The Perpetual Douchebaggery of Michael Weinstein

Posted January 7, 2016 5:31 AM by Harlan with 0 comments

“If only you could use your powers for good instead of evil. Yes, Michael Weinstein and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), I am calling you out. Rather than embracing PrEP and what it means to the mind, body and spirit of our community, you have shameless poured millions of dollars into a misinformation campaign based on fear and slut shaming – with the adult entertainment community especially in your cross hairs.”

I penned that back in August. It was not the last time the duplicitous zealotry of Michael Weinstein raised my ire. I am not alone. Mark Kernes yesterday took Weinstein to task in a masterfully crafted editorial for AVN, Op-Ed: The Shame & The Pity That Is AIDS Healthcare Foundation.

But who would ever have thought that a well-meaning and once valuable non-profit healthcare organization could ruin itself and destroy its standing in the community thanks in part to its president targeting the adult industry for partisan gain?

One ongoing problem has been Weinstein’s/AHF’s campaign against HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and particularly the HIV-preventative drug Truvada, which Weinstein once defamed as a “party drug.” But when that didn’t fly with mainstream media, Weinstein tempered his language to claim, in a June 19, 2015 press release and ad campaign, that “Mass PrEP administration is a dangerous experiment that is not supported by medical science and is currently resisted by doctors and patients alike.”

But, of course, the real question is why the AIDS Healthcare Foundation is involving itself—that is, spending donated money that could otherwise be used to treat HIV-positive individuals—in creating an initiative that clearly has nothing to do with HIV/AIDS or healthcare?

And there we see AHF’s true interest: “Funding for HIV testing,” AHF’s stock in trade, as well as HIV treatment, is “flat or declining”—and if PrEP use really took off, who knows how that would affect AHF’s—and its employees’—bottom line?

In other words, the suit says, AHF paid bonuses to employees who got people into their clinics for testing, and commissions to those who snagged HIV-positive patients for treatment at AHF facilities. It’s no wonder that Los Angeles County has been suing AHF for having overbilled the county $5.2 million for patient treatment!

But at least AHF’s machinations against the adult industry and PrEP are arguably healthcare-related. What’s not so clear is what interest Weinstein and his group have in restricting the construction of high-rise developments in Los Angeles, in what it describes as “a portion of an element.

We can’t help but wonder what Kamala Harris (California Attorney General) would think about such overtly political expenditures on the part of AIDS Healthcare and its president?