Criminal complaint filed against owner of 'Dagmar Havlova' porn site
The President's Office asked police to file criminal charges earlier this week against the owner of a pornographic website which uses the name of President Havel's wife Dagmar as its Internet address. The pay-for-view site features photos of women resembling the First Lady involved in a number of graphic sex acts. Alena Skodova spoke to the head of the Presidential Office, Martin Krafl:
Mr Krafl told me that the owner of the domain name could be tried for violating Mrs Havlova's personal rights, and Internet users could be given the impression that the Czech First Lady is involved in hardcore pornography. But the owner may also be charged with violating public decency laws, as some of the images depict violence and show women in degrading positions.
This is certainly not the first case of Mrs Havlova being targeted for abuse - there have already been several trashy books about her and her marriage to Vaclav Havel. Political analyst Jiri Pehe sees the problem as a more general one:
Jiri Pehe: I think that in any democratic societies the First Ladies are subjected in various degrees to this kind of treatment. There are always the subject of rumours and speculations so I don't think this is something very exceptional, of course in the Czech case this is all intensified by the fact that the First Lady is an actress, a famous actress, and that before she married the President, she was an interesting person on her own.
RP: But she was an extremely popular actress, so why such a hatred against her now?
JP: I don't think she is hated, I think she is simply abused by certain publications, journalists and so on, in every country there are publications that use this kind of issues, they follow popular people and parasite on their existence, so I don't think that Dagmar Havlova is necessarily hated, she is simply being abused by certain journalists. As for the population at large, I'm not sure if we have any opinion poll saying she is hated, she's of course unpopular with some people, there may be different reasons for it, for example the fact that she married a very popular president or that she married him shortly after his first wife's death.
In any case, the owner of the website - an entrepreneur from the town of Ceska Lipa - says he's not afraid of prosecution. He says anybody could have registered the domain name - which he rented to a British company for a substantial sum of money. If a celebrity forgets to register his or her domain name, he told Mlada Fronta Dnes newspaper - well, that's their problem.
