Topless Activist Leaving Ojai

Citing police harassment, Jennifer Moss is returning to Oregon

By Daryl Kelley
Jennifer Moss, who for the past year has delighted or offended Ojai residents by biking or skating through town wearing only a G-string and flesh-colored pasties, has decided to move to Oregon, citing what she considers harassment by police and some local residents.
Moss, 32, who prefers to be known as “Earth Friend Jen” but has also been dubbed “The Pastie Lady,” was in Ashland, Ore., on Monday, renting an apartment and studio where she said she hopes to teach yoga and design a stuffed animal and organic clothing line.
She’ll move back to her native state May 5, after celebrating a friend’s birthday, she said in a telephone interview.
“I’m done with Ojai and Southern California,” said the petite and fit rollerblader, who describes herself as a social artist and environmental activist, but who some critics describe as narcissistic and disrespectful of others.
“Obviously, there’s a lot I don’t like about Ojai.” she said. “There’s a lot of nice people there, but Ojai is just another suburb of Los Angeles. I’m ready to get out of there. It’s a police state.”
In recent months, Moss has been a locus of community controversy, testing both Ojai’s renowned embrace of free spirits and the legal system’s response to those who push society’s norms and its constitutional guarantees of public expression.
She’s twice been cited by police under a county law that prohibits exposing one’s breasts as a means of artistic expression. Most recently she disrobed in the parking lot of St. Thomas Aquinas Church on Easter Sunday, prompting angry calls of complaint.
But, even as Moss prepares to leave Ojai, a town she’d hoped would be open to her iconoclastic lifestyle and near-nudity, Police Chief Bruce Norris said he has now been told by county prosecutors that the young woman violated no laws.
“We went by the letter of the law,” he said this week. “But the district attorney doesn’t believe they could get this past a jury. To me her behavior was so outlandish at the church I hoped the public nuisance (law) would cover it. The videotape (she made) showed it from start to finish.
“But,” Norris added, “the prosecutors just don’t believe it was illegal.”
Norris said his officers acted appropriately when responding to citizen complaints about Moss’ frequent near-nude appearances around town. But he said the law apparently no longer prohibits women’s exposure of their breasts in public, or in Moss’ case, the apparent exposure of breasts.
“I like Jennifer,” the chief said. “I think she was a good addition to Ojai for her free expression. But I didn’t like her flaunting her nudity. That’s not fair to the people who don’t want to see it.”
Letters and e-mails to the Ojai Valley News in recent months showed Moss had plenty of critics, and supporters.
But the intensity of public discussion — even protests to the City Council — since her Easter demonstration persuaded Moss it was time to seek another haven.
And she said she has no regrets, even about her Easter demonstration at a church, except that the public’s response was so vociferous.
“The only reason that was a mistake, is it’s creating a backlash,” she said. “I came there in the name of Jesus. Christ would know my heart, and you’re not supposed to judge me. I came there because I am the light ... This country is not free until it’s free in it’s own skin. I think it’s funny: They’re judging me while their clothes are poisoning them.”
Moss maintained that her demonstrations shined a spotlight on a more environmentally sensitive way to live. Her G-string is made of hemp. And her internet web site explains her green philosophy.
“I’m not doing this to show off,” she said. “If I wanted to be popular, I’d get a boob job, bleach my hair blond and be on the cover of Playboy. This dude wrote a story about me saying I was a narcissist. Give me a break, this whole world is narcissistic.”
The “dude” Moss referenced is filmmaker Leland Hammerschmitt of Ojai, who wrote in a guest editorial in the OVN that the skater showed “naked narcissism.” “Ojai tolerance is not eternal ... ,” he wrote. “Go away. Just stop.”
On Tuesday, reacting to Moss’ pending departure, Hammerschmitt added: “There are standards for behavior and Jennifer Moss was an acid on basic public decorum. Her aggressive attack on the Catholic Church on Easter Sunday was indefensible. I suspect that her timely move to Oregon is connected to her arrest and perhaps a simple evasion of possible prosecution.”
But Moss also had her supporters, sometimes from surprising places.
One 11-year-old Oak View girl, who first thought Moss was crazy, said she was inspired by the woman’s letter to the OVN, explaining that she dresses as she does to bring attention to environmental causes.
“So next time you see Jen, don’t stop and gawk,” wrote Callie Little. “Silently stop and thank the Earth for making someone like Jen, who is doing what she can to help an environmental problem.”
But Moss now says she’s given up on Ojai and Southern California as an area to practice her green beliefs.
“The Matilija Springs is one of the most beautiful places I go, and it’s being poisoned,” she said, referring to spraying now being done to eradicate a non-native reed. “Ojai is not the green scene. I’m out of here. Leland Hammerschmitt can have his peace.”
Moss, who grew up in a small town in Oregon and fled to Southern California for its freedom of expression, said she’s returning to her native state because of its green consciousness, and because Ashland has no nudity laws.
She says she wants to find an eco-sensitive co-op she can join. And she says she hopes to earn money making things.
“I’m going to start making my own organic clothing line,” she laughed. “That’s ironic, right?”
Will she continue her nearly bare flights on skates and bike down Ashland’s main street?
She’s of two minds on that.
One minute she says, “I’m going to get grounded, get a job and slowly move into this new place. I’m not going to do what I did in Ojai.”
But the next she’s saying she might skate through downtown Ashland completely naked next month on her birthday: “I may come out butt naked. I’ll come out in my birthday suit.”