BLOGGER DISHES OUT NAKED TRUTH ON PORN.

Byline: TONY CASTRO

Staff Writer

From the fury and intensity with which Luke Ford is reviled in the American porn industry, you would think he's with the FBI or a rabid evangelist crusading against any incursion on family values.

Ford, though, is a lowly author who over the past 10 years has made a career of writing and blogging on pornography -- and who, on any day, wields an extraordinary influence over the industry unmatched by any news organization.

"I'm not a crusader against the industry," says Ford, 40, who blogs at www.LukeIsBack.com after making a name for himself at

www.LukeFord.com. "But there is very little filter between me and my readers. There is no glorification or celebration of the industry, just fact-based reporting on issues and stories that the industry would just as soon not have made public."

Over the years, Ford has broken the stories of four porn actresses and one porn actor who tested positive for HIV, a health scare that temporarily shut down film production in the industry and led to some voluntary safeguards and monthly HIV testing.

"Luke Ford (was) way out front with the HIV porn story," acknowledged former New York Times business writer Nick Ravo.

There have been other stories that Ford has been "way out front" with as well: the role of the Mafia in pornography up until the late 1990s, especially in distribution, and Internet credit-card scams of some pornography firms.

"I've always looked for important stories that deserved to be told," he said. "I've never lived for the pornography life. I haven't watched a porn movie in eight years. I don't review porn movies. I don't have pornography in my apartment.

"It's never been a lifestyle I've lived."

For Ford, though, his coverage of the industry has not been without its drawbacks -- the biggest of them personal and spiritual -- that culminate a journey of discovery, growth and heartbreak.

The son of a strict Seventh-day Adventist Australian evangelist, Ford became a convert to Orthodox Judaism in the 1990s, about the same time he began researching a book on pornography and began writing on his first Web site about news and gossip in that industry.

Posting porn stars' real names, writing about the role of the mob and revealing which actors had had cosmetic surgery, the site became an immediate, controversial sensation in the industry.

"The X-rated industry prefers to be a legendary milieu rather than a fact-oriented milieu," says Bill "The Bear" Margold, a former actor who founded an industry support group with a 24-hour hotline and is looked upon as an informal industry spokesman.

"Luke Ford is exactly what we deserve. ... Luke's not really a blogger as much as he is an Internet journalist."

Former Times reporter Ravo agrees.

"He was way ahead of the curve in critiquing, in his own comic way, the pornography industry, and -- Internet historians of the future should note this -- he was one of the first bloggers in any field. He was doing it before they even called it blogging. He doesn't get credit for that."

But Ford has also sometimes had sloppiness in his reporting -- once misidentifying porn actress Christi Lake in a bestiality photograph and another time accusing the widow of legendary actor John Holmes of prostitution on the set, which led to lawsuits.

But for him, those weren't the most troublesome aspects of his career as a porn industry blogger.

Ford had kept his professional life a secret from Young Israel of Century City, the strictly observant orthodox synagogue where he studied Talmud every morning, and the eventual revelation led to his embarrassing ouster from the congregation in 2001.

"You can imagine how humiliated we feel now," Young Israel's Rabbi Elazar Mushkin told Ford. "I brought you into my own house for Passover and introduced you to my family."

It was the second time Ford had been kicked out of a congregation. Four years earlier, not long after he had begun the Web site, he had been booted out of another temple. Since then, two other synagogues have removed Ford from their congregations.

Those incidents led to him writing "A Rebel Without a Shul," one of several self-published books. His book on the pornography industry, "A History of X, 100 Years of Sex in Film," was published by Prometheus Books.

In 2001, Ford finally gave in to the wishes of his rabbi and sold LukeFord.com to the Web site Netvideogirls.com for $25,000, roughly half of what he had been making annually through the sale of ads on his own blog.

Ford immersed himself in his religion and into a new nonporn blog -- www.LukeFord.net -- specializing in interviews with newsmakers and his personal experiences as a modern-day Orthodox Jew.

And he almost went broke.

Even living spartanly in a then-$400-a-month bachelor pad in a predominantly Jewish area south of Beverly Hills, Ford's only income came from freelance writing, his books and occasional consultant jobs related to the porn industry for documentaries, for CBS's "60 Minutes" and the tabloid TV show "A Current Affair."

So in 2004, Ford returned to reporting on pornography, creating yet another blog -- www.LukeIsBack.com -- while trying to buy back his LukeFord.com domain name, which by then had been sold to yet another buyer.

"For Luke, there are no sacred cows," Margold said. "He takes no prisoners."

tony.castro(at)dailynews.com

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CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Controversial blogger Luke Ford covers the porn industry.

(2 -- color) Luke Ford interviews porn star Hannah Harper at the XBIZ Awards in Hollywood.

Michael Owen Baker/Staff Photographer