Jail Baited

Channel 5 only snared pedophiles in its Internet perv sting, right?

ThePitch.com/March 11, 2004
By Tony Ortega

The Strip weighed in a few weeks ago about KCTV Channel 5's Internet perv series ("Hard Sell," February 19), drawing attention to the questionable tactics used by the vigilantes Channel 5 hooked up with to produce last month's six-night broadcast.

This reporting ribeye was concerned that the volunteers at Perverted-justice.com -- who trawl Internet chat rooms for men they can lure into sexed-up conversations with younguns and then post the men's pictures on its Web site -- might snare someone who didn't deserve to be publicly humiliated and labeled an "Internet predator" by Channel 5's hyperactive investigative reporter Steve Chamraz.

Turns out this meat patty wasn't the only one who felt that way.

As early as next week, one man targeted in Channel 5's sweeps-month ratings orgy will file a federal lawsuit against the CBS network; Channel 5's parent company, Meredith Broadcasting; and Perverted-justice.com; claiming that he was misrepresented as a pedophile by the TV stunt and that it cost him a $50,000-a-year job.

The man's attorney, Miriam Rittmaster, says she plans to identify her client only as John Doe in the lawsuit, so the Strip will refer to him by that name.

Everybody heard about the series. Over several days in December, Chamraz huddled in a rented house in Independence with one or more unidentified volunteers from Perverted-justice.com, who went into regional Internet chat rooms pretending to be underage boys and girls. Time and again, local men engaged the supposed youngsters in dirty talk. Eventually, 16 of them traveled to the Independence house, supposedly in hopes of having sex. Each time, Chamraz was waiting with a camera crew.

The stunt, aired during the February sweeps period, won Channel 5 big ratings -- just as it has for the other TV stations around the country that have signed up with Perverted-justice.com for their own "media busts." The first such bust occurred in Milwaukee last fall, but Channel 5 was apparently the first station to show faces and name names.

"We never called anyone a pedophile," Chamraz tells the Strip, and he's right. The TV station avoided that word by constantly repeating, like a mantra, that it had found "Internet predators" with "perverted purposes" who wanted to "have sex with underage teens."

But there's little question what impression Channel 5 wanted to give: that its ploy had rooted out disgusting, pedophilic monsters who would prey upon Kansas City children unless local law enforcement got off its lazy ass.

Only, Channel 5 appears to have overlooked one detail.

Unlike the other men caught in the sting, John Doe never propositioned the supposed young girl he chatted with.

He never described sex acts -- something the others did in great detail.

And he signed off his computer chat without setting up a specific meeting -- and without even knowing the supposed young girl's address.

John Doe tells the Strip he decided to travel to the house in Independence only after he received a phone call some time later from a woman he says sounded middle-aged and offered to give him oral sex.

When the Strip asked Chamraz and Channel 5 News Director Regent Ducas if they could refute Doe's claim, each was quick to doubt the man's story, but neither could offer any detail about the woman who made the phone call.

In fact, Chamraz admitted he didn't know who she was.

"If [Doe] thought she was 35, then why he showed up, I don't know," Chamraz says today, a month after broadcasting a very different assertion: that Doe showed up to have sex with an underage girl.

Last week, CBS compounded Doe's trouble when Dan Rather pimped Channel 5's success, showing Doe's face again -- this time on national TV -- and treating Chamraz like a star. Yes, Chamraz admits to the Strip, John Doe's was "one of the most tame chats." And during the program, Channel 5 indicated that Doe's was "one of the less graphic."

Less graphic? After reading the chat transcript, which is still posted at www.perverted-justice.com, this cutlet doubts that a Sunday school teacher would blush after reading it.

It's nothing like the stream of filth that came gushing out of many of the other men's chats. (Those screeds are also still recorded in archived transcripts.)

There's the guy, for example, who within seconds of discovering he's chatting with a supposed 12-year-old girl asks if she's a virgin and then, after she answers "yah," responds: "wanna change that?"

Soon he's offering her these choice lines: "u do know that it might hurt a little at first when i put it in?"

"think u could handle anal?"

"do u want to swallow? or would u like to have a facial?"

