Michael-Jon “Matt” Hickey. Photo via techcrunch.com
A former Seattle journalist sits in a Las Vegas jail, accused of rape. Now a lawsuit emerges that alleges how he lured his victims — as a fake porn employer.
Supposed auditions for the phony porn films consisted of an interview, a nude photo shoot and then an “attitude test.” The attitude test was simply requiring women to have sex with the suspect, authorities alleged.
Even the Valley’s adult film industry would be outraged by this.
“This is the most egregious scam I’ve seen,” Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said of Michael-Jon “Matt” Hickey. “Beyond the monetary damage his victims suffered pursuing the defendant’s fictional job opportunities, they endured emotional trauma and unconscionable loss of privacy through his deception.”
The New York Daily News reported Thursday that Hickey was accused of multiple violations of Washington’s Consumer Protection Act and the Commercial Electronic Mail Act for creating a series of fake Seattle adult entertainment businesses.
They included “New Seattle Talent, West Coast Talent, Casting Seattle, FMH Modeling and Active Entertainment — with the sole intent of tricking women into posing nude and having sex with him, according to a complaint filed this week.”
“Hickey posed as a female talent recruiter named Deja Stwalley and reached out to women via social media, claiming he could earn them an audition for an independent adult film studio,” the Daily News said.
“The try-out process included three phases: an interview, a nude photo shoot and an ‘attitude test,’ which required the women to have sex with Hickey.”
In October, The Seattle Times said Hickey was charged with three counts of second-degree rape “for repeatedly assaulting women who were too intoxicated to give consent, according to King County prosecutors.”
The case grew out of reporting by a Pulitzer Prize-winning Seattle weekly paper called The Stranger, which in June 2016 ran a long article by Sydney Brownstone titled “The Audition.”
It reported: “Hickey, who has done freelance work for The Stranger, did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the specific allegations in this story. He said his lawyer advised him not to.”
“I agree it’s weird and also ridiculous, but I’m sorry to say that at this point I can’t talk about anything specific, though I may in the future,” Hickey wrote The Stranger, which also noted:
“Some states — including California, Tennessee, Alabama and Michigan — actually have rape laws that criminalize consent obtained by trickery. In 2013, California closed a loophole in its rape-by-fraud law to add the condition of impersonation. The change was motivated by one case in which a man climbed into a woman’s bed in the middle of the night, and the woman, thinking he was her boyfriend, had sex with him, only to discover when the lights went on that the man she had sex with wasn’t her boyfriend.”
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