”
The suit goes on to claim that the tenants “utilised nearly every room of her home for their porn production including shooting scenes on top of her dining room table, and in her bathrooms, basement, and on her sofas”. Bassett also claims they moved around artwork she had created to “aesthetically enhance scenes” and even deliberately used decorative hand-sewn bedroom pillows that Bassett had designed herself.
Not the pillows. Anything but the pillows.
Bassett is suing several defendants including Mile High Media, Jensen and Spafford for property damage and emotional distress, saying that she’s been seeing a therapist and has left the home vacant ever since, too scared to rent it out to strangers ever again. She’s also claiming damages under the copyright act for her artwork, which keeps popping up in porn films.
She says that the violated the terms of the rental agreement, while The Vineyard Gazette reports that Jensen and Mile High have denied any unfair or deceptive practices and have refused to meet her monetary demands.
The lesson here? Well, there’s a few, but my takeaway is if you’re gonna shoot porn in your holiday rental, maybe hide the artworks.
