Last modified on Mon 22 Mar 2021 16.09 EDT
Sometime in the early 2010s, the porn actor James Deen made a film with a fan whom he called Girl X. He would do this now and then; fans would write to him, wanting to have sex with him, or he would put out a call to “Do a Scene with James Deen”, and the results would go up on his website.
In an interview in May 2017, only a few months before the media would be overwhelmed with discussions of assault and harassment by Harvey Weinstein and others – and only two years after Deen himself was accused of (but not charged with) multiple assaults (which he denied) – he said: “I have a ‘Do a scene with James Deen’ contest, where women can submit an application, and then, after a very long talk and months of me saying, you know, ‘Everyone’s going to find out, it’s going to affect your future’, and trying to talk them out of it kind of, then we shoot a scene.”
In July 2018 Black was found guilty of two counts of assault occasioning bodily harm and one count of rape in Brisbane’s district court. He was sentenced to five years in jail, with the sentence to be suspended after 27 months.
When the Guardian contacted One Nation spokesman James Ashby about Black’s employment in January this year, he said he was “not working for us” before hanging up the phone. In a follow up text message, Ashby, who sits on the party’s national executive, said Black “no longer works for us”.
Ashby did not respond to follow up questions, including the extent of Hanson’s role in bringing him back into the One Nation fold or why it was deemed appropriate to rehire him.