Tactics in Breaking Bad News

When someone has been seeing someone who threatens suicide if there is a breakup, my advice, stolen from Tom Leykis, is to schedule a session with a licensed therapist with that other person, under the pretense of getting relationship counseling, or with the claim of needing therapy yourself and wanting them along for some of the sessions. Once they are in the session, the dumper needs to tell the therapist what the about-to-be dumped has said as far as harming themselves or others, tell the other person it is over, and walk out. Then the dumped person is legally and morally the responsibility of the therapist.

We (the wife and I) might have to break some bad news to her mother, which will almost certainly send her mother into a drunken rage. Who knows... I need to talk with my wife about it more - maybe there is no good reason to say anything.

But this got me thinking. Besides dumping a suicidal person in a therapy session, where and how are other good places to break bad news that is likely to bring a destructive response?

Well, thanks to the post-9/11 America, I'm thinking a long commercial flight might be a good place, at least for your own protection.

Let's say you're going to dump someone who has not threatened suicide, but threatened (or conducted) violence to you. Why not dump them during a flight? But only if you can remain totally calm. If they go into a rage on the flight, they'll likely commit federal crimes. They get arrested and taken away once the flight is over. You may end up held for questioning for a while, but you'll be protected.

What do you think?

I can imagine the TSA and flight attendants are thinking, No, please, don't let this become an increasing trend.

A Waste of Human Potential

People can be convinced to do just about anything, given the right conditions. You don't have to be stupid to allow yourself to fall into a trap. In fact, it often takes someone of high intelligence to be convinced to do some really bizarre things (think cultists who commit suicide together). Check out this Associated Press story by Jeff Karoub about Steven Demink, a very evil man who convinced some mothers to do some evil things. Please don’t think I’m excusing the mothers.

In real life, Steven Demink didn't have children, a college degree or a lasting career. Online, prosecutors say, he presented himself as Dalton St. Clair, an attractive single father and psychologist — a fantasy image authorities say the Michigan man used to persuade mothers across the country to commit unspeakable acts on their children.

Demink, 41, of Redford Township [Michigan, I’m thinking], preyed on single mothers for more than a year, prosecutors say, convincing them to sexually assault their children as a form of therapy. After pleading guilty Monday to six charges related to the sexual exploitation of children, Demink faces 15 years to life in prison when he is sentenced in June.

How was he able to do this?

Demink's alter-ego was a single father of a 14-year-old girl, prosecutors said, and he posted pictures of male models as his headshots.

It's a good thing he really didn’t actually have children.

In some cases, court documents say, Demink promised the women a date if they followed through with his directions.

Playing on desperation for a walking ATM can get you far.

Since authorities arrested him in October, seven children were rescued and at least three mothers have been arrested. Prosecutors say all of the children are now safe.

Isn't that a little like saying that an arson burn victim is now safe because she is no longer on fire?

Authorities say Demink chatted with mothers from New Hampshire, Florida, Idaho and elsewhere, persuading them to engage in sexual acts with their children and send images via e-mail or through a live web stream. The children ranged in age from 3 to 15.

Of course Florida had to be part of this. So many strange stories involve that state.

Demink told U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen that before his arrest, he worked as a car salesman for about six months and before that for about five years at a local bank.

As if people didn't hate bankers and car salesmen enough already.

He said he completed a U.S. Customs and Border Protection training program in 2002 and worked for the Immigration and Naturalization Service for about a year.

That explains a lot.

As part of his plea agreement with prosecutors, seven charges against Demink were dropped.

I'm assuming the plea agreement was meant to spare victims a trial?

In one case, Demink started online chats with an Oregon woman about the sexual development of her 8-year-old autistic son, according to the plea agreement. He told her to engage in sexually explicit conduct with her son as a way to teach him about sex, prosecutors say, and she did so while Demink watched on a web camera.

You wonder how someone could fall for this, but people fall for all sorts of foolishness. I'm sure if we could be taken through how this happened step by step, we'd have a better understanding of how the mother could have suspended her judgment enough to do this. A lot of it could be the power we give to psychologists.

A Teton County Sheriff's Office report from December 2009 said the Idaho woman met "Daltonst28" on an online dating site called singleparentmeet.com. She told police she performed sex acts on her young son as directed by her online male friend.

The woman's mother, Eileen Schwab of Idaho, said she knows little of how Demink convinced her daughter to follow his orders. She said her daughter was "depressed and lonesome" after her divorce.

Good for Schwab. She decided to protect her grandchildren and the children of others over her protecting her own daughter from legal consequences.

Demink's attorney, Timothy Dinan, said his client "has expressed a lot of remorse" for what he did and has taken responsibility by pleading guilty.