And then there's the 58-year-old perv who three times uses his webcam to transmit photos of his penis to a supposed 14-year-old boy and offers this caveat: "I am a top only. I get sucked and I do the fucking."

Another guy asks a supposed 14-year-old girl if she's up for a threesome. He later puts her through an interrogation: "You swallow? ... Ever had anal sex? ... Condom or no condom?"

In chat after chat, there's a depressing repetition of the same themes. Within minutes of meeting, the men explicitly propose sex acts with people they believe are underage teens.

Then they send their phone numbers, and Perverted-justice.com sets the hook by having someone call to convince the chatters that they've really been communicating with young boys or girls. Often, after the phone calls, the men go right back online to continue their graphic chats.

In most cases, the men make it clear well before that confirming phone call is made that they badly want to have sex with underage teens.

But John Doe's experience was different.

Doe worked for an environmental firm in a job that had recently turned deadly dull. Stuck in an office after a few years working mostly outside, he fought boredom by keeping his computer signed on to Yahoo chat rooms while he sat at his desk.

"I'm sitting here in the office, devoid of human contact. This was a way to chat with people," he tells the Strip.

Chat culture has its own customs, Doe says. For example, he says, when a new name pops into the chat room, you automatically instant-message a hello.

"There are 15 Missouri rooms at Yahoo. People are automatically engaged when they show up. It's almost like a coffeehouse. There are so many different types of people, and most of it is idle banter."

By the afternoon of December 22, Doe was starved for distraction at work.

"I was really bored that day," he says. And when TerifromMO appeared onscreen, he messaged her to say hello.

According to the transcript, after telling Teri that he's stuck at work until 5 p.m., Doe asks where she's from.

"im 14/f/independence. u?"

"oh wow ... I'm 28/m/KCMO ... I'm an old fart compared to you!" he responds, then adds the ubiquitous chat-room abbreviation "lol," for laughing out loud.

He goes on: "I'm sure there's some law against me chatting with you ... lol, don't want to get you or me in trouble."

But Teri counters that her last boyfriend was 24, which leads to her describing a home where her mother, her sole parent, is gone a lot of the time. At the moment, she says, her mother's away for several days.

"wow ... doesn't anyone check up on you?" he asks.

"lol nope," she types.

Doe asks if she's raided the liquor cabinet yet and writes, "you need someone to buy you a big bottle of booze so you have something to keep you entertained."

He adds that he's planning on doing some drinking himself after work and later asks more questions about Teri's previous boyfriend. He then admits that he met his own girlfriend in a similar chat room and then asks Teri to identify her astrological sign.

After she says Aries, he says: "most aries women I've know have a liking for older men for some reason too ... lol."

"lol yeah we do," she answers.

A minute later, Doe sends a photo of himself.

Teri writes, "ur cute."

The two then share further details about each other: His goatee in the photo is now more of a short beard. She doesn't smoke cigarettes, but they both admit to enjoying marijuana.

"If I had more than a bowlful, I'd definately offer ya some," Doe writes.

Doe then complains that he hates drinking alone.

"Well u should come and drink with me," Teri writes.

"I appreciate the offer," he responds, "but I doubt your mom would like that very much."

Teri answers: "lol well she wouldnt know. she is in texas."

"You certainly seem like a nice person to hang out with," Doe answers.

A minute later, Doe writes that his work day is coming to an end and asks: "so you're just gonna bum around at home tonight?"

"I guess," Teri writes back. "Unless u come over lol."

Doe then asks what part of town she's in. "Drinking with someone certainly sounds like more fun than drinking alone." But it's Teri who makes the first allusion to sex:

Teri: yeah. i get horny when i drink though lol

Doe: uh oh ... is that a good or bad thing?

Teri: i dunno. Depends on who im with lol

Doe: well, if I do come over ... just remember, I do have a gf lol

Teri: so what does that mean?

Doe: I dunno ... I was just lettin you know ... lol

Teri then asks Doe his height, and he asks her what kind of liquor she likes to drink. When she replies, "beer or rum and coke," he says that he's surprised -- he would have guessed wine coolers. "You're pretty easy to please for being 14," he writes.

"I'm easy lol," Teri responds.

He counters: "lol ... I'll take that as easy to please."

Doe then says he needs to leave to do some Christmas shopping before he starts drinking.

