Yesterday there was the news of a homeland security official arrested in a child porn sting. But there was also another story all over the airwaves last night, the amazing saga Justin Berry who was underage when he ran a per pay site that got quite a following from men — and led to him being molested.
Berry testified yesterday before Congress and the Bush administration might hope that when GOPers talk about the need to relentlessly protectfamily values voters don’t do a google search for the news story and read this:
Justin Berry, who for five years starred in his own Web cam child pornography business, told a House panel Tuesday that the Justice Department is moving too slowly to round up 1,500 pedophiles whose information he surrendered last year.
“I believed that the government would protect the children being abused. I believed they would act quickly,” Berry, now 19, told the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “I was wrong.”
Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra disputed that, citing a threefold increase in federal prosecutions of child pornography and abuse cases nationally over the past decade. The unit investigating Berry’s case, which Sierra could not discuss, has seen its workload increase 450 percent in the last four years.
“One of law enforcement’s highest priorities is the protection of innocent children from sexual predators who lurk on the Internet,” Sierra said.
The question, though, remains what about HIS LIST? Statistics are nice. But it still doesn’t answer the question about why the people on his list can still do their execrable thing. Berry’s profound disappointment with Justice didn’t just arise out of thin air
Or this:
After quitting the business last July, Berry said, he gave the Justice Department Gourlay’s name and those of about 1,500 alleged buyers of Internet child pornography, suppliers and child molesters.
Two people have been arrested as a result.
Berry said federal prosecutors never asked him about the names he gave them, and prosecutors have not looked at his computer.
“Some of those who molested me … and who made all of this possible, are continuing to live their lives, unaware or uncaring about any government inquiry,” said Berry, who is now attending college but did not say where out of concern for his safety.
Whitfield said he was disturbed that the Justice Department’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section wasn’t aggressively following Berry’s leads.
“It appears this section of the Justice Department is failing miserably on this issue,” [Kentucky Rep. Ed] Whitfield said.
Department spokesman Bryan Sierra declined to comment on Berry’s charges and said the agency plans to testify tomorrow at a follow-up hearing by Whitfield’s subcommittee.
“One of law enforcement’s highest priorities is the protection of innocent children from sexual predators who lurk on the Internet,” Sierra said in a statement. “The Department of Justice uses every resource available to quickly protect and remove children who are being exploited from dangerous situations, and to prosecute those responsible for their abuse.”
There will certainly be some explaination. The issue is whether the Justice Departmen is moving QUICKLY on the list he turned in. There will always be a defense-position fall back (there always is). But the bottom line is: if Justice Department officials are handed specific leads on a silver platter are they moving on them?
According to network news broadcasts last night, Berry was upset to find that some of the men on his list not only hadn’t been contacted but were blasting him on sites on the internet. Nothing had happened to them by the time he gave his testimony yesterday. Of course, there’s a GOOD chance that there will be some sudden burst of activity now that Congress is looking at the problem — and there has been all of this nasty publicity coming at election time (you can just see White House official on the phone asking Justice to move on it NOW.).
Taylor Marsh has a post that MUST be read in full. Here’s a piece of it — but read the whole thing because there’s a lot more:
Since going to blogging in late 2005, I’ve not done any stories on the dangers I’ve previously uncovered over many years of researching sexuality and relationships, something I don’t do anymore, because I’ve learned all I ever care to know. It started well over 15 years ago, when I began interviewing men and women about relationships and marriage, as well as giving advice on relationships. I then went further, interviewing many people in the sex trade, as well as in the world of soft core web pornography, where I went to write about politics the way Hugh Hefner did in print. I was online in 1997-1998, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal hit, writing editorials and doing surveys on cultural issues and sexuality, Clinton and Monica, Susan McDougal and Ken Starr, which were tearing the country apart. It was quite an education, hearing from thousands of men every day. I worked as managing editor and ended up getting good dirt on this brand new industry, which was the first enterprise to make money on the web. We were covered in the Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, USA Today, you name it. Eventually, I wanted to try to explain pornography to women, because in 1997 it was a medium controlled by women, a first in history. I was there when it took off.
I walked out because one day I was handed a photo layout of a stripper on a grade school playground in broad daylight. I refused to publish the pictures and the accompanying story, but the owner overruled me. I walked that day. However, I was told the photos and story went up behind the pay firewall, where it’s safe to show whatever the corporation wants without getting in trouble. I wrote a book about it all. But that’s how web porn works. The juicy stuff is behind the pay wall. I can’t imagine what goes on today.
As a former Miss Missouri, during all my research, having a squeaky clean image had it’s advantages, believe me. I also researched the 900 line phone sex trade. I was poised to write another book on phone sex lines and the “secret lives of men” for women, when 9/11 happened. I had hoped to help educate women and parents on the facts of life as they exist in the netherworld of phone sex and web porn. It’s a seedy world filled with people who can’t control themselves and don’t care who they hurt, just so long as they don’t get caught. But after 9/11, I walked away from that research and focused back on politics, letting what I’d learned about our culture, sexuality and the changing world of liberation speak for itself, as far as I could take it.
So yesterday she was hit by a double-whammy: Berry’s testimony and news about that a Homeland Security official in charge of working for a better press for his agency was caught in a child porn sting. And it socked her hard:
Watching Justin Berry today brought it all back. I knew what he’d done. I knew the scars he was hiding. I’d seen the damage in others before.
Then when the news hit about a pedophile living and breathing inside our own Homeland Security department, I had a sort of meltdown. I put up the breaking story, then took a moment to think about it all. It’s not a comfortable subject to contemplate when you know the gory details.
Today, Justin Berry told a story of how he had given Bush’s Justice Department the names of over 1,500 people who he’d had sexual experiences with over the time he ran his web porn site. To this day, the Bush Justice Department has done NOTHING. That’s right, nothing. Joe Scarborough covered that tonight on his show. I didn’t watch it all, but he said he was going to give out the phone number for the Justice Department so parents could demand action. I hope they do because no one has been paying attention and this has been going on since 1997.
Indeed, Scarborough was stunned and outraged as Marsh is stunned and outraged — as many Americans will and should be, if the story gets out beyond the newscasts and a few scattered blogs.
But it probably won’t.
It’s not the usual partisan “red meat” stuff that partisans and talk show hosts eat up, just chicken and chicken hawk stuff. And what more can you say?
A kid (who reportedly now fears for his life) turns in an actual list of specific names and the people on the list are still online.
So who are they contacting now? What kid is being enticed with money now? Which kids will meet secretly with them now?
Which kid will wind up talking to Congress one day — or wind up the subject of a shocking newspaper crime story?
A video interview with Berry is here.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.