Mary Anne Franks PROFESSOR PUGILIST: Revenge Porn and Krav Maga By Carlos Harrison
MI A MI LAW maga zi ne | FA LL 201 4
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ltimately, it was a cyberspace horror story playing out in real life that forced Mary Anne Franks into action, and catapulted her to national recognition as a spokeswoman and a champion wielding the law to protect victims of revenge porn. The popular University of Miami associate professor of criminal law, family law, and criminal procedure appears regularly in national media, and the draft law she crafted has become a model for outlawing the non-consensual posting of sexually explicit media. That role is a far cry from what Franks might have predicted as a little girl growing up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, designated by The Independent of London as “the most dangerous little town in America.” Of course, back then she probably wouldn’t have foreseen that she would later carry a butterfly knife for protection and learn to whip it out with a spinning flourish worthy of a karate movie. Or that she’d be a belly dancer, a Rhodes Scholar, a Bigelow Fellow, or an expert instructor in the supremely quick and devastatingly lethal Israeli martial art of Krav Maga. Back then she was just the youngest child of an immigrant widow living on social security checks, who liked to play teacher. “A Sunday school teacher, I think, gave me a little chalkboard,” she says. “I loved that chalkboard more than anything because it gave me
the chance to (actually) write down lessons for my stuffed animals. And that just seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do.” It was in her blood. Franks’s parents were both professors, who met teaching at a university in her mother’s homeland, Taiwan. Franks was the only girl, born while her father taught at Ball State University in Indiana. He died of a heart attack when she was 2. Her mother “couldn’t really think of what else to do,” so she took Franks and her two brothers to be near their father’s family in his hometown, Pine Bluff. Her mother was turned down for job after job—“overqualified”—as Franks grew up. So they lived on their government check and learned to think of being surrounded by crime, like the time Franks had a gun pulled on her in a movie parking lot, as just the way life is. Franks found refuge in her father’s library of books, reading Beckett and Faulkner as a child. By high school, her affinity for teaching mixed with a desire to perform. She did “a lot of theater,” including once as Scheherazade. That’s how she got interested in belly dancing, which she would wind up teaching while she was at Oxford. Franks earned a full ride to Loyola, studying philosophy and English. A dean convinced her to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, even though she “didn’t really know what the Rhodes Scholarship was.”
She got it, and went to Oxford to earn her master’s and doctorate in modern languages. As she neared graduation, though, she reached “a crisis of conscience” about staying in the humanities. “I became increasingly obsessed with, for lack of a better term, real-world issues. I wasn’t happy just talking about literature. I wasn’t happy just talking about philosophical concepts. I wanted to talk about political issues and real-world events.” She went to law school, at Harvard, thinking that with a law degree she would pursue her interest in humanitarian issues by going to work for the International Criminal Court. “I was going to become a prosecutor for that court, and I was going to be a judge for that court and that’s really how I had my whole life set up.” Except, by the time she got her J.D., she says, “I thought, this has been a really expensive three-year diversion, but I hate everything about the law. I hate everything about the way it’s taught and practiced. I just want to go back to doing humanities.” Fate, and a prominent feminist law professor, intervened. Catharine MacKinnon, who was instrumental in promoting sexual harassment protections in the law, invited Franks to be her research assistant while Mackinnon taught as a Visiting Professor at Harvard. Watching MacKinnon teach, Franks says, “made me want to be a law professor. I could see what the impact of it was.”