Portnoy removes photos of Brady’s son from website after visit from state police

Swampscott native David Portnoy of Barstoolsports.com &mdash a blog that bills itself as being “by the common man for the common man” &mdash agreed Monday to pull pictures of Tom Brady’s 20-month-old son off the website after, he says, the state police visited him and asked him to remove them.The police “paid me a visit Friday night,” Portnoy said on his site. “They were friendly and non-threatening and basically just said they were getting lots of complaints from the lunatic fringe (their words not mine) and it would be in the best interest of everybody involved if I just take them down.”The tempest began last week, when pictures of Brady, his wife and their son Benjamin &mdash taken while the family was on vacation in Costa Rica &mdash surfaced. Portnoy ran one of them, showing the tot without any clothes on, along with a caption that many saw as crude.The fallout was swift, and severe. Portnoy, who is also known as “El Presidente,” had been a frequent contributor to WEEI’s all-sports-talk radio show. But in light of the pictures, WEEI vice president of programming Jason Wolfe said Portnoy would no longer be allowed on the air. Portnoy was also severely taken to task by Glenn Ordway of “The Big Show,” who is a Lynn native.Portnoy was also asked, by the company that posted the pictures originally, to take them down last week ? and did for a day. But he put them back up, he said on his blog, because he noticed that the news outlets that reproduced them hadn’t taken them down off their sites.Portnoy has consistently defended himself against charges that posting the pictures was tantamount to child pornography.”To me,” he said on his blog last Friday, “anybody with a normally functioning brain should have looked at this blog, hopefully laughed, and moved on. To say that there was any sexual intent or innuendo behind it is flat out ludicrous.”However, Friday night, the state police came to his house and asked him to remove the pictures. They did so at the behest of State Attorney General Martha Coakley.”We asked Mr. Portnoy to remove the postings and appreciate that he voluntarily chose to do so,” said Melissa Karpinsky of Coakley’s press office. “At this time, no further action is pending.”Portnoy said on his blog that he acquiesced because “I’m not looking to make cops jobs more difficult than it already is.” He also said that “it seems ridiculous to me that they had to waste time paying me a visit over this.”Portnoy graduated from Swampscott High in 1995, and was a member of the Big Blue’s 1993 state champion baseball team. Also in his class were Peter Woodfork and Billy Ryan, both of whom are associated with Major League Baseball (Woodfork in the commissioner’s office and Ryan as an assistant general manager with the Arizona Diamondbacks), as well as Todd McShay of ESPN and Todd Kline, formerly with the NFL Players Association; and Matt O’Neill, who recently purchased the Blue Ox Restaurant in Lynn after having served as head chef there.