Porn’s biggest know-it-all blowhard embarrasses himself…again

As many of you may know, there’s a fella out in Georgia named Mike South who fancies himself the ultimate adult business insider.

In reality, South is guy who failed as a porn agent in the 1990s, and got fired from his only professional directing gig before the movie was even released, but managed to win an AVN award for Best Amateur Video before settling in to a career as porn’s least factual gossip blogger.

One of South’s hallmarks is his citing of anonymous, supposedly well-placed sources for his rants.

In February, South emailed Christian Mann — a 30-year veteran of the adult business who currently serves as general manager for John Stagliano‘s company, Evil Angel — with a kind of friendly warning.

The backstory of this email is fascinating: the previous September, Mann had written South to set him straight on some matters he had gotten egregiously wrong (repeatedly) on his gossip site.

Naturally, South refused to run Mann’s email correcting him. But TRPWL did.

Here is Mike South’s recent email to Christian Mann:

From: Mike South <mikesouth@mikesouth.com>
Date: Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 12:10 PM
Subject: OSHA
To: Christian Mann <cmann@evilangel.com>

I know you think i am and enemy and as far as the fsc goes that is correct BUT

I have credible info that Kink was targeted by OSHA partially because of Cameron bay and partially because of Peters position on The FSC Board

I also have info that EA is next because of your seat on The FSC Board

Do as you will with this info…just a heads up….

best Wishes man

South

Sounds reasonable, right? — South hears from one of his ‘credible’ sources that Evil Angel is going to be targeted with a Cal/OSHA investigation, and he quietly gives them a heads-up. Sounds downright neighborly. Semi-literate, perhaps, but neighborly.

Except for one little thing… Evil Angel had already been under investigation since August 2013.

If South had any reliable sources on the matter, obviously they would have known this.

Moreover, if his ‘sources’, or South himself, had done a simple Establishment Search on the OSHA website back in February, they could have seen the inspection report.

The obvious conclusion is that Mike South’s sources are either stupid or non-existent.

Last week, South ran a story on his site slamming adult producer ATK. The piece mentioned a female performer and cited her Twitter account as the basis to conclude that ATK had flown three girls to Las Vegas to shoot, and put them up at the Bellagio.

When the performer notified South via Twitter that he had made assumptions and gotten the story wrong, South’s limp-wristed demurrer was that the post had been a reader email… and unless she was willing to go on record (whatever that means — she tweeted him publicly) the story would stand.

TRPWL made two phone calls and was able to verify from separate sources that: there were not three models, they did not stay at the Bellagio (they merely visited the fountains there), and they did not fly.

This process literally took three minutes.

The fact that South remains unwilling to do legitimate fact-checking or even to correct his false and misleading report should come as no surprise — he does it all the time. Remember when he posted an escort ad of a woman who happened to use the same name as one of the HIV-infected performers from last year?

The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that South doesn’t care; rather, he wants to muddy up Google searches with negative information about people, often outing their legal names as well.

He’d rather lie.

The irony is, he’s still pretending to be better than a certain other axe-grinding crackpot who lives thousands of miles from porn valley yet feels compelled to tell everyone in the adult world how to do their jobs.

Mike South and Donny Long aren’t two sides of the same coin, they’re the same side of the same coin.

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