CORTLAND, NY – An unsolved mystery surrounded Cortland County’s district attorney last year.
Ten days after Mark Suben was re-elected, he admitted at a news conference that he’d lied to reporters before the election. He was, in fact, in adult porn movies in the 1970s.
But who was the anonymous tipster who’d connected Suben to the porn actor using the name Gus Thomas?
Before he confessed publicly, Suben accused his Republican opponent, Keith Dayton, of spreading a false rumor as part of a smear campaign. Dayton denied any involvement in uncovering the secret kept by Suben, who was the Democratic incumbent.
This week, the guy who connected the dots and forced Suben’s hand revealed himself to syracuse.com and The Post-Standard. It was Dayton’s brother, Kevin Dayton.
The Dayton brothers have been estranged for a few years. They rarely speak. Both of them say Keith Dayton was completely unaware of what his brother was doing until last week.
Kevin Dayton, 42, was a lawyer suspended from practice over his failure to pay child support payments. He was homeless, living out of his law office.
About 10 days before last year’s DA’s election, Kevin Dayton was on the verge of posting a video on YouTube that presented all the evidence he had linking Suben to porn. Then two Ontario County sheriff’s deputies knocked on Kevin’s door, he said.
CORTLAND, NY – An unsolved mystery surrounded Cortland County’s district attorney last year.
Ten days after Mark Suben was re-elected, he admitted at a news conference that he’d lied to reporters before the election. He was, in fact, in adult porn movies in the 1970s.
But who was the anonymous tipster who’d connected Suben to the porn actor using the name Gus Thomas?
Before he confessed publicly, Suben accused his Republican opponent, Keith Dayton, of spreading a false rumor as part of a smear campaign. Dayton denied any involvement in uncovering the secret kept by Suben, who was the Democratic incumbent.
This week, the guy who connected the dots and forced Suben’s hand revealed himself to syracuse.com and The Post-Standard. It was Dayton’s brother, Kevin Dayton.
The Dayton brothers have been estranged for a few years. They rarely speak. Both of them say Keith Dayton was completely unaware of what his brother was doing until last week.
Kevin Dayton, 42, was a lawyer suspended from practice over his failure to pay child support payments. He was homeless, living out of his law office.
About 10 days before last year’s DA’s election, Kevin Dayton was on the verge of posting a video on YouTube that presented all the evidence he had linking Suben to porn. Then two Ontario County sheriff’s deputies knocked on Kevin’s door, he said.
Cortland County DA’s porn career
Kevin Dayton and Klaire Butler talk about outing Cortland County DA Mark Suben as a former adult porn actor.
They arrested him for not appearing in court on late child support payments. He posted bail and was ready to come home and get back to posting the video. But he needed someone to drive two hours to pick him up and bring him back to his home in Groton, he said.
He couldn’t find anyone, so he didn’t make it home until the Friday before the election — too late for the video to get picked up by the media, he said.
“I think that cost him the election,” Kevin said last week about his brother.
Kevin started investigating Suben in the fall of last year, when his teenage son told him he’d seen a photo of a porn star that people were saying was the DA.
Kevin found it ridiculous that a former porn star would run for public office. So he set out to disprove his son.
After seeing there was a Mark Suben linked to the Gus Thomas on the internet site IMDB, Kevin turned to a friend who was savvy with internet searches.
The friend, Klaire Butler, had had run-ins with Cortland County child protective services workers and was eager to turn up proof of any kind of scandal involving a county government official.
She quickly located small-town newspaper stories from the 1960s and 1970s about Suben. One of them mentioned he was an actor whose resume included “underground movies.”
Kevin Dayton, writing under the name Jake Avonas, started emailing a reporter at The Post-Standard in late October 2012 with evidence of Suben’s connection to Gus Thomas.
Suben repeatedly denied to the reporter having been in adult movies and threatened to sue the newspaper if the story were published. He said a story before the election would mean certain defeat. Lacking sufficient proof, the newspaper did not publish the story.
Suben defeated Keith Dayton by 2,300 votes.
Nine days later, Kevin Dayton and Butler posted their video on Youtube (see below, but be warned — it’s cleaned up for YouTube but does contain adult scenes) and sent the link to The Post-Standard and to WSTM-TV Channel 3. The TV station posted a story on its website the next day. Suben quickly confessed at a news conference that he’d lied, and the story drew national attention.
Suben was unaware of who had linked him to Gus Thomas until a reporter called him last week.
“I’m glad to know who it is,” he said. “But I don’t have any relationship with Kevin Dayton, so I don’t know why he would have any animosity on his own toward me.”
Kevin Dayton said his motivation in tracking down Suben’s porn history was not out any allegiance to his brother. Both say they’ve been distant for years. Nor was it out of a vendetta against the DA, whom he doesn’t recall ever going head-to-head with in court.
“He’s always seemed like a good guy to me,” Kevin said. “Even now, I don’t necessarily think he should’ve resigned.”
It was more about knowing something’s true and hearing a public official lie about it, he said.
“It was like Ronald Reagan saying, ‘I wasn’t in Bedtime for Bonzo,'” he said. “It was annoying that someone would lie so bluntly and run for public office.”
Keith Dayton said he can’t control what his brother does.
“The problem is, no matter how many times I deny and he denies it, people are going to speculate” about his involvement in outing Suben, Keith Dayton said. “I’m still a public figure in Cortland. It’s disappointing that I have to address this when I had nothing to do with it.”
Keith Dayton, a lawyer in private practice in Cortland, said he plans to run for DA again in 2016.
Suben said the porn story hasn’t been dogging him over the past year.
“It’s ancient history to me,” Suben said of the porn story. “It’s of no significance in my life. The issue is long since gone. It’s a thing that’s over, that’s quite completely over as far as I can determine.”