He's probably just sorry he got caught. What a waste of human potential.

I'm glad law enforcement isn't letting the mothers off of the hook. I do wonder if the charges would have been the same and if the news article would have been the same if the sexes were switched - if this had been about some women convincing single fathers to molest their daughters.

Learn how to think clearly, critically, and discern. Don't blindly accept whatever "experts" tell you. Ask them to explain how they came to their conclusions. Some very intelligent and educated people have believed some very wrong things. Look for contradictions. And if something doesn't pass the smell test, think very hard more than once about it.

The Latest Shark Attack on Dr. Laura Schlessinger

I used to listen to Howard Stern. I've read his books. I've seen his movie. We even have at least one mutual friend. Listening to his show allowed me to listen to other shows, because of the 20-minute marathon commercial breaks. When he left terrestrial radio for satellite, I figured I would keep up on his show by reading recaps on the fan sites, as I wasn't motivated to pay for radio. Turns out the overwhelming majority of his listeners weren't motivated to pay for radio, either. Turns out I wasn't motivated enough to even read the recaps. In my life, just as in the larger pop culture, Stern's relevance has become a faint shadow of what it had been.

In my case, it can probably chalked up to maturing. Nationally, it is not just his move to pay radio, but also TV shows like Jersey Shore and other "reality" shows essentially doing his show on television. Stern's stuff is very funny to adolescent boys, at least the first few times they hear it. When he was a struggling father and long-married husband who made fun of others for getting drunk, and fought with his boss, people could identify with him. But that all changed. I most enjoyed Robin Quivers' news, and I'm a sucker for parody,so I enjoyed those aspects of the show even as I vehemently disagreed with some of the things Stern said or some of his tone.

There is radio for which I'm willing to pay. I started paying so I could get Dr. Laura’s podcasts, just before she announced she was changing the nature of and base for her show by moving to pay radio.

If you haven't heard yet, Howard Stern's prankster fans did a shark attack on Dr. Laura's show yesterday, apparently trashing the second and third hour so horribly that they weren't podcasted (at least not when I downloaded the first hour). They called with bogus calls, made cryptic and not-so cryptic references to Stern's show, and called Dr. Laura Anglo-Saxon words you can't hear on terrestrial radio because the FCC will fine the broadcaster into oblivion.

Stern has loyal, hardcore fans who, living with their parents and collecting checks from the government, have nothing better to do with their time than play toadie for the bully. If they can get their rude verbal assaults rebroadcast on Stern's show as Stern points out what his toadies did to another show, it is the highlight of their year. If Stern doesn't explicity organize and direct these assaults, he certainly encourages them.

There's no winning this sort of thing. Dr. Laura is on the air fewer hours of the day than Stern. Her show is about helping people, not tearing down others. Her listeners are busy working, loving their spouses, and raising their kids. Stern's toadies (a small subset of his listeners) have a lot of free time, stunted emotional development, and a fixation on insults and offensive disruption.

I'm not sure if there is a way to get Stern to stop attacking Dr. Laura on the air, and thus getting the toadies to stop. Has he made a specific demand? I haven't been playing close attention to Stern for many years now, but based on what he used to say and what scant scraps I've read more recently, my guess is that he attacks Dr. Laura because she teaches things like "It's wrong to kill an innocent human being for any reason other than self-defense", her propogating the ideal of saving sex for marriage, and for her past problems with the content of Stern's show and movie, especially now that she has done what he did – moved to satellite to avoid attacks on advertisers. Stern probably feels like she either should have stuck up for him during his battles in the past or shut up about her battles now.

But there is a difference. Stern's show, and related problems, had to do with pushing racy content for titillation. Dr. Laura's show, and related problems, had to do with instilling morals and ethics. If Stern truly can't see the difference, then he has a serious problem.

I'm interested in seeing how Dr. Laura handles this major shark attack. Is there a way to resolve it without a face-to-face broadcasted meeting between Dr. Laura and Howard Stern? Would Dr. Laura agree to such a thing? I wonder what their "bosses" at Sirius XM think about all of this?

He Was Teaching More Than English

Shelby Grad reports on LATimes.com that an American man accused of being a "sex tourist" in Cambodia is heading to trial.

Michael James Dodd, 59, was brought from Cambodia to Los Angeles in February. If convicted, he could face up to 30 years in federal prison.

While I want to see child abusers imprisoned, what other crimes do people get tried for here in the states if they commit them elsewhere? I know if two Americans are abroad and one kills the other (or one disappears), the FBI will get involved. And leaders of foreign nations have been convicted in American courts for crimes they directed from their home country. But if someone were to, say, go to Brazil and rob a bank there, and then come back to the states, would the authorities here try that person here? The crimes in cases like this often have to do with travelling abroad to commit these crimes. Does intent have to be shown? I mean, does he get off the hook if he really did go there for business and then, once there, decided to indulge in his perverse desires?

