Assuming the caller doesn’t live in the same building, yeah, that’s just harassment. Unless the caller plans to track Rick’s whereabouts and warn all future potential neighbors about him, it’s just trading one set of unsuspecting neighbors for another.
Out of curiosity, is this crazy woman embarrassed, or just upset? It just seems like about the most humiliating thing in the world to have a pedophile SO and for people to know about it.
Yeah, that’s a good question. If it were me I would be sad and embarrassed and angry–both at her friend (if she’s who did all this) and at Rick, although in this hypothetical scenario where I’m masochistic enough to hook up with a pedo, I also apparently believe him innocent, so I’d also feel guilty for being angry at Rick. And I’d have to hide that from him. So that would make me even more angry, in a passive-aggressive kind of way. But that’s me.
As for Shelley… this is now only the 2nd time I’ve ever spoken to her on the phone, so it’s a little hard to gauge her emotions since she’s only been relating facts rather than feelings. (Considering Rick is there with her, she can’t exactly say, “I am feeling so stupid and helpless and angry right now for being with Rick!”)
But my instinct says that she’s still in shock, you know? This all happened so damn fast and came out of nowhere. I mean, Thursday she lost one job, Friday she lost another, and Saturday her landlady called and gave her the good news. That is a lot to take in!
Shelley seems to be reacting first by trying to find another job as quickly as possible, so she’s in “whirlwind action mode,” and there’s no room for emotions in that kind of state. She asked me if I’d be a reference, and I said yes. I don’t think the place (a retail store, and no nothing to do with kids at all!) will ever call me, but even if they did, I’m not in any danger of reprecussions–besides, all I’d be able to say is that she hired me to edit and she’s great with deadlines and managing multiple projects, all of which is very true.
Would this make her rethink this relationship? Sadly, if my pop psychological profile of her as someone who needs to be The One Who Saves The Pariah is correct, now that this has moved into outright harassment (IMHO) I think this would only make Shelley cling more tightly to Rick: you know, “We’ll get through this together, it’s us against the world, even though others may spit at you I’ll stand by your side just as Bella did with Edward!!!” Or to quote another piece of pop culture, it’s like Nancy sings about Bill Sykes in Oliver!:
(Look how swell that turned out for Nancy!)
They really need to move out of that fucking town. Although if it isn’t the friend and is this set of internet crusaders who will stalk Rick wherever he goes, I don’t see anyplace being much better for long.
About the only kind of retail I can think of where her boyfriend hanging around wouldn’t be a problem for children would be an “adult store”, and I don’t see someone that naive even applying for that. Otherwise, parents do bring kids when they’re shopping, and it would be even harder to keep him away than it would have been at the school.
It is possible it is not the school sending the information about Rick to all her former co-workers. After all, didn’t you find the same information?
Yes, and I am trying to flesh out where different people here would draw the line.
To me withdrawing extant support/friendship/job/group membership (a withdrawl that causes that person real harm) based on a crime that someone the person loves has committed is on the other side of an ethical line. Ethics are often a messy affair and I understand in a preschool setting that the PR hit is an extenuating circumstance.
Seanette … huh? What sort of job is it appropriate for your boyfriend to hang around at? Assuming that he walks in to pick her up every so often … are you really of the belief that such represents any risk for a random child hanging on while Mom is shopping for shoes or such? There are over 22,000 RSOs in Illinois … odds are that any particular family has passed one or more by in the grocery store or mall or on the street. Really this is the boogeyman hysteria I am talking about. Truth is that few RSOs reoffend after release from jail (under 3%) and that most sexual offenses are by people known and trusted by the victim, not by the boogeyman on the street. (Same site, less than 9% by strangers. See Table 2.) One effect of the sort of persecution that we seem to be seeing going on here is that the rate of future criminal activity (not sex related) goes up as making a living or even living within the law becomes well nigh impossible.
Yeah, but I know his first and last name, and knew he had a record to look up. Her former co-workers–excepting Yolanda, and that’s a big exception–didn’t, and if the school had kept this confidential, why would the coworkers have had the slightest inkling that her firing had anything to do with her outside life in the first place?
As an aside, I just reread the thread, and can I just say I am now aware of what a moron I sounded like when suddenly, midway through, I became convinced the correct abbreviation for that particular list Rick is on is “SRO.”
That’s right, folks. Watch out, Rick’s on the Standing Room Only list!
It had already reached that point when she was fired–or when the information was reported to the school.
All this wouldn’t have happened in the more advanced parts of the country. In fact, it would have been illegal. The only solutions are a) to regretfully dump Rick (though she’ll still have to move) or b) to go with Rick to a less tiny-minded, stupid, hateful, disgusting part of the world. I think that dumping Rick will be the only practical solution, though, because it sounds like even if they moved, the bigoted assholes in that scummy little pest-hole of a town would track them to another state and start making more phone calls.
