The “fire fiend” wants his porn back.
Peter Braunstein, a former Women’s Wear Daily journalist notorious for posing as a firefighter to chloroform, strip and kidnap a beautiful co-worker, has filed a motion from an upstate prison demanding that his jailers return two CDs of bondage porn.
The materials — Braunstein calls it “outré porn” in his motion — had originally been seized from his home computer by cops eight years ago.
Officials at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, NY, where he is serving an 18-year sentence, have now confiscated the CDs, which hold Braunstein’s photograph collection of women being held captive, threatened and assaulted, including five photos used in evidence at his 2007 trial. Officials are threatening to destroy the CDs in 60 days. But Braunstein insists in his well-turned but loopy motion in Manhattan Supreme Court that he needs to refer to the discs in filing appeals and motions to overturn his verdict.
His defense lawyers, Robert Gottlieb and Celia Gordon, were too prudish to use the porn in his defense, he argues at one point.
“The skittishness of [my] attorneys Gottlieb and Gordon toward pornography prevented them from considering a legal strategy positing defendant’s addiction to outré pornography as a mitigating factor in terms of his ensuing criminal activity,” Braunstein writes.
Correction officials have yet to respond to the motion, which seeks immediate return of the materials. Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Farber is expected to rule by month’s end.