Deadspin by Diana Mokovitz
March 27, 2019
A group of media companies—mostly publishers of Florida-based newspapers, as well as a few national outlets—filed a motion on Tuesday to intervene in more than a dozen cases of soliciting prostitution, whose defendants include New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. The motion was necessary because the same group of defendants filed their own request last week to prevent the release of videos recorded by police inside Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, Fla.
In their motion, lawyers for journalists at the Associated Press, ESPN, Gannett (owner of Treasure Coast Newspapers), GateHouse Media (owner of the Palm Beach Post), McClatchy (owner of the Miami Herald), the New York Times, Orlando Sentinel Communications, the Sun-Sentinel company, and TEGNA (owners of WTSP-TV and WTLV/WJXX) explain the many reasons why the massage parlor videos are public records. I’ll go into detail later in this post, but the gist is this—the law in Florida designates these videos (as well as many other police records) as public record and has done so for many years, long before Kraft’s AFC Championship pregame visit for what, according to police documents, sounds like oral sex, followed by a hand job at the same massage parlor the next day.
