This is a spinoff of the “have you ever known a murderer” thread.
Unfortunately, I have. For many years, my mother was a police department transcriptionist, and found out that a man who attended the same church I did when I was teenager had abused pretty much all his female relatives - children, grandchildren, cousins, etc. :mad: :eek: She violated confidentiality to tell me about it, because in the back her mind she wondered if he had abused me; he didn’t, but the news did not surprise me at all. All his children, including his son who denied being abused, made incredibly horrible decisions when it came to picking spouses, and now, it made complete sense.
I was not prepared for the overwhelming feeling of sadness when I found out about this. He seemed like a gentle, kind, grandfatherly type of person, and it turned out he wasn’t.
One of my co-workers. When he was under investigation, he died in a suspicious accident. We found some really really disgusting child porn Internet printouts in his desk. Which was odd, cause I had to do most of his work-related Internet. He claimed “I don’t know how to do it.”
One of my middle school teachers was arrested (and pled guilty) to molestation a few years after I had him. I had no involvement or indications because I am female and he was interested in boys. He did one stint for the original charges and then another shorter one for parole violation.
I just looked in the sex offender registry and he lives about 2 miles away now.
Yeah. I supervised a bunch of them at a treatment center. If you mean in a non-work sense, yeah. I can go to the PA Megan’s Law website and see all kinds of familiar faces from both my hometown and the town where I work. One of them is a guy I used to feel bad for decking when we were in high school. I don’t feel bad about it any more.
I have a good friend who was accused of molesting his daughter, a fact that she “discovered” under hypnosis. She has since built a career upon studying “recovered” memories. I don’t believe a word of it. Here is one reason. He is a now-recovered alcoholic. My wife once asked his wife (before all this happened) why she put up with him. Her answer: because he was such a good father to the girls. She is an intelligent woman (PhD in linguistics, in fact) and quite observant and I don’t think he could have fooled her.
Slightly tangentially…do you get *gay *and *straight *pedophiles? I had always imagined that they were simply into kids full-stop, and that the gender didn’t really matter…
A guy who sat near me in 8th grade homeroom was found guilty of it and he is occasionally mentioned in the newspaper as being non-compliant with treatment, registry, etc.
Yes. Someone who I had spent a few seasons officiating high school football with was arrested last summer after he molested one of the girls in his kindergarten class. A few other girls came forward as victims, too.
No abusive molesters, but I’ve known 2 that went for jailbait.
My high school band teacher got a little too friendly with one of the flute players. Amazingly to a modern audience (this was in 1984), he was merely forced to resign. The girl declined to press charges. Last we heard he was a band teacher at a community college. (Well, he’s probably retired or dead by now)
About 6 months ago a 50 year old co-worker abruptly left the company. We all thought he’d got a fantastic job offer. A few months later we found out he’d done the stereotypical “To Catch a Predator” bit. Huge surprise, as he seemed too smart to get caught in such an obvious way, he had a good family, played guitar for his church choir. He met a 14 year old in a chat room, drove out to desert to have his fun, took pictures with his phone. A few weeks later “she” texted back for another hookup, only this time it was the cops, and he walked right into an arrest. He pled no contest and is currently serving 4 years.
I also went to high school with several kids who had been preschoolers at McMartin. This was right when the story first broke. They all insisted the stories had to be bullshit. Unfortunately it took about 7 years for a large part of the community to accept that.
A friend of mine when I was a kid (well, actually, the son of some friends of my parents) got (to my recollection) a 99 year sentence for something inappropriate he did with some young boys. I do not know the exact nature of it. I know it was commuted to a year plus 98 years of probation or something like that, but one of the rules was he was not allowed to live with his parents because they were across the street from the victims, and he broke that rule. So back to jail he went and as far as I know he’s been there since.
He was very weak, not very smart, and mostly innocent with an odd temper flare up every once in a while. That plus the nature of his crime and, well, I just don’t want to think about what prison is like for him.
