In late February 2012, Salon reporter Tracy Clark-Flory received a federal subpoena to testify in a Los Angeles federal obscenity trial — based on a year-old Q&A she had conducted with the adult filmmaker Ira Isaacs. She wrote about getting the subpoena that same morning. The government withdrew it later that day.
Then
Clark-Flory was a San Francisco-based Salon journalist whose 2011 Q&A with Isaacs — the defendant in the federal obscenity case against him — had been a straightforward published interview. The government’s subpoena asked her to come to Los Angeles to testify as a fact witness, since the Q&A contained material the prosecution apparently wanted to introduce. As she pointed out in her Salon piece, she had no special expertise to contribute beyond confirming “that Isaacs said what I said he said” — which the published article already established.
The Salon piece Clark-Flory wrote about the subpoena openly questioned the federal government’s wisdom in compelling a reporter’s testimony at taxpayer expense to prove a journalistic fact she had already published. Within hours of the piece going up, she got word that the government was withdrawing the subpoena.
The original FishbowlLA framing was matter-of-fact: a reporter wrote about getting a federal subpoena, the public-attention pressure helped, and the subpoena was pulled. The broader press-freedom question — whether federal prosecutors should be subpoenaing reporters as fact witnesses to confirm published quotes — was the implicit substance.
Now
The Ira Isaacs federal obscenity trial proceeded to conclusion without Clark-Flory’s testimony. Isaacs was convicted in April 2012 on multiple federal obscenity counts and was sentenced to four years in federal prison — one of the relatively few successful federal obscenity prosecutions of the post-2000 period under the Comstock-era statutes that the DOJ rarely brings cases under. The case has been cited in legal-academic literature on the contemporary scope of federal obscenity law.
Tracy Clark-Flory continued at Salon for years and subsequently moved to Jezebel and then to her own writing project. Her book Want Me: A Sex Writer’s Journey Into the Heart of Desire was published by Penguin in 2021 and drew on her years of sex-and-culture reporting. She has remained a recognizable voice in that space across the 2010s and into the 2020s.
The broader subpoena dynamic the case surfaced — federal prosecutors compelling reporter testimony — has continued through subsequent administrations, with various press-shield-law debates and DOJ-policy changes around when reporters can be subpoenaed in federal cases. The 2012 withdrawal of the Clark-Flory subpoena after her Salon piece went up is now cited in journalism-school case studies of how public pressure can affect DOJ subpoena decisions, though the structural protections for reporters in federal cases remain weaker than at the state level.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: February 2012 snapshot