Laws of Nature

by Lisa R. Cohen

Sometimes I think that males are taught the Ten Commandments in a separate room from us girls. Like maybe the day we're shuffled off to the auditorium in the fifth grade to see "that" film, and learn about the joys of being a woman. (Do they still do that?) In another room, the boys are being handed the tablet, each commandment starred almost imperceptibly. At the bottom of the engraved granite, an asterisk explains the tiny caveat: "*...except if it can get you laid."

Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness*

Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery*

Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Wife*

You get the picture.

I intended to write this column about Johnny Reid Edwards and his inability to follow all three of the above laws of God. He failed so miserably that federal prosecutors charged him Friday with violating the laws of man - six counts of them. But before I could weigh in on this seemingly fresh and fertile ground of male doggery -- it was superseded by even fresher meat.

Yesterday, after days of kerfuffling about inappropriate online messages, New York Representative Anthony Weiner tearfully admitted that yes, he did send the – um – package in question. And that that was the least of his inappropriate conduct. More risque photos, salacious texts, and online canoodling with sexy young constituents.

But unless there is much more to come, really, this is not politics' finest hour; it's also not its worst. Most (but not all) of Weiner's randy texts and tweets and emails took place before his recent marriage. To quote another politician, in Weiner's case he really did not "have sex with (those) women."

Weiner's biggest misdemeanors, in my humble opinion, were poor impulse control, arrogance, and the more heinous crime of hijacking the public conversation.

Now, Congressional leader Nancy Pelosi has announced she will call for an investigation into whether Weiner misused government resources. That will waste more government resources. We'll have as many news cycles as possible to wring out every last detail of these embarrassing revelations, yet more time sucking and agenda fogging.

The only Democrat who might be thrilled with all this Johnny Reid Edwards.

Last Friday, federal prosecutors handed down the indictment against Edwards. The onetime presidential hopeful was charged with four counts of illegal campaign contributions, one count of false statements, and one count of conspiracy. Edwards immediately pleaded not guilty, acknowledging he'd done wrong, but claiming he hadn't broken any laws.

Over the next few days, pundits and legal experts alike agreed it was a highly unusual case. It's unclear whether the government will be able to convince a jury that almost a million dollars funneled to pay the expenses of Edwards' paramour Rielle Hunter could be considered campaign funds. If so, it should have been reported as campaign funds, (which would have been problematic, handily topping the $2,300.00 legally allowed individual limits). If not, the money was just a friendly gift, maybe designed to keep the damaging details from Edwards' sick wife.

That's certainly the position Edwards' lawyer takes.

"No one has ever been charged, either civilly or criminally, with the claims that have been brought against Sen. Edwards today. This is an unprecedented prosecution," said attorney Gregory Craig. "No one would have known, or should have known, or could have been expected to know, that these payments would be treated or should be considered as campaign contributions. And there was no way Sen. Edwards knew that fact either."

Here's the tricky part. It's a no brainer that John Edwards, through his flunkies, took fistfuls of cash from rich folks - specifically 100 year old heiress Bunny Mellon and Texas lawyer Fred Baron, and used the money to conceal Edwards' affair, and its resulting child. At issue is whether that money qualifies as campaign funds.

It comes down to intent. Prosecutors will argue that of course the money was politically motivated, thus qualifies as campaign donations. Bunny Mellon started passing the dough to Edwards' aide Andrew Young (the man tasked with pretending he was Rielle Hunter's baby-daddy – shouldn't there be a law against that?) after Edwards was excoriated in the press for his $400.00 haircuts. Mellon sent her money with a note, now touted as a smoking gun for the prosecution, one that provides evidence Mellon thought she was supporting the campaign.

"From now on, all haircuts, etc..., that are necessary and important for his campaign – please send the bills to me," wrote Mellon. "... It is a way to help our friend without government restrictions."

If $400 haircuts could negatively impact a presidential shot, think of what a torrid affair under the nose of one's cancer ridden wife, and an out-of-wedlock baby, would do to it?

"A centerpiece of Edwards' candidacy was his public image as a devoted family man," Friday's indictment read. "Edwards knew that public revelation of the affair and the pregnancy would destroy his candidacy."

So Listerine heiress Mellon eventually spent upwards of $725,000 to keep Hunter quietly tucked away. That's a lot of mouthwash. In fact, some of it was being passed off as home furnishings, funneled through Mellon's decorator, pricey antiques – chairs, a "Charleston" table. Meanwhile the checks were really going to fund private jets for Hunter, hotels and baby expenses.

Edwards faces up to five years in prison. So even if yet more crazy, self-imploding politicians eclipse him in the weeks and months to come, he's not off the hook.

And there will undoubtedly be more. As sure as the asterisk lurks at the bottom of the male ten commandments, male politicians will implode. That seems to be a law of nature. You can bet, though, that the Democrats are hoping for another John Ensign (R-Nev) the next time around.

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A Cautionary Tale: Chinese Slave Labor

by Lisa R. Cohen

There are perhaps no worse crimes than those perpetrated against defenseless children. I include in that group adult men and women whose mental impairment leaves them childlike and just as vulnerable. In a way, when they are abused they might even suffer in an added dimension, because they’re not as physically appealing, not as cute and cuddly, which can make support, sympathy and outrage harder for a community to muster.

That’s why this weekend’s Los Angeles Times front-page story about the enslavement of mentally impaired adults in Chinese factories was so disturbing. Reported by my good friend Barbara Demick, the Beijing bureau chief for the Times, the piece tells a chilling story.

A 30 year old named Liu Xiaoping, whose look and demeanor is more boy than man, told Demick how he was enticed away from his home, held captive and forced to work for one of the many brick factories in the Chinese countryside. Xiaoping and his family recounted stories of horrific mistreatment, clearly evidenced by physical scars and wounds that have yet to heal, as shown to Demick by Xiaoping's mother in the LA Times photo (below right).

“His hands are as red as freshly boiled lobster from handling hot bricks... without proper protective gloves. On the back of his legs, third-degree burns trace the rectangular shape of bricks...punishment for not working hard enough. Around his wrists, ligature marks tell of the chains used to keep him from running away at night,” Demick writes.

This man wasn’t just punished; he was branded, like cattle. And he was treated worse than them.

Xiaoping was the microcosm story in Demick’s piece, a human face for the more widespread travesty found in a wave of brickworks springing up around the country. Demand for housing material in a Chinese building boom has outstripped supply and overwhelmed the work force needed to create that supply. Adult strength capable of hauling backbreaking loads of bricks, coupled with the feeble mind of a child who cannot fight back, makes for the most desirable of manual labor. 

So, the worst kind of villains have created their own industry that recruits workers who have no way to fend for themselves. Liu Xiaoping and his family talked of him being tricked by a bowl of soup and promises of a living wage. Instead, his family told Demick, he endured beatings, torture and was chained at night, guarded by attack dogs.

And Demick heard stories of others, each one seemed more horrific than the last, of women sold by psychiatric hospitals as sex slaves, of a young man beaten to death after he tried to escape. Workers who were allowed one bath a year and who ate dog food they shared with the boss’s canine.

Like child victims, the mentally disabled make terrible witnesses; unlike children, authorities can dismiss their disappearances as voluntary. Such an adult face staring out from the Chinese equivalent of a milk carton just doesn’t have the same public impact. So police just don’t make them a priority. Demick’s heartbreaking story ended with He Wen, another human face – one his family hasn’t seen in months. He Wen’s father still searches for him, has traveled to factories all over the region where his son was spotted, and though he gets reports of his son’s sightings, always seems to have missed him. There are cases where such victims are transported thousands of miles away.

Kudos to Barbara Demick for spotlighting this terrible crime wave in China. As we become ever more enmeshed in that country's burgeoning economy and culture, we also need to continue to bring attention to its unsavory practices.

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One Man's Poison

By Lisa R. Cohen

I've been on hiatus from this website for the last several months, making a documentary set in a maximum-security prison. That means months of filming on location on lockdown, then months in the isolation of the edit room, which can often feel even more like lockdown. I've been out of the loop for so many cultural events, and I've only just emerged to find myself shamefacedly fascinated by the Charlie Sheen phenomenon.

Of course, part of its appeal lies in what I like to call the rubbernecking by the side of the highway accident syndrome. Part of it is an antidote to the grim subject matter I've been immersed in–the prison has a unique hospice program that enables inmates to redeem themselves by caring for fellow inmates in their final days. It's actually been an awe-inspiring year, but it is dark. And part of it is the conflagration of intriguing moral issues raised by Sheen and his antics.

A brief recap, for anyone who's been hiding in a cave or an edit room, Charlie Sheen has enjoyed years of bad-boy behavior and playing a vanilla version of same bad boy in his hit TV show Two and a Half Men. His bad-boy behavior includes assaulting one of his ex-wives, trashing hotel rooms, frantic 911 calls, alcohol and drug-induced rages and near-death experiences. He ended last year with a bang, apparently locking a naked porn star in the closet, then totaling his room at the tony Plaza Hotel, finishing off with a hospital stay for a psych evaluation.

He started the New Year with an even bigger bang. Celebrity websites were filled with recent accounts, including a convincing first-person account by a fellow partier, on camera, of a weekend binge of porn stars and eight balls of coke, another 911 call, another hospital, and another round of rehab. The cover story, stomach trouble after laughing too hard at an old TV movie, was laughable enough to send us all to our local ERs.

As the tabloids continue to wring the story for its juicy details (how can you resist when the porn stars are as eager to bear witness as they are to bare themselves; see Kacey Jordan, right), the rehab stint is now a house call. The celebrity's father, Martin Sheen, wants to do a Britney and protectivly wrestle away Sheen's assets. Sheen himself has cried foul. He thinks the media has more important things to do such as covering the Egyptian uprising or the war in Afghanistan, for example. Leave Charlie to self-destruct on his own.

He has a point.

Whose business is it if Charlie Sheen wants to commit slow suicide, faster and faster nowadays? How can you force a 45-year-old man to do what he doesn't want to do? Are the CBS suits the bad guys here, for enabling Sheen's habits? Well, maybe, but if he does his job, as supposedly he has, and wants to self-destruct on his own time, do they have other options? Any loved one of an addict will tell you that tired lightbulb joke–how many does it take? Just one, but he really has to want to change.

Here's the thing, though. Most of the people I met in prison were spending years, some their whole lives, because they did a fraction of the drugs Charlie Sheen appears to have done in the span of one weekend. That's not to excuse the criminals serving time for it. But somewhere along the way, the phalanx of look-the-other-way friends and business associates are crossing the legal line to protect Sheen, and, in the process, they're hastening his death.

At the very least, they're teaching exactly the wrong lesson to the rest of us, including that vulnerable and highly prized demographic Two and a Half Men attracts. If you're Charlie Sheen, the lesson goes, you can break the law over and over, and just get to stay home by the pool with a Dr. Drew type and some hookers. The rest of us? Orange jumpsuits.

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We Should All Be "Violently Enraged"

by Lisa R. Cohen

On Wednesday, pediatrician Earl Bradley shuffled into a Delaware courtroom, shackles and handcuffs accessorizing a gray prison jumpsuit above white sneakers. It was the first time he'd been seen publicly since the last time I wrote about his case here, almost a month ago, when he was indicted on 471 counts of child molestation.

Some in the audience, parents of his victims, cried openly. Others tried to get a closer look as Bradley moved to the lectern and pled not guilty to all 471 counts. These were all brutal acts that took place during thousands of visits to BayBees Pediatrics (below right), the private practice where countless parents in the sleepy fishing village of Lewes, population 3,000, trustingly took their children. From the outside, the office looked more like Disney Land, with a miniature Ferris wheel and colorful merry-go-round beckoning children. But inside, authorities say, it was a true house of horrors.

From as far back as 1998 until his arrest in December of 2009, prosecutors charge, Bradley forced at least 102 children as young as three months old to engage in sexual acts, including vaginal intercourse and oral sex with him. Often he took the kids to a basement room after the exam, without their parents. "Come down to my toy chest and pick out a prize," he'd tell toddlers and older kids alike. They'd be gone just a few minutes -- but long enough for him to do unspeakable things and damage them forever. The children would return to their parents, toys in hand.

Sometimes Bradley assaulted his victims right on the exam table, with prolonged internal exams, as when, for instance, one 12-year-old came in complaining of a sore throat and pink eye. According to police reports, Bradley penetrated her for two minutes, then gave her a toy meant for a toddler. Another mother complained that Bradley conducted a four-minute internal exam on a child brought in for ADD.

Yet another mother reported her three-year-old leaving the exam to ask her, "Why did Dr. Bradley kiss my tongue?" The mother went to the police with the same question.

But the complaints and outrage went on for years before Bradley was finally arrested this past December. And perhaps the toughest, most important question that bears answering is: Why did it take so long? Especially since police had fielded enough complaints by December 2008 to ask a judge for a search warrant to raid Bradley's office.

The warrant was denied. The judge said there wasn't enough probable cause. The name of the judge isn't being made public. That's probably good for him, because a lot of the folks in Delaware would jump all over him.

During the ensuing twelve months, Bradley continued to sexually assault dozens more of his patients -- 47 of them, the indictment says. Now the finger-pointing has gone beyond the shortsightedness of an unnamed judge. Delaware press and residents want to know why the prosecutor's office didn't persist in getting into that examining room to do their own examination. An excellent article by the Wilmington (Delaware) News-Journal's Cris Barrish, who's been covering the case, raises a lot more questions.

Why didn't police go to another judge? Or ask the judge to do something else -- sign an arrest warrant, for example, which would have allowed the cops to get in there and possibly catch Bradley incriminating himself? Or ask for federal help? Or report Bradley to the state medical board for misconduct?

Prosecutors have responded that they feared notifying the medical board would have tipped off Bradley, since he'd have been informed of their action. But it might have stopped him from molesting all those little girls in 2009 (only one of his victims so far was male). We know that girls ran from him screaming and crying, that he yelled and raged at them, demanding they obey. We know that his face at such times was terrifying -- "violently enraged," according to the arrest affidavit. And we know that at least five of his victims appeared to lose consciousness or stop breathing during the attacks.

We know all this because now, 47 victims later, there's more than probable cause. There's video. When Bradley was finally arrested, video files seized from his computer replay all the scenes described in the affidavit, and more. When the Feds were finally called in, it was to help access the files.

The video came from a camera Bradley himself set up, probably to enjoy his conquests over and over again, after the fact. But here's the really stunning part: police knew that Bradley had installed a camera in his office as early as December 2008, around the time they were asking for the search warrant, and that the doctor could view the video remotely from his home.

And yet they didn't push the case further until new victims came forward in the months ahead.

Hindsight is 20/20, as they say. And it didn't help that the police investigator in the case retired in early 2009, when it was taken over by a new detective. But in this case, foresight and good old common sense should have provided a pretty clear picture.

Wednesday, the judge upped Bradley's bail from $2.9 million to $4.9 million -- cash. That's $10,000 for each count. A case review is now scheduled for May 19th, but Bradley's public defender said he doubts it will take place, since it would be based on the prosecutor preparing to offer a plea deal. That's not going to happen. Bradley's lawyer is talking insanity plea.

One of the mothers who cried at Wednesday's hearing said,"I just want to see him rot in hell."

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Images of War

by Lisa Cohen

Last week's announcement that Delaware pediatrician Dr. Earl Bradley was charged with 471 separate counts of child molestation shocked the public. It seemed to throw even Delaware's Attorney General Beau Biden for a loop. He told reporters this might be the worst case of abuse the state had ever seen. So far, Biden's office has identified more than 100 victims from 13 hours of videotape Bradley allegedly shot -- victims ranging in age from 14 years down to 18 months. Eighteen-month-old babies.

Biden knows he's got to be careful not to say more than he can. But this father of two young children was pretty clear. "The reality is that as a prosecutor, the rules prohibit me from telling you exactly how I feel -- and I'm feeling a great deal today."

Almost two dozen prosecutors and other staffers are being tapped to track this case, as well as resources borrowed from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, working together in the seaside town of Lewes, as well as Wilmington, and a crime lab in Dover. Delaware State Police detectives are going door-to-door in Lewes, asking parents of Bradley's patients the painful questions that might determine whether their children are yet more victims to add to the long list.

Biden (right) said the search is also aimed at uncovering how this "physician could lurk in our midst for as long as he did." And how he could have recorded his heinous acts?

I can't look into his mind, nor, frankly, would I want to if I could. But clearly, if Bradley is guilty of such monstrosity slash stupidity, he is not alone. Child porn is everywhere, exploding on the internet. Julian Sher, author of "One Child at a Time: the Global Fight to Rescue Children from On-line Predators," says that via computers, porn thrives in an environment of the 3As: anonymity, access, and acceptance. Bradley might have recorded himself for his own private pleasure ... or to blackmail his victims into silence -- at least, the ones who were old enough to talk (!!??). He might have intended to share -- or already has shared -- his recordings across the globe.

According to Michelle K. Collins, Director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's Exploited Child Unit, writing in an issue of "The Police Chief," general trends in recent years point to that third option. Offenders are self-reporting more and more that they collect and trade these images to enhance their stature amongst their online "peers." It's a community that supports and justifies each others' actions. Not to mention the money there is to be made.

NCMEC estimates they review some 250,000 images a week depicting abused children online, available at the click of mouse. In many cases, it's not the pseudo-pubescent, pigtailed adults posing in schoolgirl uniforms, but actual acts of extreme violence perpetrated on younger and younger children. NCMEC's Collins cites data showing 58% of child victims seen were prepubescent, with some 6% of them infants. Often they are faceless, the better to hide their identities and to minimize their humanity.

It boggles the mind.

There are combatants fighting the perpetrators, who, even if they appear in the videos, are largely faceless and elusive themselves. In the Delaware case, the perp is presumably a known entity. But even now, after two months with the damning video in hand, investigators are still looking to identify victims. Biden's office has appealed to parents to come forward with any clues, as they work to amass the strongest possible case against Earl Bradley.

On a nationwide level, NCMEC's Child Victim Identification Program (CVIP) marshals the talents of a dozen federal law enforcement agents who, among others, spend their days perusing the most egregious video and photos with two major goals. They're looking for clear-cut evidence for prosecutors, and in many cases they're looking to identify locations -- what hotel room or basement in what city -- to literally track down and rescue tiny victims.

As a former television news producer who's spent years in edit rooms watching the same five second clips over and over during an interminable edit, I can't imagine a more discomfiting activity than watching such horrific content repeatedly. But the work has yielded results. NCMEC reports more than 900 cases where the CVIP team has aided in a rescue, simply by scrutinizing the smallest of details.

For example, "MINNEA...," the partial revelation on a school uniform draped over a chair in the background, gave away the city and helped liberate six prepubescent girls in Minneapolis. The video producer in that case was convicted of over two dozen counts of making, possessing and distributing pornography. The team looks for details of a room, the specific make of camera used, anything to narrow the search.

CVIP isn't the only one with vigilant eyes out there. Paul Gillespie (left), a veteran Toronto police detective, spent months analyzing web images for clues in the distinctive wallpaper or the soda cans at one young victim's crime scene. Finally, the distinctive logo on a piece of jewelry sent cops to find her, not abducted by strangers, but held captive and tortured by her own father, who passed images of her abuse around online for his friends to enjoy.

Gillespie eventually turned to Bill Gates (below right). "Your technology helped create this mess," he wrote the Microsoft founder in a 2003 email. "Help us clean it up." Gates responded with millions of dollars and some creative minds to build CETS, (Child Exploitation Tracking System). The tracking system took clues from different web images and synthesized them. Its first case was an immediate success -- a four-year-old girl whose abuse was being viewed by a 1,200-strong ring of paying online customers.

Beyond using the images as part of the investigation, there's also the important effort to purge them from sight. Victims describe the proliferation as an eternal, endless sense of being abused over and over again. But rounding up all the copies is a tough task, especially if material is altered in any way -- cropped, re-sized, re-colored -- because then the image can't be searched for online in any uniform way. Most of what appears on the Internet has been changed from its original form. But in December, Microsoft introduced, and then donated to NCMEC, something called PhotoDNA.

Developed along with Dartmouth professor Hany Farid, the new technology manages to identify a photograph's innate signature, its "DNA," regardless of modification. An offending image can then be submitted to online service providers, who in turn can delete all versions from their sites. One added plus: PhotoDNA may be helpful in tracking down "invisible" copies of the illegal photos, which could lead authorities to offenders.

It's a David v. Goliath effort, but it offers some hope amidst the bleakest visions of mankind. It's a world view that is no doubt burned into the minds of these helpless children, subjected to the very worst, often by those very adults -- parents, priests, a family doctor -- who were supposed to keep them safe.

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