In trial over Seattle's Denny Blaine Park, video evidence shows public sex acts 37%
By Amy Radil0%
5/28/2026, 11:41:30 PM
Topics: Law And Courts
BS Summary: This article contains 20 faulty reasoning types, including In-Group Bias, Anecdotal, and Confirmation Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 20.6% saturation with 106 hits. Analysis detected 839 faulty-reasoning hits from 515 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 43.3% and a BS Rank of 37% (13,967 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 63.80% of the article peer group.
In a King County courtroom on Thursday, a judge reviewed videos of people performing oral sex and masturbating in Seattle’s Denny Blaine Park.
The trial is part of a lawsuit by neighbors seeking to have the park declared a public nuisance and potentially closed.
The videos were recorded from the property of the park’s next-door neighbor, philanthropist Stuart Sloan, who has urged city officials to clamp down on lewd behavior and in 2023 offered to anonymously help fund a new playground in the park.
That proposal drew an outcry from patrons and the public who said it would disrupt Denny Blaine’s tradition of serving as a gathering place for nudists and LGBTQ people.
The neighbors’ group Denny Blaine Park for All sued the city in 2025.
Since then, Judge Samuel Chung has overseen the city’s abatement plan which includes new fencing around “clothing optional” areas, signage and increased presence from police and park rangers.
But Sloan’s house manager Carrie Christensen said on the witness stand this week that the city’s response has done little to curb indecent exposure.
She said she knows of three people arrested out of hundreds of instances of sexual conduct.
“The lewd acts and illegal behavior I’ve witnessed on an almost daily basis is inexcusable,” Christensen said.
She said she is not opposed to public nudity, which is legal in the city of Seattle, but at Denny Blaine the nudity “invites a darker element.”
Neighbors have also protested drug use and illegal parking which they said blocks vehicle access to and from their homes.
Defenders of the park as a nude and queer-friendly gathering place said the examples in court were overblown.
Nicole Baich is a member of the group Friends of Denny Blaine, an intervenor in the lawsuit seeking to preserve the park’s identity.
“What we’re seeing in court is very atypical, and ultimately it’s unfair that an entire historic community and culture is collectively being punished for some bad apples,” she said.
Baich said she visits the park regularly and members of her group are working to educate people that the park is a place for “nonsexual nudity” only.
But she said publicity from the lawsuit and controversy in recent years has resulted in more visitors to what was once a little-known green space.
During Thursday’s court proceedings, an evidentiary photo of Baich herself was shown standing naked at a gap in the city’s new fencing.
Baich said she was protesting the city's changes.
“On that day with the fence going up, two-thirds of the park were removed from the general typical use,” she said.
“It was an act of protest to signal displeasure with the decision to control peoples’ self-expression.”
Baich added that “no other park is surveilled like Denny Blaine.”
She said she’s hoping the trial leads to solutions such as staffing and outreach that can decrease or eliminate lewd conduct and cool the tensions between park patrons and the neighborhood.
The trial began on Wednesday and is expected to last about a month.
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100%flagged-word coverageCarrie Christensen
84 attributed words26% of attributed speech82% writer coverage
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