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Media
Out of Time
The L.A. Times internal investigation is complete and someone has to take the fall.
By Sean Elder
[12/21/99]

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Media
Mickey's surprise
An alternative juror gives his impression of the case of a Disney exec charged with crossing state lines to have sex with a minor.
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[12/13/99]

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[12/13/99]

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Things began going Naughton's way last Thursday when the jury split largely along gender lines on the charges that the former executive vice president of Disney's Go Network had crossed state lines (from Washington to California) and had used the Internet in an attempt to have sex with a 13-year-old girl. The kicker, of course, was that the "girl" Naughton met in a chat room called "dads&daughterssex" was an FBI agent trawling for pedophiles, and even the decoy he met on the Santa Monica pier Sept. 16 was a sheriff's deputy in pigtails.

Though an alternate juror I spoke with was convinced that Naughton, 34, went to the pier that night with every intention of having sex with a minor, most of the men on the jury were not so sure. Naughton had maintained that such chat rooms (where he spent a lot of his time online) were a source of fantasy for him, and he assumed that "krisLA," the FBI's fictional teenager, was a woman of legal age herself.

"For me, it seemed like a fantasy," 39-year-old Jorge Hernandez told the Los Angeles Times. "He didn't touch her." Indeed, the majority of the men who voted for acquittal (the six-man/six-woman panel reportedly split evenly on the state lines charge, with one man crossing over for conviction on the Internet charge) thought the feds had acted too soon, arresting Naughton before he had laid a hand on the decoy.

And then, in a ruling the next day, a federal appeals court ruled that the Federal Child Pornography Prevention Act is unconstitutional in that it outlaws images protected by the First Amendment. Specifically, the court was defending the right of individuals to possess images that appear to be child pornography -- when in fact they were digitally manipulated. ("No child was harmed in the making of this pornography!")

The rub in Naughton's case was that two of the pictures he had on his laptop were identified by a British law enforcement agent as being photos of actual children engaged in real sex. Naughton has denied knowledge of the pictures -- though Judge Edward Rafeedie's decision whether or not to release him on bail will probably rely more on his interpretation of the federal court's ruling. (Also at issue in light of the new ruling are the instructions Rafeedie gave to the jury.)

Naughton's lawyers, Donald Marks and Anthony Brooklier, have also vowed to have him acquitted on the porn charge on the same grounds -- though Judge Rafeedie has proved an unsympathetic audience thus far, jailing Naughton after both defense and prosecution said he should be out on bail.

What seemed odd about Naughton's fantasy defense was the fact that he was not playing a role in the chat rooms ("dads&daughterssex" was one of several he frequented, including "girls&oldermen" and "girls&olderguys") -- at least not in the conventional sense. He sent "krisLA" links to stories about Patrick Naughton as well as photos of himself (including one of what he said was his erect penis) and bragged about his accomplishments and status in the Internet world. (Before working at Infoseek, which Disney bought and merged into the Go Network, Naughton had been an executive at Paul Allen's Starwave, and at Sun Microsystems he had been among the engineers who wrote the code for Java.) But that was part of the fantasy, it seems. "The role I was playing was a character of me," he told the jury. "If you ask my psychiatrist, I have a lot of self-image and ego problems. I was looking for approval."

As bizarre as this may seem on the surface, Naughton's logic makes perfect sense to one young woman who had an online relationship with him in the early '90s. (The woman, who contacted me after reading my last column on this case, wishes to remain anonymous though she established the veracity of her claims with me -- and was even interviewed by a private detective working for Naughton's defense team.) "That was why he played himself on the Net," she said of her encounters with him, "for approval. He never lied about who he was."

Though the U.S. Attorneys (who have until Jan. 5 to decide if they are going to retry Naughton on the first two charges) insist he was seeking something other than approval in Santa Monica that night, it is clear from the jury's reaction and the memories of this other online correspondent that his story can be seen in more than one light. Was Patrick Naughton a closet pedophile or an over-stressed executive engaging in some harmless sexual role-playing? And were the actions that led to his arrest those of a man about to put his fantasies into violent play or (in that shopworn liberal phrase) a desperate cry for help? The answers may lie where his story began: on the Internet.

Next page | "Mr. Famous comes home"