These people consider sex-related offenses to be reprehensible but acting horribly and uncharitably to others to be just swell. I hope the town gets what it deserves, but I doubt it will.
You can’t really - and I say that because every piece of information matters when drawing that line. It’s never just that someone the person loves committed a crime- there are any number of criminals of all sorts whose families may love them, but won’t house them or go around proclaiming their innocence and it’s rare for those people to lose friendship or support. I think I would have less of a problem ( on a personal level, not as the school owner) with Shelley if she believed that Rick was guilty but wouldn’t offend again, and that this information came to the attention of her employer in some other way. There’s a difference between loyal and foolish. My opinion of Shelley was leaning toward foolish when she believed in his innocence in spite of the facts that he is an admitted pedophile and was convicted of molesting a child. But she also told the OP (not a close friend) and apparently previously told Yolanda- because she’s also foolish enough to believe that these facts won’t affect anyone’s opinion of her.
There are too many variables- it's one thing to not desert your husband of many years when he gets arrested, and another to marry your prison pen-pal who convinces you he was framed. It's one thing to believe your brother isn't really a child molester and another to believe he is guilty and yet allow him to attend family events while keeping a close eye on him. If my sister's husband stole from me, I'd maintain a relationship with her, but not if she stayed with him.
choie, maybe your friend should fight back by making anonymous accusations of the other tenants in the building. It’ll get the landlady busy chasing down accusations and buy her some time. Who knows, maybe she’ll get lucky and hit upon another sex offender or serial killer or something.
Convicted criminals by definition don’t have problems violating laws or rules (unless you’re buying the “innocent victim of framing” line), so rules don’t tend to stop criminals, which would make “don’t have your boyfriend hanging around” just words. She’s obviously too blindly sure of his innocence to have any sense about letting him affect her life, and about the same age range as the store staff I frequently see hanging out chatting with non-employee friends while “working”.
Sorry, but if I ran a retail store, no way would I hire a clerk dating/living with a sex offender, especially since in this case he’s very open about having the hots for kids. Too big a liability risk.
That is a stupid and extremely insulting analogy. But I suspect you know that.
Bullshit. No judge who values his career is going to tell you that you have to employ the babysitter who is dating a convicted child molester.
Maybe her neighbors were assholes, but I consider child molestors a little lower down on the scale. I’m not defending what they did, but if Rick IS guilty, then yeah, that is “reprehensible”.
I sure hope this is a whoosh, really.
Getting in the crosshairs of anonymous vigilantism is horrible. But the anonymous vigilante asshole(s) here have the advantage of having something factual to hold (fairly or unfairly) against Rick/Shelley. I get the feeling that wherever Shelley seeks to obtain employment or housing within their range of action, there will they be, one step behind, until they succeed in driving them BOTH out of town,
Desert Dumpster, I can’t moderate you since I’m not a moderator nor your parent nor your conscience, but I do wish you’d tone down the rhetoric a bit. I do think criminals, some of them, can be redeemed, and that includes some child molesters; I also think the current RSO laws are draconian and treat the offenders worse than we treat convicted murderers, and I wish wish wish someday we’ll figure out how to treat people as human so that they behave like humans, instead of like caged animals so that they end up behaving like beasts.
Nevertheless, there is no equivalence to be made between someone making an anonymous phone call and someone who assaults a child. You only weaken your arguments with that kinda stuff, and it’s a shame because you are making some good points–you’re just dialing it up to 11.
And you keep insulting this town–which yes, does clearly suck, but it’s not just the townspeople who are the problem. There are self-styled vigilante crusaders on the web who have taken it upon themselves to follow people on the RSO list and hound the fuck out of them. That is very possibly who could be to blame for the anonymous call and even Shelley’s firing, if they knew enough to know Shelley lived w/Rick, they obviously know how to do their due diligence and find out where Shelley works.
Whew. Okay, that said. Regarding the whole “how dare she think she can work in a retail store! Where KIDS might have once gone!” and “Obviously she’ll let Rick hang around there, probably in the back room, and lure kids with bags of candy like that creeptastic child-catching dude in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!” arguments:
Shelley’s blind loyalty toward Rick is one of the reasons I think she is actually *more *likely to make sure he keeps his nose clean. As I’ve said before, although she thinks he’s not guilty (and that’s what she says to me; you know, it is possible that she is saying that to me as a face-saver for her), she is hyper-aware of the restrictions placed on him and by which he’s allowed to remain free. So is Rick. Whatever the truth about his past may be, whether it’s a horrifying crime or a travesty of justice, Rick wants a new life. I do believe that, from the very limited times I’ve had any email contact with him, and from things Shelley has said. I really do think he is avoiding the things that could put him in prison. But I’m less confident about Rick’s motivations than I am about Shelley’s. She has his best interests at heart, and while she is a ridiculously naive young woman, she is not dumb as a bag of hair. She does not want this guy to get in trouble. She is not going to put him in situations where he’d be in trouble. That’s why she never brought him to the school, she never brought kids to her house, she always insisted on babysitting at other people’s houses, and so on. Yes, she worked at a school, and it was naive in the extreme to think it wouldn’t eventually be a problem if someone found out about Rick.
