In March 2004, child pornography charges were dropped in exchange for Reubens' guilty plea to a lesser misdemeanor obscenity charge. For the next three years, he was required to register his address with the sheriff's office and he could not be in the company of minors without the permission of a parent or legal guardian. Reubens later stated that he was a collector of erotica, including films, muscle magazines and a sizable collection of mostly homosexual vintage erotica, such as photographic studies of teen nudes. Reubens said that what the city attorney's office viewed as pornography, he considered to be innocent art and that what they described as people underage engaged in masturbation or oral copulation was, in fact, a judgmental point of view of the nudes that Reubens described as people "one hundred percent not" performing sexual acts. Being an avid collector, Reubens had often purchased bulk lots, and one of his vintage magazine dealers declared that "there's no way" he could have known the content of each page in the publications he bought and that he recalled Reubens asking for "physique magazines, vintage 1960s material, but not things featuring kids".