Luke Ford - Professional

Professional

Ford studied economics at UCLA but did not graduate. Instead, he worked as an investigative journalist for southern California newspapers and at a radio station. In 1995, he became intrigued with the lack of journalistic coverage of the pornography industry, and started to write a book, which would become A History of X.

In January 1996, after researching porn for a year, Ford wrote, produced, directed and acted in What Women Want, a pornographic video (not related to the Mel Gibson movie of the same name). It was not a success. Ford is credited as "Dick Dundee".

In 1997, Ford started his pornography gossip website, LukeFord.com. It was criticized for being badly organized, but contained a large amount of information; Ford would take a tape recorder nearly wherever he went, and transcribed many conversations.

Ford exposed a 1998 HIV outbreak which infected an indeterminate number of actors (including Tricia Devereaux, Brooke Ashley and Kimberly Jade) who had been working with actor Marc Wallice. Ashley eventually sued Wallice, claiming that she had been infected on the set of The World's Biggest Anal Gangbang.

Discretion has never been a Ford strong suit. In his own words "I'm not a businessman. I'm not a conventional journalist. I'm a story teller/entertainer/lunatic." Porn stars such as Asia Carrera and Brandy Alexandre have criticized errors and inaccuracy on his site. But its impact was undeniable, and he was referred to as the Matt Drudge of porn.

Ford was sued for defamation multiple times by people in the porn industry, including by RJB Telecom, whom he (as well as the Federal Trade Commission) accused of dishonesty; Christi Lake, whom he mislabeled in a bestiality photo; and Laurie Holmes (widow of John Holmes), for accusations of prostitution on the set. Ford has said that he has been sued five times to date: one suit was dropped, another was thrown out, another was settled when his insurance company paid $100,000, and the last two were settled when he removed some of his statements without making a retraction. Wired called him "The Most Hated Man in Web Porn". He was physically assaulted by Mike Albo, an editor for Hustler.

In August 2001, after urgings of his rabbi, Ford sold his main website,lukeford.com to Netvideogirls.com for $25,000, and created lukeford.net which avoided pornography, and focused more on Jewish issues. One year later, after nearly going broke, he returned to his pornographic roots by starting lukeisback.com with many of his old archives. On 23 October 2007, Ford announced he had sold lukeisback.com and its contents for an undisclosed sum to an undisclosed party. "Any writing I do on the porn industry from now on will be for publications with no porn advertising," Ford said. Those owners (whose names have not been divulged) ran the site until June 2008 but walked away from the site saying that writing the site was too much work for the money earned. It was sold a second time, with the new owner being long-time industry observer Cindy Loftus.

AVN Hall of Famer Bill Margold has said that "Luke Ford is exactly what we deserve... Luke's not really a blogger as much as is an internet journalist".