But the person she trusted with this information was Yolanda, who used to be her best friend for years now, and whom she thought was her soul mate (well, y’know, as far as friends go). She put that trust in Yolanda and was betrayed (I think).
She also trusted me with that information. Well, damn it, I am trustworthy. (Okay, I’m telling the whole internet, so that’s pretty ballsy of me to claim, but as you see I’ve remained staunch in not revealing anything identifiable about this person. So I think I’m safe.) So here, at least, she hasn’t shown bad judgment.
Finally there’s the big one: her trusting Rick. Well, you know, it strikes me that one thing we’re forgetting is that Shelley knows more information than I know, and thus more than we all know. It’s possible, just possible, that she’s privy to something about Rick’s family that to her makes it believable that this was a false accusation. God knows that’s what I hope is the case. (Again, I’d rather there be no molestation at all–I’m sure we all agree on that, at least, right?)
Okay I’ve tired myself out again. DSeid will probably say everything better than I could. He is right. There are RSOs everywhere and one could be working at your local bookstore, the one where your average Doper likes to go because it makes them feel superior because damnit they’re reading actual books. The one where you take your kids. And that RSO is likely one of the 97% of stranger offenders who don’t re-offend, if DSeid’s cite is correct.
Making jobs impossible, making finding housing impossible, making finding new friends impossible, and making living impossible, is going to do nothing but increase that re-offender rate. Is that the endgame we want to play?
That’s all. Sigh. I just want Shelley to be happy, and I want Rick to turn out to be a decent person after all meaning that his niece didn’t have a horrible thing happen to her, and I want this thread not to be something I dearly regret posting.
Probably none of this will come true, but a girl can dream. A girl can dream.
I probably wouldn’t either if I happened to know about it, because I would assume the woman had very little sense, but certainly not because I would be worried about him molesting a kid that was there shopping with her parents (barring a few special circumstances such as if the store provided childcare). If it’s just a regular store, that would make no sense. If a child molester wants to grab a random kid at the grocery store to molest it (a very rare thing to happen, and I would expect that the vast majority of people who do things like that have no interest in having an adult girlfriend), he would do better to pick a grocery store where he hadn’t been hanging out a lot and people knew him. Your girlfriend working at some random store where people of all ages shop does not give you any special access to kids.
Unless “by definition,” their criminal acts are the result of a mental condition or compulsion, in which case they may feel terrible about the urges they haven’t been able to control and the acts they have performed as a consequence. And yes indeedy doodle, such people do exist and are actually far more common than black-and-white thinkers surmise.
I’m not saying that’s the case here, but why go all the way in the opposite direction and say unequivocally that this guy’s an unreformed, irredeemable monster who is just faking his relationship in order to get closer to all those juicy little boys and girls?
It sounds as if you agree with me that there’s at least some possibility that Rick is a human being, not a monster to be hunted down with pitchforks and torches.
You’re right about the equivalence thing–it’s far more reprehensible to hound someone out of town because they associate with someone you despise than it is to commit a criminal act that is the result of an uncontrolled compulsion. I would rather live in a town full of Ricks than a town fully of petty, intolerant, nasty little people.
And sorry, but I do blame the town–the school wouldn’t have been able to shaft Shelley (and Rick) if it wasn’t confident that its actions would be approved, nay, applauded by the local police, courts, and townspeople. For one thing, what about all the parents of the kids Shelley supervised? When they heard of her firing, did they say, “Well, that’s unfair!” or “Thank God we chased that awful child molester out of town before he raped my child!”?
I’m sorry if I have seemed a little heated about this but as I’ve already remarked, our rights mean nothing when we decide they don’t apply to those we despise. Many people just don’t “get” that concept, which is why the local ACLU office gets firebombed every time they go to court to defend the right of the American Nazi Party to hold a public rally.
No, he wants his old life, from before those mean old relatives accused him of raping their daughter. He isn’t a changed man because he doesn’t want to change.
I’m sure that’s true. On the other hand, I’m sure a ten year old girl would rather live in the town full of people who don’t have time for child rapists and their apologists than a town full of Ricks.
It would when co-workers or customers decide that charming young lady would make a WONDERFUL babysitter.