The three young guys responsible for a disgustingly popular Bum Fights video series were sentenced to a $500 fine, 280 hours of community service, and three years’ probation Friday. I couldn’t find more detail than the Mercury News had in a brief mention but I don’t understand how they got off so lightly–they made a deal to plead guilty to a single count of conspiring to stage an illegal fight. The videos they produced sold only 300,000 copies and also featured homeless men and women performing such entertaining acts as ripping out teeth and ramming themselves into doors.
Let’s jut make a conservative guess that these guys (Ryan McPherson, Zachary Bubeck, and Daniel Tanner) made about $7 per video net of production and marketing costs, or about $2.1 million total; not unreasonable conjecture when the tapes and DVDs sold for something like $19.95 each. And in exchange for all the harm they did to the featured players, the DA in San Diego made them cough up a big $1500 without even putting a felony on their records.
I wonder, though, what the police and DA would have done if they came upon two of these poor people fighting over a bottle of alcohol or a nice sleeping bag. Say a knockdown, dragged out affair in a visible location with one of the men really doing damage to the other. Somehow that sounds like the kind of situation where the “winner” would get a real prize: felony assault and one to three years in a state prison.
So Ryan, Zachary, and Daniel ought to thank their lucky stars that business-oriented crimes are seen as much less important, especially when the defendants have some cash to mount a good defense. Fortunately for sanity, these clowns also face civil lawsuits from some of the performers where one can hope they’ll have to disgorge their ill-gotten gains.
BillSaysThis 