US: Court throws out Bel Ami’s legal case over their models being ‘thrown off’ a gay cruise

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A legal case brought by gay porn producers Bel Ami against the gay cruise company RSVP has been dismissed by a judge in a Los Angeles federal court.

In June 2012, RSVP hired a collection of Bel Ami porn stars to “mix and mingle” with paying passengers on a cruise operated by Dutch company Holland America through the Mediterranean. Bel Ami says the models were told to treat it as a “vacation including food and safe passage from Barcelona around the Western Mediterranean and back to Barcelona”.

Bel Ami says they were told they would be permitted to pose for non-sexually explicit photographs and film a documentary during the cruise. It said in its court filings that the team were removed from the ship in un-gay friendly Tunisia. The porn company claimed that the models were getting “too much attention” from guests and that a secret agreement for them to mingle with the customers would be discovered.

RSVP said that such permission wasn’t granted to film and photograph and that they were being disruptive to guests. The company says its operator Holland America asked the models to leave the ship but not necessarily in Tunisia if immediate flights could not be arranged. The cruise company said that the models left the ship knowing that they could have remained on it should they agree to no longer act in a “disruptive” way.

The court case was dismissed on the grounds that it revolved around the citizens of foreign countries that took place outside of the USA and therefore the court had no jurisdiction over the dispute.

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