Judge Bill Pryor,
at badpuppy.com
The tip came in fall 1997, several months after Alabama Governor Fob James had appointed Pryor as attorney general. Someone had seen the photos at badpuppy.com, based in Cocoa, Florida."An informant called and said, 'You aren't going to believe this,'" recalled a retired agent with the Alabama Bureau of Investigation (ABI). "He said Bill Pryor was being displayed at a gay Web site out of Florida. So I looked it up, and there he was, with his name on it."They obviously were old photographs, but it was gay porn. A coworker and I made some copies of it, and [a lawyer] presented it to a Republican [politician], who went to Pryor with it. That next day, it was killed from the Web site."The former ABI agent said he had no doubt the photo was of the Bill Pryor, who now sits on the U.S. Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. President George W. Bush made a recess appointment on Pryor in 2003, and the Senate narrowly confirmed him in 2005.How did Pryor react upon seeing the photos? Our source says: "Pryor expressed surprise, of course, and I was told he said, 'That's not me, that's not me.' But Bill Pryor is hard to fake a photo of, and it had his name on it."
Why would it be hard to fake a photo of Bill Pryor? We can think of at least one reason: Photos of Pryor, taken over a number of years, indicate the judge has strabismus, which is the medical term for a crossed or misaligned eye. The young man in the porn photo clearly has strabismus. Former Alabama Attorney General Jeff Sessions was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1996, and Gov. James began deliberations to appoint his successor late that year. Pryor was appointed in early 1997, and the gay porn photos surfaced a few months later.
Even though he had served as AG only a few months, Pryor already had made it known in political circles that he someday wanted to become a federal judge. That is what prompted the ABI to investigate the gay porn photos. "He was lobbying for [a judgeship]," the retired agent said. "Even though being homosexual isn't illegal, it's an issue that conceivably could result in him being blackmailed as a judge. We thought, yes, there is something to it here."How many people in Alabama have seen the photos? The answer to that is not clear, but we've heard from a number of insiders who claim to have seen them. Our sources say the spread at badpuppy.com included eight or nine photos of Pryor. The photo that we have run, and has been picked up at numerous Web sites, definitely is not the only one out there. The retired ABI agent said he showed the photos to a former reporter for The Birmingham News. "I showed them to her to get an opinion, and she was in shock over it."Did she have any doubt about who it was? "She did not, nor did we."Anyone who has followed the Alabama political scene over the past 20 years or so will not be surprised to learn that The Birmingham News never reported the story--even though one of its reporters immediately recognized that the young man in the porn photos was prominent Republican Bill Pryor.
