Recently, a dear friend of mine watched her husband get sentenced to 151 months in federal prison, less credit for two years served in pretrial detention. I’m as dumbfounded today as I was two years ago when she told me about the FBI knocking on their door at dawn.
How is it that I’m acquainted with three people who have or are serving time for CSAM?
How is it that this person I thought I knew so well—who I trusted with my kids multiple times—how is that he accumulated 2,411 images and 28 videos where the victim was under 12 years old?
This isn’t something you do accidentally, as he tried to claim. And even if the first time was accidental, none of the rest of the times were. You don’t accidentally accumulate that many files. And you damn well don’t “accidentally” share them.
I cannot wrap my head around the idea that he never thought to talk to the family therapist he was already seeing. When I was a Christian, I considered him a mentor. Someone I looked up to. Someone whose judgment I trusted in spiritual matters, because he was so much more spiritually mature than I was.
And now I find out that this had been going on in one form or another for ten years.
I found out that he was grooming his teenaged daughters.
Several churches and over two decades ago, there was talk of this man becoming the youth pastor at our church. A number of people, including my wife and me, advocated for him to be hired. The senior pastor at the time kept declining the idea, saying that he just wasn’t getting the message from God that he was the right person for that church.
What did that pastor know?
I’ve felt horribly guilty over the last couple of years. We had this couple in our home regularly in Ohio. Then they moved to Pennsylvania, so we didn’t see them much. We stayed in touch online, or tried to. But I talked more with the wife than the husband because she was a writing colleague besides being a friend.
Could I have helped him fight this?
Would he have confessed any of it to me?
I’m not shouldering any of the blame for his actions here. That’s all on him. But I’m always going to wonder just a little bit if I could have helped.
And he’s really turned into someone I don’t know. Aside from all of the crap in this case, he’s making life difficult with regards to their divorce. He’s doing everything he can to drag out the divorce, mainly by accepting her terms, then not, then accepting them again. He’s even gone so far as to claim IP rights to her writing because she wrote some of the content when they were married.
Yeah, I don’t understand that either.
The cynic in me says that he was trying to drag out the divorce so as to retain ownership of the house until after he was sentenced.
The FBI identified victims in eleven of the file sets he was sharing. Under federal law, he owes $3,000 in restitution for each of those sets, to be paid into a federal restitution fund. Then identified victims can make a claim against the fund rather than having to chase down individual offenders. So he owes $33,000 restitution, and he’s effectively broke, now and until 2032. His share of the home’s equity is his only hope for making any substantial payment against the assigned restitution.
I don’t know this man, and I ache for my friend and her daughters.
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Previously Published on bobmuellerwriter.com and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock