Predators Live Among us. Diane Roblin Lee
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Until outed through charges being laid against them, predators are usually impossible to spot. They lurk behind masks designed to look like everyman or everywoman.
My research was not limited to libraries or news reports. I gained valuable insight from individuals who were willing to expose their hearts in interviews in hopes that their sharing would assist in the battle to protect children.
One of these contributors was Matt, a middle-aged professional man who lost his wife, family, home, profession, reputation, dignity, friends and total sense of worth when charged and convicted of molesting two young girls. While not an example of a sadistic pedophile, he is typical of a multitude of predators who started out dabbling in pornography and ended up destroying the lives around them and losing everything.
We met one cold, fall morning. I plugged in my equipment to record the sad legacy of this man’s life. He was broken and totally open to exposing his deepest shame if it could in any way dissuade anyone thinking of targeting a child from acting on fantasies, or if it could in any way bring healing, insight or prevention into the epidemic of child molestation.
D. Let’s go back to the beginning. Where did this all start? What was the root?
M. Pornography was certainly a major contributing factor.
D. Was there anything else at the root of it?
M. Well, the absence of a healthy adult sexual relationship was not a good environment for me to be in.
D. How do you account for that? What was wrong with your relationship with your wife?
M. I think that on our honeymoon when I was more open about wanting to do the kind of stuff I saw in pornography, and I realized that she wasn’t into it, I disconnected and took the easy way out in more pornography and fantasizing and other relationships. We just grew apart. Instead of working on a healthy relationship, I replaced normal, healthy sex with more and more degrading pornography.
D. So you had no desire for normal sex ?
M. No.
D. Do you think that if your wife had participated in all the things you wanted to do that you would never have gotten involved with the first young girl?
M. There’s no way of knowing that. I never had any thoughts of kids. All the time I was messing around with other women while I was travelling so much, it was all about adults. The thought of kids never crossed my mind.
D. In terms of the root, do you feel that there was anything generational, or anything in you that led you to be attracted to children? Do you feel that you were born with that sexual predisposition?
M. I don’t think so. Psychologists have determined that I am not a real pedophile. Not all people who molest children are pedophiles. True pedophiles just go for kids. That is not my preference. I was always into adult sex but got involved with the two young girls because they were there and I was so selfish that I cared more about self-gratification than anything else at the time. I think that in both cases, with both girls, it was a matter of convenience. I was in a trusted position for a long time.
D. When you were a child, did you have sexual experiences or were you molested by anyone?
M. When I was about nine, I was molested by a counselor at a Scout camp. I called home and tried to get my parents to come and get me, but they didn’t and so I told the senior camp counselor. Then my parents came and got me. Other than that, there were about three instances of experimentation with other children who were older that I, but in talking with psychologists, they seem to think that those circumstances were just normal childhood curiosity.
D. What did your parents say to you about it?
M. We never talked about it. It was as though it never happened.
D. Do you feel that had any effect on your sexual development or your relationship with your wife, or...
M. I don’t know. It wasn’t a good situation. I felt very ostracized at the camp because I was treated like the snitch who had caused this fellow who molested me to be sent home. Everybody was mad because this fellow had been very popular. They didn’t know what he had done to me. I just wanted to go home, to get out of there. I was there for about a day before my parents came.
D. Do you, yourself, feel that the incidents with other children were normal childhood occurrences—or do you feel that they had an effect on your development?
M. It’s not something that you can qualify. I don’t know what I would have been like had those things never happened.
D. Research speaks of the “grooming process” child molesters use to gain the trust of their victims and families. Did you intentionally groom your first victim with the intent of molesting her?
M. While I had begun to fantasize about schoolgirls, I never intended to actually get myself in a situation of molesting a child. The first time it happened, I was leading a children’s church group and a young girl who was a foster child of a family in the church used to want to be around me all the time. She had been sexually active in a previous home and was very clingy with any male leader who would pay attention to her. She was mentally and emotionally weak and just wanted someone to love her. She wanted males to love her. One of the other leaders had to have a talk with her foster mother about how she was constantly making plays for the male leaders. I played on her needs. One day when I was at her home, she flipped her top up out of the blue and exposed her breasts to me. That’s when I should have just told her to pull her top down and left the situation, but I didn’t.
D. Did the foster parents not suspect anything?
M. The girl’s foster mother was very observant. I felt she was always on the outlook for the kids because she had had a previous situation where someone was suspected of molesting one of her grandkids and so I never pushed anything, simply because that would have been a red flag to her. I could sense that she was always very protective.
D. Did you ever feel that she had any distrust of you?
M. No. Not at all. In fact it was exactly the opposite. I was very much in a position of trust with the kids.
D. You must have begun to feel very isolated after all that began to happen. You became isolated from people who could have helped you. Can you talk about how that was?
M. It just reinforced the behavior. It made me go deeper into unreality and interact more with the kids than with the adults. It was a real catch-22 situation.
D. How did you see yourself in relation to other people?
M. I always felt that in a funny sort of way I was superior to other people—that I was smart, that I was clever. I was getting away with it. Did I like me? No. But deep down I always felt that I did a good job at a lot of things. I felt that there weren’t a lot of people who could do certain things as well as I could do them. Believe it or not, I thought I was spiritually astute. That was a total deception, obviously. I was proud to the extent of being vain. Not a very nice person. I worked at trying to appear to be a nice person, but it was all a sham.
D. How long did that situation with that young girl continue?
M. I’m not exactly sure. She eventually went to another home in Toronto. Then there was a church party of some sort and I volunteered to go to Toronto to pick her up and that’s when it ended.
D. Why did it end?
M. Because I took her to a secluded spot on the way and proceeded to molest her and she started to cry. That’s when I stopped. I snapped out of it and took her home.
D. There were quite a few years between the first girl and your neighbour’s daughter, Linda. Why did you choose Linda?
M. I think Linda was the most vulnerable. She was always very clingy and wanted to be around me. She was at my house a lot with my grandkids. Linda was very bright, but she was emotionally needy because of her circumstances and she craved the attention. Other kids who were strong characters never entered my mind. Never even entered my mind.
D.