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Phil Harvey, who battled government over his sex-product business, dies at 83
Phil Harvey, who battled government over his sex-product business, dies at 83
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Obituaries
Phil Harvey, who battled government over his sex-product business, dies at 83
By Louie Estrada
February 4, 2022 at 9:51 p.m. EST
In the early 1970s, Phil Harvey was a public health graduate student at the University of North Carolina when, as part of his thesis work on family planning administration, he started a mail-order condom business. He took out ads in college newspapers highlighting the risks of unprotected sex. ... The business, which began as an experiment to test novel ways of distributing contraceptives, was later named Adam & Eve. Under Mr. Harvey and his Chapel Hill classmate Timothy Black, it became a multimillion-dollar company specializing in sexually oriented merchandise.
Headquartered in Hillsborough, N.C., Adam & Eve’s parent company, PHE Inc., generates more than $200 million in annual revenue and employs more than 350 workers. About 12 million customers receive its catalogue of products, which includes lingerie, massage oils, erotic books and magazines, X-rated movies and sex toys. ... Mr. Harvey, who used his fortune to support sexual- and reproductive-health programs overseas as a philanthropist, died Dec. 2 at his home in Cabin John, Md. He was 83. ... The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Harriet Lesser.
Eloquent, Harvard-educated and favoring Hush Puppies shoes, Mr. Harvey did not fit the stereotypical image of a sex merchant. He positioned himself as a defender of civil liberties after government prosecutors tried to jail him and close his adult novelty business in the 1980s. ... There were legal risks from the early days of his enterprise. Shipping condoms through the mail violated a rarely invoked 19th-century regulation — often dubbed the Comstock Act — that prohibited the use of post offices to send obscene materials and articles of “immoral use.”
Eradicating the distribution of pornography became a top priority of the Moral Majority, a conservative organization led by televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr., that helped propel Ronald Reagan twice to the White House in the 1980s. Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese III, led a commission that proposed the creation of a team of federal attorneys to pursue obscenity cases. ... Using statutes designed to take down racketeers, the Justice Department’s National Obscenity Enforcement Unit helped secure almost 20 convictions of adult-themed mail-order companies around the country. As Mr. Harvey liked to point out, the government’s success helped boost Adam & Eve’s profits by forcing many of its competitors out of business. ... Adam & Eve had been one of the unit’s first targets. In 1986, law enforcement agents raided the North Carolina offices and warehouse of PHE Inc. Mr. Harvey was charged in Alamance County, N.C., with nine state felony counts of disseminating obscene videos and sexual accoutrements, which carried a maximum of 40 years in prison. At the end of his trial, the jury deliberated for less than an hour before acquitting him on all charges.
{snip}
“It will be argued that people are sinful, that the government must make ‘bad’ people less bad by forbidding behavior that is held to be improper }or immoral by a majority of citizens,” Mr. Harvey wrote in his {2001 book, “The Government vs. Erotica: The Siege of Adam & Eve.”} “But when private peaceful behavior is interfered with coercively by the government, it is coercers who are behaving immorally.”
Phil Harvey, who battled government over his sex-product business, dies at 83
By Louie Estrada
February 4, 2022 at 9:51 p.m. EST
In the early 1970s, Phil Harvey was a public health graduate student at the University of North Carolina when, as part of his thesis work on family planning administration, he started a mail-order condom business. He took out ads in college newspapers highlighting the risks of unprotected sex. ... The business, which began as an experiment to test novel ways of distributing contraceptives, was later named Adam & Eve. Under Mr. Harvey and his Chapel Hill classmate Timothy Black, it became a multimillion-dollar company specializing in sexually oriented merchandise.
Headquartered in Hillsborough, N.C., Adam & Eve’s parent company, PHE Inc., generates more than $200 million in annual revenue and employs more than 350 workers. About 12 million customers receive its catalogue of products, which includes lingerie, massage oils, erotic books and magazines, X-rated movies and sex toys. ... Mr. Harvey, who used his fortune to support sexual- and reproductive-health programs overseas as a philanthropist, died Dec. 2 at his home in Cabin John, Md. He was 83. ... The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Harriet Lesser.
Eloquent, Harvard-educated and favoring Hush Puppies shoes, Mr. Harvey did not fit the stereotypical image of a sex merchant. He positioned himself as a defender of civil liberties after government prosecutors tried to jail him and close his adult novelty business in the 1980s. ... There were legal risks from the early days of his enterprise. Shipping condoms through the mail violated a rarely invoked 19th-century regulation — often dubbed the Comstock Act — that prohibited the use of post offices to send obscene materials and articles of “immoral use.”
Eradicating the distribution of pornography became a top priority of the Moral Majority, a conservative organization led by televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr., that helped propel Ronald Reagan twice to the White House in the 1980s. Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese III, led a commission that proposed the creation of a team of federal attorneys to pursue obscenity cases. ... Using statutes designed to take down racketeers, the Justice Department’s National Obscenity Enforcement Unit helped secure almost 20 convictions of adult-themed mail-order companies around the country. As Mr. Harvey liked to point out, the government’s success helped boost Adam & Eve’s profits by forcing many of its competitors out of business. ... Adam & Eve had been one of the unit’s first targets. In 1986, law enforcement agents raided the North Carolina offices and warehouse of PHE Inc. Mr. Harvey was charged in Alamance County, N.C., with nine state felony counts of disseminating obscene videos and sexual accoutrements, which carried a maximum of 40 years in prison. At the end of his trial, the jury deliberated for less than an hour before acquitting him on all charges.
{snip}
“It will be argued that people are sinful, that the government must make ‘bad’ people less bad by forbidding behavior that is held to be improper }or immoral by a majority of citizens,” Mr. Harvey wrote in his {2001 book, “The Government vs. Erotica: The Siege of Adam & Eve.”} “But when private peaceful behavior is interfered with coercively by the government, it is coercers who are behaving immorally.”
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