His dad, meanwhile, sent out a mass email while this was going on in which he, in the middle of the email, said something like “now we all know he didn’t do anything we didn’t ALL do at that age.”
This was long before facebook but after that email this couple was basically unfriended by everyone.
I haven’t known any child molestors, but I have known some pedophiles.
Around 1990 I staffed a telephone help line for general sexual questions, as an internship for my psychology study. I did so at the NVSH. The NVSH was founded in the sixties and is/was a pro-sexual organisation. They had meeting groups for transsexuals/transvestites, for swingers, and also… a pedophile meeting group.
Even back then (1991) the NVSH was a bit unhappy with the pedophile meeting group, and had regular discussions if they should go separate ways, but most people agreed that there should be a place for them instead of them going underground. This was before the Internet.
Out of curiosity I spoke with a few of the members of the pedophile group, and visited one at his house for an interview. He had an 12 year old boy visiting. The boy sat in a corner desk happily tinkering with some electronics his adult friend had set up for him. I got the impression the boy was there with the knowledge and consent of his parents, that he liked being there, and that the pedophile was trying, and succeeding, to be open about how he was without harming the boy.
The history teacher at my kids’ school was found with images of many many many boys on his computer. He killed himself when confronted so there was some small measure of satisfaction in that.
My aunt abused her daughter physically, emotionally, sexually, as well as walking out on her and leaving her basically homeless. Needless to say, this is not considered to be a bright spot in our family.
I worked in a mentoring program at a middle school. Several years later, the principal was caught molesting girls.
There are some others, but nothing was ever proven.
I’ve known three. One is a disgraced former teacher who was caught having an excessively intimate private tutoring session with a student. He now does manual labor around town. One is a former IT help desk guru who did ten years for touching his daughter. I doubt that he’ll ever work in IT again - not only does he have a felony record, but his IT skills are 10+ years out of date. I don’t know a lot about what the last one did because I only found his name on the registry after he died. I honestly had had no idea that he had that in the past - there was nothing in his behavior or statements that made me suspicious. Guess he had already put whatever had made him do that behind him.
While I was in high school one of the younger male teachers got fired for having sex with a girl student. At which point a lot of rumors arose about a few other earlier events where the girl hadn’t complained or the complaints had been ignored by officialdom. This was early 1970s.
The daughter of some friends of ours married a rather weird guy and in due course they had a child. When the child was a few months old the dad tried to get a job as a dispatcher for the local police department. In the course of the pre-employment background investigation he mentioned his large collection of child porn on his home PC.
He wasn’t hired. He was however convicted and divorced. This was in the early 2000s.
As far as anyone knows the child wasn’t harmed. Dad liked pictures of older kids, like 6 or 8. He didn’t much care about infants. According to the ex-wife, for whom my wife and I are sort of de-facto aunt & uncle, the guy never did really understand what the fuss was about. Why anyone objected to his hobby was apparently a mystery to him even after a couple years in prison. AZ prison.
My asshole cousin. He was always a raging asshole, but when it came to light that he’d been molesting his son, his asshole-ness achieved new heights. Fortunately, he’s been in prison for the last few years because of it.
The saddest part: my cousin adopted his son after marrying his son’s mother. When the molestation came to light, the mother sided with my cousin, and hasn’t spoken to her own son since.
A neighbor who got busted trying to pick up an 8 year old from school
A co-worker, he was also HIV positive too. His wife was just as bad, she knew what he was and would still leave him alone with her young daughters. he finally got arrested when he tried to have sex with their foster daughter.
The father of one of my son’s classmates. The mother was a snotty bitch who thought she was better than everyone else. I think that knocked the snot right out of her.
One of my son’s HS teachers. I didn’t know him but it really upset my son, it was one of his favorite teachers and he had a hard time accepting that this cool teacher was a creep.
She violated confidentiality to tell me about it, because in the back her mind she wondered if he had abused me; he didn’t, but the news did not surprise me at all. All his children, including his son who denied being abused, made incredibly horrible decisions when it came to picking spouses, and now, it made complete sense.