The Sunday News first broke the sordid news that the circulation of graphic sexually explicit images of Garth Stirrat in Steve Crow’s R18 magazines NZX and Brass Magazine had left his New Zealand Hotel Council bosses “at a loss for words”. Within one week of being appointed to the position of CEO of the NZHC, Mr Stirrat had resigned over the sordid and scanalous revelations concerning his past. However, the story of his involvement with Steve Crow and John M Carr’s hardcore porn publications, where he had posed under the name of “Steve Parnell” had just led to his resignation from a prior position he held for six years as CEO of the New Zealand Professional Golf Association, an incorporated society with about 300 members at the time. Hardcore porn involvement had forced Stirrat to resign from two top positions in quick succession, despite the fact that the Chief Censor Bill Hastings had approved the videos and magazines he ‘starred’ in, classifying them R18.
Negative backlash ends Steve Crow’s New Plymouth Sleaze Porn Promo 2009. Erotica Expo Lifestyles & Boobs on Bikes Dead
Backlash Ends Sexpo Plans
Lyn Humphreys – Taranaki Daily News
15 September 2009
Boobs on Bikes and the Erotica Lifestyles Expo are not coming to New Plymouth this year following a public backlash.
“It was going to happen but with all the controversy we’ve been copping and all the negatives from everywhere, it’s not happening now,” Erotica’s owner and porn mogul Steve Crow said from Auckland yesterday.
Steve Crow and his Inglewood brother, David Crow, bought the New Plymouth and Districts RSA at Strandon and also bailed out the debt-ridden club last year.
The two are planning an extensive development for the site, named the Te Ara project.
Amid negative reaction, Steve Crow last month promised the Taranaki Chamber of Commerce that the site would not be converted into a brothel, strip club, adult shop or “anything at all to do with the sex industry”.
But Mr Crow’s Erotica lifestyles expo website advertises a three-day expo at New Plymouth’s Te Ara at 434 Devon St East for $20 a head in November. When contacted by the Taranaki Daily News yesterday, Mr Crow admitted that the expo, which would have been at Te Ara, included strip shows.
However, recent bad publicity and a public backlash from New Plymouth people have caused him to pull the pin.
“I just think it’s going to backfire if we do,” Mr Crow said.