I think it’s very possible - even likely - that Yolanda, out of genuine concern for the children, or at least her employers, gave Shelley an ultimatum to dump Rick or else she’d spill the beans. She chose Rick, because of course she did, and Yolanda wasn’t bluffing. Yolanda is the hero in this story.
Oh, now that sounds like a GREAT idea. Yeah, it’s not like that’ll ever backfire on her or anything. :rolleyes:
All I asked was HOW OLD was the victim?? 13? 10? 0? Revealing the victim’s age does not reveal any identifying details about Rick, Shelley, or yourself. Stop lying, you can access the details, you have access to those anti-pedo blogs you (wisely) refused to share, you can tell us THE AGE without compromising anyone’s identity.
But your refusal to comply tells me that (A) it’s worse than you want anyone to believe, and (B) you are still protecting “Rick”, for whatever reason.
And if you wanna Pit Me, go knock yourself out. I won’t be there, that’s not my type of drama. :rolleyes:
Forget about Yolanda. Yolanda’s a bitch who took advantage of the situation. Some people are bitches like that, and not just women. Some people think only of themselves, damn the rest of humanity.
Sound like anyone you know yet?
Besides being an awful rhetorical tack, it doesn’t flatter you to tell someone they’re lying when it’s obvious they don’t know anything to tell you. Your wanting something doesn’t mean it exists to be given to you no matter how much you want it. This is a mystery you’re just never going to have a solution to. A temper tantrum insisting you know they know something over and over isn’t going to make it so.
It’s pretty clear to the rest of us what your type of drama is.
What isn’t so clear is the reason; why you are attacking choie and imputing all kinds of pro-pedophilia motives to her.
If you just need to be the star of a thread, you can start one of your own, you know.
It almost sounds like YOU may be the one who needs to Pit someone, so I suggest you take any beefs with anyone there and out of this thread. Your posts in here are getting a little vitriolic and heavy with outrage…so this is just a simple note to reign it in, please, and back off some.
Message Acknowledged.
The meta-analyses looked at incest offenders, extrafamilial offenders with either stranger or acquaintance victims, and mixed offenders. Most sexual assaults actually don’t occur within the family, but you’re broadly correct that incest offenders are as a whole statistically less likely to recidivate than offenders who offend against non-family members. There are several probable reasons: sex offenses occurring within the family may be more likely to be the result of gravely misplaced affection, offenders who only offend against a family member may be less brazen and have a smaller victim pool, etc. I’d be careful about characterizing molestation within a family as per se “non-violent,” though - to use a blunt example, an anal penetration of a child is violent whether the offender is the victim’s uncle or babysitter. Incest offenses are often less forceful than extrafamilial offenses, but there are always outliers: I’ve seen offenders with stranger victims with offenses that were comparatively mild, while some of the most frighteningly vicious offenders I’ve seen were only ever adjudicated for offending against family members, essentially sadistically torturing their families sexually for years.
One of the authors of the first piece is also the co-author of several of the meta-analyses I was talking about, probably one of the most respected researchers in the field. I’m in agreement with you here - stalking and harassing sex offenders does nobody any good. If they’re complying with the terms of their supervision, it’s a good thing that they’re employed, housed and have a stable support system. Disrupting that just for the sake of disrupting it is counterproductive.
