Miami woman charged with role in animal torture sex fetish porn video
BY DAVID OVALLE
DOVALLE@MIAMIHERALD.COM
A Miami woman took fetish pornography to a disturbing extreme, police say — repeatedly decapitating live chickens and killing rabbits while engaging in sex acts during the filming of an animal torture video.
Sara Zamora, 28, was arrested Friday on eight felony counts of animal cruelty for her feature role in a video called “SOS Barn” that a Miami-Dade police arrest report described in gory, stomach-turning detail.
“The chicken is enduring extreme pain and suffering during this process,” according to the arrest report.
The video clips — filmed for a twisted animal torture genre called “crush” — depicted her and other porn actresses “torturing and killing a wide variety of animals, including chickens, rabbits and more for the sexual gratification of its viewers,” according to police.
The barnyard snuff video was filmed at the South Miami-Dade home of Adam Redford, according to the police report, who is listed as a co-defendant. He is already on probation for a similar animal cruelty case in Lee County last year but had not been charged in the Miami-Dade case as of Friday night.
Redford, a boat captain who claims on his website to have filmed a variety of videos “related to South Florida fishing,” said he knew nothing about Zamora’s case.
“I haven’t seen or talked to her in close to a year,” Redford said.
Detectives from Miami-Dade’s agricultural unit learned of the video clips from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a prominent animal rights group.
Stephanie Bell, director of cruelty cases for PETA, called the arrest “excellent news. We have been waiting for this.”
Bell said the group also had tipped off authorities in Redford’s case in Lee County, where she said he had moved. Bell said such videos, graphically depicting animal torture and death, are illegal under state and federal laws.
“These videos are unfortunately in demand and it’s hard to fathom that anyone would produce or enjoy them,” she said.
In one clip of “SOS Barn,” Miami-Dade police say, Zamora gropes a man’s genitals with her left hand while “repeatedly cutting a chicken’s neck using hedge clippers with her right.” In others, she posed “in a sexy outfit” after hacking off the head of another screaming bird, or she beat chickens to death with a wooden stick.
Chickens weren’t the only victims. She also karate-chopped the necks of several rabbits as they howled in pain, according to the report, then admitted to killing them.
On the Internet, Zamora goes by the moniker Gloria Shynez. On a website called Model Mayhem, Zamora claims she has been “modeling” since age 19. Her rates are flexible.
“My middle-eastern look distinguishes from many models and I am so excited to see what fun, beautiful shots we create together!” she writes.
Zamora was arrested while already in jail. She had been on probation on two separate cases, on charges including grand-theft with a firearm, credit card fraud, possession of a fictitious driver’s license and cocaine possession. If convicted on the animal cruelty charges, she could face up to five years in prison on each count.
She had been in jail for the past month after failing a probation drug test but would likely have been released Friday “if not for the fickle finger of fate,” said defense attorney Theodore Mastos.
On Friday, Miami-Dade prosecutor Jason Pizzo informed the court and Mastos of the new charges. Mastos, while questioning whether the state could mount a “viable prosecution,” told the Miami Herald he was shown portions of the video outside court during a brief hearing.
“I’m glad I didn’t have breakfast because I would have puked all over the place,” said Mastos, who used to prosecute pornography cases in the 1970s. “It was disgusting.”
As for Redford, he is on probation in a 2013 case on charges of causing the cruel death and torturing of animals in Lee County. On Friday, he acknowledged the earlier arrest was a matter of public record but that “it had been resolved.”
So-called “crush” animal torture videos aren’t new and have been the target of past legal crackdowns. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a law that outlawed depictions of animals being “intentionally maimed, mutilated, tortured, wounded, or killed,” saying it was too broad and violated the right to free speech.
The federal law had been aimed at videos that often depict women slowly crushing animals to death “with their bare feet or while wearing high heeled shoes,” sometimes while “talking to the animals in a kind of dominatrix patter,” the opinion read.
But the 2010 decision did not apply to the actual acts themselves of extreme cruelty to animals — and did not preclude the passing of future laws that narrowly applied to crush videos.
