Reporter Who Tried To Expose Nica Noelle Reveals New Details On How She Kept Her Incest Porn Movies A Secret From The Homeowner She Was Defrauding
As Str8UpGayPorn first reported in June of 2016, disgruntled gay porn star Billy Santoro tried to get director Nica Noelle’s Icon Male porn shoots in Martha’s Vineyard shut down in early 2015 by contacting a local reporter at The Martha’s Vineyard Times and informing him of the disastrous working conditions on Noelle’s sets. Santoro later forwarded his emails to the MV Times to Str8UpGayPorn, and two of them can be seen below:
As we now know, the Icon Male porn movies were being filmed by Noelle in a rental home without the property owner’s consent or knowledge, and that owner is suing Noelle and Icon Male for civil violation of the RICO act (for racketeering and corruption), civil fraud, trespassing, infliction of emotional and mental distress, and copyright infringement. As if the plaintiff’s case against Nica Noelle and Icon Male couldn’t be any stronger, the reporter who Billy Santoro contacted at the MV Times, Nelson Sigelman, has come forward today to reveal why and how his story wasn’t published, after Nica Noelle (legal name Monica Jensen) made an “angry” phone call to the newspaper’s owner. Plus, the reporter gives details (which, presumably, came from Billy Santoro) on how Nica Noelle repeatedly lied—and instructed others to lie for her—in order to keep her porn shoots in the rental home a secret from the homeowner and everyone on the island.
Sigelman’s piece—”The Porn-Studio-On-Martha’s-Vineyard Story That Never Was”—was published today in the Columbia Journalism Review, and it’s a fascinating glimpse not just into Noelle’s fraudulent activities, but also how good journalists with good stories can be silenced when publishers with their own personal or financial interests get involved. Read the entire piece here (which goes into more details about how awful the MV Times’ publisher is, and how the paper misled readers after news of the lawsuit broke last March), but here are excerpts:
In March, an unusual lawsuit was filed in the federal district court whose jurisdiction includes Martha’s Vineyard. The suit, filed by a local homeowner, claimed director Monica Jensen and the production company Mile High Media had used the homeowner’s island rental property, without her knowledge, as a studio to produce porn.
While some of the information in the 24-page complaint was new to me, I recognized most of the details and actually knew a great deal more than was set out in the civil complaint. Three years earlier, as editor of The Martha’s Vineyard Times, a small weekly, I had prepared a story that described how Jensen, a former adult film star and now a director who went by the name Nica Noelle, had relocated from Los Angeles to a quiet island neighborhood to produce gay porn films for the Icon Male Film company.
It was a well-reported story that I knew would be of great interest to the island’s tightly knit, year-round community of about 17,000 people. But the story never saw the light of day. Over my objections, the newspaper’s publisher declined to publish the story, altering the journalistic calculus under which I had reported, managed, and edited for more than two decades.
[…]
[E]ight months into my tenure as editor, I took a call from a man who asked me if The MV Times reported on controversial stories. I assured him we had never shied away from a story. He said he was one of several actors hired by Nica Noelle and was uncomfortable making films in one of the the residential communities on the island.
I suspected a personal disagreement underpinned his conscience, but I knew it was an explosive story. I researched all of his claims, and it quickly became clear that Nica Noelle, as she was known, had settled in the Vineyard.
I was provided email exchanges between Nica Noelle and the film actors, who received specific instructions about how to behave after getting picked up by a hired driver at Logan Airport in Boston. “Please be discreet in the car and do not talk about shooting porn,” Nica Noelle emailed. “The driver knows that I work in the entertainment field and we do various projects and photo shoots, but I do not discuss the particulars with him nor mention the name of my company, and I would like to keep it that way.”
Nica Noelle also set specific ground rules with respect to social media. “Please do not tweet or otherwise publicly post photos or other information regarding where you are, or announce that you are going to Martha’s Vineyard.”
Not all of her actors followed the Twitter prohibition against referencing Martha’s Vineyard, nor did Nica Noelle, who frequently referenced her fondness for life on the island and posted video clips to her Twitter account.
When I called Nica Noelle in February 2015, she denied making films. She accused me of invading her privacy. Ultimately, she said I would be hearing from her lawyer and business partner.
That call occurred on a Tuesday night. Our publishing deadline was the next evening. I worked overnight and into the morning. The headline read: “Adult film director bases studio on Martha’s Vineyard.”
On Wednesday morning, publisher and owner Peter Oberfest received an angry telephone call from Nica Noelle. Had I planned to say anything to him before I published this story, he wanted to know? He was rightly angry with me. I had no good answer, because the truth is I suspected what came next.
The story was put on hold. The next week Oberfest said he did not think it qualified as a news story, that it was a private matter, and that there was no reason to draw attention to what Nica Noelle was doing, other than for its salacious quality. She was not breaking the law. By drawing attention to it we would be making it into a story—something, I pointed out, newspapers do all the time.
Oberfest told me the story did not serve the interests of the paper or the community. I objected. I insisted that by any measure of what a community newspaper ought to report, it was a news story.
I said nothing to the staff. I was the editor and I needed to keep them motivated. My frustration sat in the pit of my stomach.
Given all the Icon Male movies filmed in the rental house that people can see with their own eyes, the plaintiff suing Nica Noelle probably has more evidence of Noelle’s lies than they know what to do with, but Sigelman’s piece today provides even more proof as to how the plaintiff was deceived and defrauded.
Sigelman’s story on Nica Noelle/Monica Jensen and Icon Male obviously never ran. As he wrote in CJR today, “I quit the Times in 2016, in the wake of what happened with my Jensen story.”
[CJR: “The Porn-Studio-On-Martha’s-Vineyard Story That Never Was”]