Whoa, hold on - we don’t know anywhere near enough about Rick to put him in a statistical low, medium or high risk category, much less to say what his personal risk is. We don’t even know his age or whether he’s telling the truth about having an incest victim. From what we’ve been told he’s currently compliant with his supervision, has a live in girlfriend, and says he has one offense against a family member, but on the other hand he’s also described as young and having an admitted deviant sexual attraction to children, both of which are associated with raised risk. Beyond that there’s too much that we don’t know: whether there were other dropped sex offense charges or other credible victim allegations, whether he has a criminal history other than his sex offense, whether he has supervision failures in the past, whether he’s lived with Shelley or another lover long term, what his prison disciplinary record was, whether his victim was male or female, etc. If Rick is a 40 year old guy with just one offense against a female family member, no other charges, no other criminal history or supervision violations, has lived with Shelley or another lover for at least two years, then he’s in a statistical low risk category. Change that a little and say Rick is a 30 year old guy who offended against a male family member, had two more sex offense charges against that child that were dismissed in a plea bargain, had four other misdemeanor non-sexual criminal convictions including an assault, once had his misdemeanor probation revoked, had never lived with a lover for at least two years, and deliberately masturbated in front of a female guard while in prison, and that Rick’s is in a statistical high risk category. Those are just statistical categories, bear in mind, there’s always the possibility of a dangerous outlier in a low risk category and a non-dangerous outlier in a high risk category; those categories just say what percentage of other offenders with those shared characteristics were reconvicted. I’ve seen statistically “low-risk” offenders who I though were incredibly dangerous due to some extreme aggravating factors, and an off the charts statistically “high risk” offender who I think is unlikely to ever reoffend due to along term treatment, an acute understanding of the depths of his problem, and some aggressive preventative measures taken on his part.
Points well made and duly noted - “Rick” as presented in the op would have been a better way to phrase it. We, and the poster of the op, do not really know what the true details are.
Very informative post.
I hope people realize that all registration laws are not the same. From state to state the types of convictions needed to be placed on the list vary greatly. Also what it means to be on the list (i.e. community notification) varies greatly from state to state.
For instance in my state all offenders with convictions that fall under Megan’s Law are evaluated for their likelihood of re-offending using some of the factors mentioned above by pravnik. Most of the offenders on our list are considered low risk and are placed on Tier 1. Tier 1 offenders are not searchable on the state database. If you looked to see how many RSOs are in my town you would only see the Tier 2s and 3s. Our Tier 2s are that way for damn good reasons in my opinion. If you do an internet search you would be able to find their info. That’s only about 10% of those on our list. I have never had a Tier 3. If you are that big a risk then you have probably done enough to be in jail for a very long time.
That’s just one way its done out of 50.
That’s exactly how they do it here too (well, could be the same state for all I know, I’m in WA). Once I found one on my block who was a Tier 3, and a little kid and a pregnant woman who seemed to be his wife or girlfriend lived at the house too. I called the police to see if that was something they knew about, and they said he wasn’t under any kind of supervision so there were no restrictions and nothing they could do. The same justice system classifies him as a Tier 3 child sex offender and lets him live with a little kid. Makes no fucking sense.
I believe that he was also a convicted child molester. That can’t bode well. Might need to be a bit circumspect in our giving the old boy the keys to the nursery. He still doesn’t own the actual crime-insists it was a frame??? Uh-oh!
BTW, can we find out more about this college?
This.
One of my Tier 2s was ordered to have 24 hour GPS tracking. He’s the only one we have had that has to wear the bracelet, its pretty rare. Still managed to get a girlfriend and move into her house. He recently got locked up again for dropping his pants and jerking off in multiple stores. Even though he knew he could be tracked.
Thanks Nawth Chucka, j666 and Idle Thoughts. The hostility and the unsavory imputations have kept me from the SDMB for a couple of days, so I’m grateful for your support.
Thanks also to all the informative posts about the research! Good points about it being difficult to determine whether Rick is a high, low or medium risk, considering how little we know about either the offense or what’s been going on during the past ten years. Something like 80% of what I know is from those anti-pedo blogs (there are at least two that mention him, probably more but I just didn’t want to look under any more rocks). As I’ve said, I’m really assuming if they could have included more awful details–God knows they are thrilled to reveal everything including his address and photo, which I’m pretty sure isn’t kosher under most states’ permissions for use of the registry–they would have, and that includes the age of the reported victim (the sites just say the reported victim/niece was ‘under 14’).
As far as Rick’s age, as I mentioned he’s currently anywhere from 26 - 29, maybe at the outside 30, but that feels like pushing it considering what I know of Shelley (as I said they’re basically the same age) so subtract ten years from that to get his possible age range at offending. 16 - 19 or 20 at the outer limits.
