Sascha Wil­son

Se­nior Re­porter

sascha.wil­son@guardian.co.tt

The own­er of an adult sex toy busi­ness is chal­leng­ing the state’s seizure of her goods af­ter they were deemed “ob­scene and in­de­cent”.

Jus­tice Ava­son Quin­lan-Williams has grant­ed leave to Shenice Kat­teck, 26, pro­pri­etress of Rogue Adult Toys & Lin­gerie, to seek ju­di­cial re­view chal­leng­ing the de­ten­tion and seizure of a quan­ti­ty of toys com­pris­ing dil­dos and wand mas­sages.

Kat­teck is su­ing the Cus­toms and Ex­cise Comp­trol­ler and the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al.

Con­tend­ing that the comp­trol­ler’s de­ci­sion to seize her adult sex toys for sale was il­le­gal, ir­ra­tional and un­fair, she ar­gues that it was a breach of her rights un­der Sec­tion 4 of the Con­sti­tu­tion.

Among the re­liefs be­ing sought are an or­der to quash his de­ci­sion and or­der that the toys be re­turned to her forth­with, or with­in 48 hours of the court’s or­der.

She not­ed that the ex­er­cise of dis­cre­tion by the comp­trol­ler to seize her ar­ti­cles is a clear, ar­bi­trary, and mis­in­formed ex­er­cise of pow­er, since while some wand mas­sages were seized, sim­i­lar toys in her ship­ment were not.

In her af­fi­davit, Kat­teck said she es­tab­lished the busi­ness two years ago and in Ju­ly, she made on­line pur­chas­es of a num­ber of adult toys in bulk to re­stock her busi­ness in­ven­to­ry and to fill pre-or­ders.

When she went to clear the items last month, she said a Cus­toms of­fi­cial ob­served that her ship­ment/box weighed less, and af­fixed on it was a doc­u­ment stat­ing, “No­tice of seizure of goods”.

The no­tice stat­ed that 13 of the adult toys were deemed to be “ob­scene and in­de­cent ar­ti­cles” and seized.

De­spite the re­moval of the items, she said she was still charged du­ties in the sum of $1,839.81 to clear the pack­age at the stat­ed weight of the ship­ment.

When she re­turned to her busi­ness, she not­ed that 18 items, and not 13, were miss­ing.
She said the seized items were among the more ex­pen­sive in her pack­age and in­clud­ed five vi­brat­ing dil­dos, 10 dil­dos and three wand mas­sages.

In her af­fi­davit, Kat­teck stat­ed that she nev­er be­fore had any dif­fi­cul­ty im­port­ing and clear­ing adult toys.

Claim­ing that there has al­so nev­er pre­vi­ous­ly been any pol­i­cy in the Cus­toms and Ex­cise De­part­ment pre­vent­ing the sale of adult toys, she said her busi­ness caters to the grow­ing mar­ket in T&T for adult sex toys and lin­gerie.

She ar­gued that it was “patent­ly un­fair” that the comp­trol­ler would al­low oth­er peo­ple to im­port and sell sim­i­lar adult sex toys.

List­ing the names of oth­er busi­ness­es in­volved in the im­por­ta­tion and sale of adult sex toys, the pro­pri­etress claimed her com­peti­tors pub­licly ad­ver­tised hun­dreds of prod­ucts to their thou­sands of fol­low­ers on so­cial me­dia ac­counts.

“Adult sex toys are not made in Trinidad and To­ba­go and do not fall from the sky. They are im­port­ed by these busi­ness­es and the very Cus­toms De­part­ment has no prob­lems with clear­ing these items, so I am at a loss to un­der­stand the sud­den ar­bi­trary and il­le­gal seizure of my prod­ucts,” she said in her court doc­u­ments.

She ex­pressed con­cern that her busi­ness could be ru­ined.

“This has had a crip­pling ef­fect on my busi­ness as many of my cus­tomers are switch­ing their loy­al­ty and sim­ply pur­chas­ing from my com­peti­tors who are open­ly stock­ing and sell­ing the very items that were seized from me. As a con­se­quence, my liveli­hood, good­will and rep­u­ta­tion built from two years of hard work has been ad­verse­ly im­pact­ed,” she said.

The pro­pri­etress was al­so wor­ried that she could face crim­i­nal charges and pros­e­cu­tion.
Kat­teck is be­ing rep­re­sent­ed by a team of at­tor­neys from the Free­dom Law Cham­bers of Anand Ram­lo­gan.