Phil Harvey, Adam & Eve founder and civil liberties champion, dies at 83
Phil Harvey, the founder of the Hillsborough, N.C.-based adult entertainment giant Adam & Eve and a longtime fighter of censorship, died on Thursday at his home in Maryland. He was 83.
Harvey’s death was first reported by The News of Orange County, and it was also shared by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C. Hillsborough Mayor Jenn Weaver called him a “legendary” business leader, and the free-speech group the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education mourned the loss of a “staunch free speech defender.”
As a student at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Global Public Health in the 1960s, Harvey first began what would become Adam & Eve as part of his graduate thesis focused on the distribution of contraception, The News & Observer previously reported.
The company, originally launched as a mail-order condom company, focused on providing cheap means of birth control, and used the profits to make birth control more available in low-income countries. Before enrolling at UNC, Harvey spent five years in India working for the nonprofit CARE International, helping feed hungry children. The experience made him an advocate for expanding birth control availability.
Though it was illegal at the time to sell contraception and other “obscene” items via the post, as The Economist magazine put it, the mail-order company became a success, after it was founded in 1971. And though its customers likely had no idea, a portion of all their purchases would go to sending cheap contraception around the world.
Harvey and his co-founder, classmate Dr. Tim Black, used profits from the catalog business to fund their own nonprofit, which sold contraception below cost to low-income countries. Later in life, Harvey started DKT International, a nonprofit that increased the availability of contraception and conducted educational campaigns around family planning and HIV/AIDS prevention.
By 2004, Harvey would be putting around $2 million per year of Adam & Eve’s profits into DKT, The Economist reported, helping distribute some 348 million condoms to countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where they would be used as a contraception and an HIV preventative. In 2014, The N&O reported that over the years Harvey had donated some $50 million total of his Adam & Eve profits to his family-planning work.
“I was very taken with the idea that I could sell sexual accoutrements to relatively wealthy Americans and use the proceeds to support family planning in developing countries,” Harvey told the magazine Mother Jones in 2002. “I’ve certainly taken a great deal of pleasure from the sort of Robin Hood effect that’s resulted.”
In an effort to ensure the longevity of the original mail-order company, Harvey expanded its focus beyond contraception to other sex-related items.
The arrival of video cassette recorder technology, in particular, was transformative for the company, turning it into one of the largest retailers of adult entertainment in the country, The N&O reported. Pornographic movies, once mostly viewed inside of X-rated movie theaters, could now be watched at home, thanks to VCR. And Adam & Eve would thrive because of it.
By selling pornography, however, Adam & Eve attracted the attention of federal regulators under the administration of President Ronald Reagan.
The Department of Justice sent 37 agents to raid the company’s offices, which were then located in Carrboro, and charged the company with selling obscene items, The N&O reported.
A self-described libertarian, Harvey fought the charges and sued the federal government for harassment and violation of free speech, The Economist reported.
The legal battle went on for eight years and cost him $3 million in legal fees, the magazine Mother Jones reported.
But, in 1993, he beat back the charges from the government, a journey he would later detail in his 2001 book, “The Government Vs. Erotica: The Siege of Adam & Eve.”
The victory would be a boon for the adult entertainment business, The Economist noted, helping not just Adam & Eve but also its competitors.
The company would not just face backlash from the feds, though. Even locally, Adam & Eve faced pressure.
When it relocated from Carrboro to Hillsborough, protests around the move quickly began.
Some local ministers warned at the time that Hillsborough could become the “pornography capital of the South,” and as many as 400 people protested the planned move, The N&O reported. At public hearings, the company was compared to a hog, a moral cancer and a toxic chemical plant.
After a court overruled the town’s denial of needed permits, the company opened its Hillsborough facility in November 1994, The N&O reported.
The protests faded away, and the company became one of the largest employers in Orange County. PHE Inc., the parent company of Adam & Eve, is now the 14th largest employer in Orange County, according to the N.C. Department of Commerce, and it employs around 350 people, The N&O reported.
In 2005, the Hillsborough/Orange County Chamber of Commerce named it the company of the year.
In recent years, Harvey split his time traveling between Hillsborough and the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where his nonprofit was founded.
Despite its success, Adam & Eve never really advertised that some of its profits would go to a nonprofit. Harvey didn’t believe it would have made a difference.
“My hypothesis,” he told The N&O in 2014, “is when people are making a purchase to make their sex lives better, it’s a different part of the brain than the charitable guy.”
This story was originally published December 4, 2021 at 6:00 PM.