I did double-check and confirm that he didn’t actually have jail time, he had an ankle monitor for 30 days after the conviction and mandatory weekly counseling along with his probation officer, plus annual photos to update his record. What startled me, after re-looking at those blogs, was that I missed the fact that the offense was apparently in another state; so he has been allowed to move since. I must’ve missed it because the blogs only list his current address. Anyway I don’t know whether his choosing & being able to move is a good indication or a bad one.
I know he’s been with Shelley for at least five years. Don’t know how long they’ve lived together… it’s been at least as long as I’ve known Shelley, and I first became her editor in September 2011, I think it was? Maybe October. Current status on his living situation is that they haven’t heard back from the landlady, so he’s still there.
Neither of the blogs mention anything about subsequent arrests or breaking the conditions of his probation, but if it wasn’t a felony maybe there’s no record of it that they could find? (I know I keep repeating this but it seems to be true: if there is anything bad or scummy to say about the people they highlight on these blogs, they will do it. So either they just couldn’t get access to his subsequent record, or there isn’t one. So I guess that’s a null tell, if I remember my Mafia terms correctly. :))
Anyway, so that’s the sum total of what I know from outside sources. Meanwhile, everything I know from inside sources (Shelley herself) is just as second-hand but clearly biased in the opposite direction.
Right or wrong, mentally I’ve been taking an average of the two sides. So in my mind, he’s not a martyr the way Shelley paints him, but he’s not Satan as the blogs paint him. OTOH either could be 100% right, but I just don’t know, so taking both with some grains of salt seems fair enough.
Oh Bob Ducca, I really can’t believe Yolanda is this righteous heroine who gave Shelley an ultimatum. They’ve been friends for ages and she’s known about the Rick situation probably right after Shelley found out (Shelley would have confided in her first, I’m guessing, knowing that they were BFFs). I mean, I suppose Shelley could be totally lying about this, in which case you could be right. But knowing Shelley’s personality and the way she’s idealized Yolanda despite this sudden coldness over the past two months (rather nauseating, really), I can’t imagine that what lay behind it was Yolanda pushing Shelley to dump the guy she loves, something that Shelley obviously doesn’t want to do. I don’t see her extolling Yolanda’s virtues despite being hurt at her going incommunicado if Rick was at the center of some ultimatum.
Still, as I said, I just don’t know and you could be right after all. No way of my ever knowing short of getting in touch with Yolanda and OMG that is clearly out of the question since I don’t know this chick at all.
Hmm, what else? Oh, in the news, aside from no word yet from the Landlady, Shelley has applied for two jobs and has told them upfront about Rick’s history. Both interviews went well despite what must have been one hella awkward moment for Shelley and the interviewers; one of the jobs offered her the position; the other, she hasn’t heard back from yet (but the interview was only on Monday). So perhaps there’s a reason to hope Shelley can find an alternate position soon.
There ya go. I’m sorry for not being able to add much to the discussion but really, I’ve opened the bag here. Aside from the lack of jail time issue and the state of offense differing from where they’re currently living, I think I’ve shaken that bag free of any additional available data.
Seems clear that my job as her editorial consultant/sorta-friend has been to give her some practical suggestions about where to look for jobs and mostly just offer a shoulder. I’ve done that so far and she seems grateful for it, so the help I’ve received in this thread has been valuable. Thanks!
Why is everybody acting like Yolanda is the POS? She didn’t commit a felony, and she’s protecting the kids.
Thanks for your posts in this thread - it frustrates me that many SDMB posters respond to the hysteria around sex offenders by perpetuating reverse myths - that recidivism is always low (even though these crimes are way underreported and difficult to prosecute) or that a significant number of registered sexual offenders are 17 year olds who slept with 15 year olds (people on the boards who work in this area have stated that they’ve never come across this).
And no, I am not in favour of witchhunting or public registers. choie, I’m glad your friend has had a job offer.
Why would it? It sounds like she’s going to be evicted anyways, so might as well try to delay it and possibly get some other people evicted too
Also known as “The High Road.”
Screw that. If people are trying to evict me because of who I’m dating, then I’m going after that. Its no business of theirs if I enjoy the company of zombie Hitler