Pee-wee’s latest adventure began in 2001 when Los Angeles police received a complaint from a teenager about Reubens and a friend, the actor Jeffrey Jones. Because the Reubens case dramatically expands the parameters of what is considered child pornography, it should trouble us all. It raises major questions about censorship and criminal intent. This is no ordinary tale of celebrity justice. It could be quite a saga now that the once and future Pee-wee has been charged with possessing child porn.
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Lately Reubens has been talking up a movie that would darkly deconstruct his childlike persona. To millions of adult fans, Pee-wee was one of the most subversive comic creations of the ’80s, Howdy Doody with a sense of camp-and a libido. But his career is still haunted by the world he created as Pee-wee, where all sorts of deviations from the macho norm were on display. He made a comeback as a weed-fiending hairdresser in the 2001 film Blow. Pee-wee dolls were yanked from toy stores all over America, and Reubens retreated to the limbo of scandalized clowns. But with a “sex crime” on his rap sheet, the name he had borrowed from a favorite harmonica was mud. To a generation raised in the Reagan years, he was Pee-wee Herman, presiding over the fabled playhouse that ruled children’s TV. Jack-off jokes were only part of the penalty Reubens paid. “I was leading the news,” he later told Vanity Fair, “followed by Dahmer eating people, boring holes into their heads, and turning them into zombies.” Reubens pleaded no contest, and the case became a tabloid sensation. In 1991, he was busted in a Sarasota porn theater and charged with the ultimate victimless crime: whacking off during a showing of Nancy Nurse. Paul Reubens is no stranger to the sex police.