Anti-porn lawyers ready to profit from Kansas’ age-gating law

The legal industry isn’t immune to quackery. Think about this recent example in central Kansas.

Kansas state lawmakers adopted mandatory age verification for porn websites last legislative session. Knowing that her veto might not stand, Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly refused to kill the law, indicating that her administration felt it was in conflict with the First Amendment. Despite the sentiment, the age verification law reached full enforcement, including a provision that created a new private right of action for plaintiffs to sue adult sites accused of noncompliance with the law.

The minimum penalty under the porn age verification statute starts at a whopping $50,000.

Adult industry companies and professionals have expressed that this could lead to frivolous lawsuits that will financially harm the much smaller players in the industry, such as indie adult film studios and adult content creators — thousands of whom live in Kansas and Missouri. 

Considering civil liberties concerns and the private right of action, major adult platforms owned by the Canadian company Aylo have completely geo-blocked the state. Aylo, formerly known as MindGeek, owns websites like Pornhub — a web property that has more web traffic than most online video streaming services and social networks. Seeking to capitalize on this market, a law firm out of Wichita and Hutchinson has prominently advertised itself as a plaintiff’s attorney to sue porn companies. The law firm is Mann Wyatt Tanksley, a personal injury law firm of ambulance chasers mainly dealing with workers’ compensation disputes and car accidents. 

The Pitch reached out to several people employed by Mann Wyatt Tanksley for comment on this story. After several more attempts, no response was provided. Founded by attorney Scott Mann, the law firm started advertising its services in age verification cases some months ago with advertisements and blog posts. The blog posts directly cater to right-wing religious crowds and audiences likely to oppose legal adult content and its protection under the First Amendment. 

“Contact your local church,” reads one blog post posted on the Mann Wyatt Tanksley website. “We understand this may not be something you want to tell friends and family about. That being said, the best thing to do is to take this before your church family. Gain their support in this matter.”

Mann’s firm is explicitly urging religious communities to partake in suits against adult industry stakeholders while highlighting the potential for high payouts settled outside of court. 

They do so by using anti-pornography talking points that misrepresent or outright lie about the adult entertainment industry and other adjacent topics. For example, the sources referenced in a pair of promotion blog posts explaining the Kansas age verification law, Senate Bill (SB) 394, with materials published by far-right anti-porn groups that circulate many pseudoscientific barbs.

One blog post titled “Pornography: Its Effects and How Kansas Law Fights Back” references a body of work sourced to these sorts of anti-porn groups, some classified as anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups by civil rights groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Human Rights Campaign (HRC), and GLAAD.

For example, the unknown author of this particular post links to Focus on the Family, a Christian fundamentalist group based in Colorado Springs, Colo. Focus on the Family is regarded as a staunch anti-LGBTQ+ group that helped normalize homophobia as a tenant of the conservative Christian hard right.

PFLAG, a pro-LGBTQ+ family advocacy group, has further criticized Focus on the Family as it “still lobbies hard to bring a fundamentalist viewpoint to the political process.” Sources in the blog post also included the Institute for Family Studies (IFS). IFS is considered anti-LGBTQ+ and has links to known hate groups, such as the Illinois-based hate organization that organizes the World Congress of Families series of events – the International Organization for the Family (formerly known as the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society).

The IFS has received funding from Howard and many other hate groups.

On top of this, the Mann Wyatt Tanksley blog posts rely on debunked scientific claims about the so-called “pornography addiction” diagnosis and other disputed science on social media usage. Pornography addiction isn’t a recognized diagnosis by the American Psychiatric Association via the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The World Health Organization doesn’t recognize pornography addiction either via the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases.

Rather, the vast majority of evidence suggests that problematic consumption of pornography is derived from compulsive behavior, coping with any anxiety, depression, or being subjected to very heteronormative, hyper-religious environments.

In addition, Mann Wyatt Tanksley employs a marketing and business director who touts being a “certified brain health practitioner” trained by Amen University.

Amen University is a certificate mill owned and operated by celebrity psychiatrist Daniel Amen. Dr. Amen is regarded by many in his field as a “snake-oil salesman” and that some of his contributions to treatment, via many experts, as “spectacularly meaningless.” Amen has also propagated the myth of applying an addiction treatment model to pornography consumption and has been platformed by right-wing media outlets, like Dennis Prager’s PragerU. As the law firm’s marketing and business director doesn’t have direct implications on the matters at hand, it proves how much of the staff at Scott Mann’s firm are steeped in deep religious belief that anything remotely sexual is potentially bad.

This is common across the board, especially in states that are predominantly controlled by the one-party rule of MAGA populists and religious conservative Republicans. Age verification laws, like Kansas SB 394, have been regarded as infringements on protected forms of expression by civil society organizations across the political spectrum.

This isn’t a far-fetched, one-sided claim from a journalist with an affinity for sexual expression as a protected right for all people. In fact, this question is before the highest judicial body in the land – the U.S. Supreme Court. Plaintiffs from the adult entertainment industry sued the state of Texas to block a similar age verification law that specifically targets adult entertainment platforms. That law was adopted by the Texas state legislature in 2023. Scheduled for oral arguments on January 15, 2025, age verification could be found as unconstitutional and in violation of the First Amendment.

Scores of groups have filed amicus briefs in support of the adult companies noting how age verification could harm freedom of speech. These lawyers are simply exploiting a bad law for their own profit.