Doe: how late do you mind meeting up?

Teri: well i was hoping sooner than later. like 7 or so

Doe: I think I could do that ... it might be closer to 7:30 or 8 though.

Teri: thats kewl. do u have a number i can call u at and give u my addy?

Doe then types his telephone number and suggests that Teri call at about 6:15 pm.

Doe: right on ... I'll plan on talking to you then!

Teri: kewl. hey while ur out can u pick up condoms just incase u do come over?

Doe: lol ... yeah, I can grab some of those as well

Teri: kewl

Doe: any particular type?

Teri: nope. anything is kewl

Doe: gotcha

The two then wish each other good-bye, and then the chat ends, ninety minutes after it began.

Doe says he had no intention of meeting up with the girl. He had no phone number and no address for her. And he claims that his references to getting together with her had all been made with a joking "lol."

After leaving work, he didn't buy alcohol. And he didn't buy condoms.

"He'd been joking," says Rittmaster, his attorney. "If you'd seen the little emoticons with smiley faces they sent to each other, you could see that."

Unlike the other chatters, Doe hadn't brought up the subject of sex. Not once had he described a sex act.

"This is more of a lonely guy than anything else," says Detective James McLaughlin, a nationally known cybercrimes expert who agreed to look at Doe's chat transcript.

McLaughlin was profiled recently in Rolling Stone because he's so good at tracking down and arresting dangerous Internet predators. Such men, McLaughlin says, are likely to describe sexual acts in explicit detail, and they tend to e-mail child pornography. When McLaughlin busts them, he usually finds copious amounts of damning material stored on their computer hard drives.

Of Doe's transcript, he says, "I wouldn't even issue a subpoena for subsequent information, let alone make an arrest. His statements don't have the specificity that I'd be comfortable with. And he even makes some references to not wanting to have sex. That's a death knell for an investigation."

After Doe arrived at home that night, he got a telephone call. It was a woman from Perverted-justice.com, claiming to be Teri.

But Doe says he was immediately struck by her voice.

"It was obviously not a 14-year-old girl. She sounded like a middle-aged black lady."

Doe claims that, as in the chat, he wasn't the one who brought up sex. "Considering the innocent nature of the computer chat, suddenly the phone conversation got really weird," he says. "There were a lot of pauses, and it sounded like there was someone in the background. And the person made weird references to sex. She said things like, 'So what are you looking for, oral?'" The woman then asked him to come over.

"I felt like someone was screwing with me," Doe says. "I was curious. It was like when you can't help looking at a car accident. I didn't know what was up. I knew whatever was there wasn't good, but there was something so terribly askew about the whole deal."

So, like 15 others, Doe made his way to the house in Independence. But unlike the others, he reacted not by running away from Chamraz and his camera crew. Instead, he stood his ground and argued with the reporter.

"Life became very surreal at that point," Doe says. "Chamraz kept asking me why I was sweating. Well, they had cameras and lights in my face."

Eventually, Doe says, Chamraz asked him to leave.

After getting home, the first thing Doe says he did was call his girlfriend.

"Needless to say, she was quite unhappy with my actions," he says.

Ten days later, at 5:30 a.m. on New Year's Day, someone from Perverted-Justice.com called Doe to tell him that his was the first chat transcript to be posted on its Web site in 2004. Before long, his phone was ringing constantly as the site's fans called to curse at Doe and scream obscenities into his answering machine. (Over the past few weeks, the Strip has sent several e-mails to Perverted-justice.com staffers, but after an initial response from one of the site administrators, printed in the February 19 Strip, no one has written back.)

On January 5, Doe approached his supervisor at work and offered to resign. After explaining what had happened, however, Doe found that his boss was supportive.

At that point Doe didn't know whether Channel 5 would publicly identify him in its series.

But last month, two days after Chamraz identified Doe, Doe was fired from his $50,000-a-year job.

"I can't fault [my bosses] for what they did," Doe says. "I was a tainted commodity."

If Channel 5 had blurred Doe's face, as other stations have done in similar operations, Doe says he'd still be employed.

Chamraz says he doesn't know who Perverted-justice.com used to call Doe. Moreover, he admits that he wanted to know as little as possible about how the Web site operated.

