PITTSBURGH, PA — Special council to the Alliance Defense Fund and former chief obscenity prosecutor for the Justice Department, Pat Trueman, is outraged that Karen Fletcher will not have the opportunity to rot in prison. Although he has no proof to support his claims, Trueman is convinced that the agoraphobic’s website caused real world children to be raped, tortured – and possibly murdered.Quoted in right wing Christian mouthpiece website OneNewsNow.com as saying that U.S. District Judge Joy Flowers Conti’s sentencing was “flat wrong,” Trueman opines about what harm the site may have caused in the real world.
“Men would subscribe to her website and be, of course, motivated by the stories that she wrote,” Trueman fantasizes aloud. “And this is how sex crimes come about: People get ideas in their minds and they fuel them with stories and pictures, and then commit crimes.”
How men and women ever got the idea of molesting children without the internet to plant the idea isn’t explained by Trueman, but his belief in the emotionally housebound Fletcher’s ability to manipulate others to engage in activities they would never have considered or acted upon otherwise is obvious in his statements.
“This woman was responsible for the crime,” he insists, without explaining what “crime” he is talking about. “It took a lot of effort to develop a website, to write these stories, to see money for these stories. She’s guilty. She had the mental state to commit the crime – she has the mental state to do the time. [T]he judge was just flat wrong in giving her a slap on the wrist for this.”
Fletcher has indicated that breaking the law was never her intent and that she started the site in order to exorcise the “monsters” that have tormented her since her own abused youth. She has said that she set up the $10 per month membership fee in order to restrict access to the material while providing adults with similar histories a place to indulge in a form of catharsis via writing extreme erotic fiction featuring the physical and sexual abuse of children. Fletcher told the court that she policed her 29 site members to ensure that they never posted photos of actual child-adult sex.
Unwilling to endure a week-long court room ordeal due to social anxiety and self-imposed virtual house arrest from agoraphobia, the 56-year-old Fletcher chose to plead guilty to six counts of obscenity, instead. Conti sentenced the legally disabled woman to six months house arrest and five years probation.
Fletcher says she remembers nothing about her life prior to turning 14, when she ran away from home. “I may still be afraid of the monsters,” she admitted prior to her sentencing, “but at least in the stories, they prey on someone else, not me.”
While Free Speech Coalition board member and First Amendment attorney Reed Lee contends that “there’s tremendous social value in breaking that spiral between silence and shame,” OneNewsNow states that Trueman feels grief over what it calls “the children who have probably been raped, tortured, and possibly even murdered by Fletcher’s customers trying to act out her stories.”
Although the list of Fletchers’s subscribers is likely available to prosecutors, no evidence has been submitted indicating that they have committed any crimes against children.
