It seems like only yesterday (actually it was last Friday) that I was waxing poetic about how Sex Tapes don’t really matter to anyone’s career anymore. That the revelation that Emma Stone had a Sex Tape floating around somewhere was not going to harm her career since the last celebrity to take a hit for getting caught having sex on camera was Rob Lowe and even he says “It was the best thing that ever happened to him.” Of course there is a caveat to this sexual adventurism on celluloid. If you’re a celebrity or an entertainer Sex Tapes are fine, if you’re a politician, not so much. This is the lesson for Lei Zhengfu a high ranking Chinese official who’s just been bounced for his sex tape going public.
The facts of the case are fairly simple. Zhengfu was a party secretary in Beijing and a construction company hired an 18 year old girl to sleep with him in order to secure government contracts. The tape was made in 2007 but was recently posted on-line by a muckraking (former) journalist named Zui Ruifeng. Scandals like this are not appreciated by the Chinese government which is trying to modernize while at the same time retain control over the public and media and given previous scandals that have rocked the capital city in the last few years this newest one is most unwelcome. Of course all of this is the salacious political stuff, the real meat of the story is – the fact that this story exists at all.