Reader Email: Mike South Falsehoods of the Week

Reader email, received today —

I’m trusting you not to tell anyone where this came from, but I was just reading Mike South and thought it would be fun to write up his falsehoods of the week. There are so many of them!

Sep 5: “Contrary to what you might read, you don’t get tested before you’re allowed to work”- FALSE. Whether you are brand new to the industry or you are an industry veteran, you can’t work in a scene until you are tested.

Sep 4: “ATMLA is the only LATATA agency that is not charging the 20 dollar premium for 14 day tests and passing it on to talent to help cover the cost of testing” – FALSE. Although it is something that agencies have talked about doing, several agencies are not charging $20 to producers to help performers pay for testing. [This is an issue that TRPWL covered nearly a year ago. In fact, the $20 testing fee has been the single-most divisive issue in LATATA history, according to a  spokesperson for the group. — MW]

Sep 4: “I am considering purchasing a house in L.A. maybe in the Valley and hiring someone as a live in house keeper and opening a model house”. RIDICULOUS – To purchase a house you would have to be able to put 20% down. Even if Mike was going to buy a low end house, he would need $100,000 as a down payment. Does anyone think that Mike South has $100 in the bank, forget $100,000?

Even if he bought one, would he really charge less than the $35 that everyone else is charging? In a 3 bedroom house, you could only fit 4 girls (assuming one room is for the person running the model house). If you filled all 4 slots, all 30 days, that’s $4,200, enough to cover mortgage payment, electric, insurance, property taxes, other expenses. But how often would you fill all 4 slots, every day of the month? There would be a lot of months where didn’t make enough to cover expenses. He could get a bigger house with more rooms, but that would increase the $100,000 down payment that he already probably doesn’t have. It would also increase all his expenses and he still probably wouldn’t be able to fill all the slots.

Bottom line: that’s just something Mike said to make girls think he’s more than just someone who sits in Podunk Georgia and spews bullshit. In reality, he’s just an industry outsider who sits in Podunk Georgia and spews bullshit. It’s highly unlikely that he’s considering purchasing a model house.

August 28: “Apparently there has been another HIV positive affiliated with Kink.”- FALSE. Kink had nothing to do with it. [Moreover, at that stage there would be absolutely no way to know where someone had potentially been infected unless the performer had only had sex while on set for that producer, or there was a second identified case with whom the first performer had worked for that producer. — MW]

August 28:- His follow up report-  “Word coming through is that it is a female performer and it was indeed a Kink.com shoot” (about the HIV positive performer). – IMPRESSIVELY FALSE. He confirmed a made-up lie with another made-up lie. Kink had nothing to do with it.

August 29: “ I hope this turns out to be a false positive but the fact that it has gotten this far would seem to indicate that it is unlikely”. WRONG ASSUMPTION. The likelihood of it being a false positive didn’t change during the time she tested and the time the results came back from re-testing. A false positive was relatively likely at that point, and turned out to be the case.