More charges filed on strip club

Following close study of videotapes featuring female strippers in action, the Butte County District Attorney’s Office said this week that it will file 70 new charges of prostitution and pimping on exotic dancers and a manager employed by the former First Amendment Club.

The charges stem from a months-long investigation of the club, which was bought out by a Sacramento chain recently and is now called Centerfolds. District Attorney Mike Ramsey said that the Sheriff’s Department deputies assigned to investigate the club used hidden videotapes during some of their visits to the club. Those tapes, he said, reveal “a whole lot very explicit” of dancer-customer contact.

Although none of the tapes reveals oral sex or intercourse, Ramsey said that the explicit nature of the contact qualifies as prostitution.

“These were lewd acts done for money,” Ramsey said, “ … and that is prostitution.”

The offensive acts, he said, involved the dancers accepting money to place their vaginas and breasts on the customer’s faces. Ramsey assigned a charge for each time the hidden video camera caught each of 10 dancers—some of whom still work at the club—taking money for a lewd act. In all, the charges add up to 60.

He also charged Steve Clark, the club’s manager, with 10 counts of pimping—one for each of the women he supervises.

When asked if his office or the Sheriff’s Department is mounting the same type of exhaustive, on-site investigation of Centerfolds as they did the First Amendment Club, Ramsey just shrugged.

"I wouldn’t say if we were," he replied.