"I purposely didn't want to know much about what they were doing. They set it up how they do it," he says. "They have their standards. We have our standards."

But Chamraz called the Strip back later to say that a Portland, Oregon, Fox affiliate had just completed its own Perverted-justice.com sting and had included footage of the Web site's volunteers, including a woman making a confirming phone call.

In a flash, this sirloin hit the Internet and downloaded the Portland series -- and sure enough, there, onscreen, was a clear shot of a woman dialing a phone for justice.com, about to reel in a chatter.

And she was 35 if she was a day.

Now, this particular woman, identified as "Sarah Lee" by Perverted-justice.com, probably wasn't the same woman ("MBO") the Web vigilantes used to call Doe in Kansas City.

But why, this meat patty wondered, had Chamraz been so eager to point out that a middle-aged woman had, in fact, been used to make the calls in a media bust in Oregon?

What a dumbass.

Later still, Chamraz called again, this time leaving a message. Still unclear on the concept, the TV reporter pointed out that the woman who had called Doe hadn't identified herself as middle-aged.

Chamraz's point eluded this tenderloin.

But then, the crack investigator dug himself in even deeper.

"If [John] thought she was 35," he says on the message he left on the Strip's voice mail, "Then why he showed up, I don't know."

This meat patty was stunned.

Now Chamraz appears willing to give Doe the benefit of the doubt. But on his February 9 broadcast, Chamraz told a very different story when he announced to tens of thousands of viewers that Doe, like the rest, was an "Internet predator" with "perverted purposes."

"The reality of the situation is that [John Doe] came to our door expecting to meet a 14-year-old for sex. He can paint it any way he wants," says Channel 5 News Director Ducas. But when the Strip asked Ducas about the woman who made the phone call that actually lured Doe to the house, he responds, "Perverted-justice.com makes the phone call." And, he admits, "It's obviously not a 14-year-old who makes the phone call."

Ducas also insists that Perverted-justice.com is a "reputable group."

"Reputable group? Oh, my gosh, I'm sorry. But I have to very much disagree with him," says Julie Posey, a Wichita mother who operates Pedowatch.com and has helped law enforcement agencies make more than sixty arrests of Internet-surfing pedophiles. She draws a sharp distinction between her methods and those of the vigilantes at Perverted-justice.com.

"How could they be reputable? They're into voyeurism and stalking, at best. How do we even know who these people are? Not one of them is willing to give his real name. I've got my name all over the Internet. I don't have to hide."

Posey says she wouldn't make a keystroke without cooperation from law enforcement. "You have to follow the law. You have to prove [a suspect's] intent. And you don't go publicizing the evidence everywhere. You need training in what the law is."

But the volunteers at Perverted-justice.com, she says, cut corners. "It all sounds so easy. You just start talking dirty in a chat room. But some of these conversations I'm seeing on Perverted-justice.com are very leading. You can't do that -- you have to let [the suspect] arrange everything."

Posey says she doubts Channel 5 really considered whether Perverted-justice.com was legitimate. "Were they there to truly protect children, or were they just there to get ratings?"

Detective McLaughlin says Perverted-justice.com's tactics trouble him. "They haven't been around long enough to be reputable. I had just given an interview to a Boston paper saying that Perverted-justice.com is a lawsuit waiting to happen when you contacted me," he says.

After viewing Doe's transcript, McLaughlin predicts that Channel 5 will regret lumping him in with the other men the station exposed in its series. "[Doe's] in a pretty good position. What the television station is going to hope for is a sympathetic jury that looks at this guy in an unfavorable light.

"But they'll spend a whole lot of money getting to that point," he adds.

Before Channel 5's series ran, another man caught in the sting attempted to halt the broadcasts by filing for a temporary restraining order in Missouri Western District federal court. That attempt failed to keep the series from airing, but the lawsuit is still pending. Next week, Rittmaster says, she'll file John Doe's lawsuit by joining the earlier, pending court case.

"Our biggest challenge is keeping the case focused on the law, convincing people that a person who's truly without malevolent intent could get swept up in something like this," she says.

Doe, meanwhile, is looking for a new job. But he says he may have to move out of the area.

"I'm trying not to wallow in self-pity over this. That's what they want," he says.