Dodd taught English in Cambodia, had sex with a 14-year-old girl and was seen with her on several occasions in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, according to an affidavit for arrest filed in federal court.

Gross. He should have learned to make movies and gone to live in France.

In 2002, Dodd pleaded guilty in Saipan to five counts of sexual abuse of a child after he was accused of inappropriately touching 13 female students at an elementary school where he taught, an FBI agent said in the affidavit. Dodd served time in prison and was placed on probation for 15 years.

It's only 2010, so he didn't spend much time in prison, did he? Elementary school girls. Ick. Fourteen year-olds are attracted to each other. Elementary school kids get crushes on 14-year-olds. But the only people attracted to elementary school kids are pedophiles.

He also faces criminal charges in Cambodia.

Yeah, but if they don't want to lock him up for very long, let's keep him locked up for a long time here.

Katrina Brown's Killer Sentenced to Death

Richard Winton reported at LATimes.com that James Heard, 58, of Compton, has been sentenced to death in another case that illustrates all too vividly the danger of exposing your kids to your new honey.

James Heard, 58, killed sixth-grade honors student Katrina Brown in December 1990 while her mother was at work. Heard later said he could not remember the slaying because he had been drinking alcohol and smoking crack for more than a day.

You know, when I was a teen, I used to worry that I wouldn’t be able to get dates unless I had a good job, a nice ride, and was living a fairly decent life. How naïve I was.

But investigators tied him to the crime after recovering a part of his tongue that Katrina had bit off.

Good for her. He had sexually assaulted her, and she fought back in a way that produced evidence. Unfortunately, it enraged him.

It is his second death penalty sentence; the California Supreme Court overturned the first in 2003 because of a "seriously deficient examination of a prospective juror during the jury selection process."

During Heard's trial, Deputy Dist. Atty. Danette Meyers told jurors that Katrina had marked her killer by biting off part of his tongue, and that he stomped on her and poured rubbing alcohol down her throat to get her to regurgitate before he strangled her to death.

The story does not quote the mother or the guy who impregnated her in the first place.

Meyers, an experienced death penalty trial lawyer, has called the case “most brutal crime I have seen perpetrated in my lifetime."

"This is one guy I hope to see executed in my lifetime," she said. "I'm hoping they expedite this."

It's California. He'll die of old age on Death Row. He’ll probably get letters from women who want to marry him.

A woman usually finds herself unmarried with minor children for one of the following reasons:
1) She intentionally got pregnant without wanting a husband to father the child.
2) She's a widow because her good husband was killed by a bad person, fire, or in an accident.
3) She drove away a good husband.
4) She got knocked up by the wrong man (one night stand, boyfriend, shack up, bad husband, guy involved in shady dangerous stuff who ended up dead or in jail).

A lot of these women fall into the last category, which means they may be really bad at picking men. But even the women in the other categories are more likely to attract pedophiles and other child abusers.

And guys – you lose a lot of control over your children and ability to protect them if you're not married to and living with their mother. Be very careful where you stick it.

Update on Sexual Assault Convicts

Yay! As Joseph Serna wrote in the Daily Pilot, California’s Supreme Court rebuffed a request to review a petition (got that?) by three punks who assaulted a teenaged minor. They wanted their convictions overturned and not to have to register as sex offenders.

Warning – the details get disturbing.

Greg Haidl, 25, the son of former Assistant Sheriff Don Haidl, was convicted five years ago of sexually assaulting a teenage girl in 2002. Greg Haidl and his two accomplices, Keith Spann and Kyle Nachreiner, both 25, were minors when they sexually assaulted a 16-year-old girl while she was passed out on Haidl's pool table in his garage in Corona del Mar.

The boys inserted a pool cue into her anus and her vagina, where they also inserted a Snapple bottle and lit cigarette, among other items. The group videotaped the attack, which a friend later found and turned over to police.

Note to criminals: Keep evidence of your crime.

The men were seeking to have their convictions overturned because some testimony about the girl's sexual past was not allowed at trial.

I don’t care if she did a chain every weekend. Well, I would care. But it isn’t relevant. It's like saying you are entitled to go into someone's wallet without asking and steal money because that person has previously given away their money to others and you. Only it is worse because it is her body.

If some young man is convicted of running around flashing adult women from ten yards away, and five years down the road he's behaved himself and matured and asks to get his designation as a sex offender removed, that I think is a fair request. But the sex offender registry is made for people who physically abuse other people in the worst ways. These guys had skilled legal representation. They were connected. And they still got convicted. They're guilty.

Read my previous comments on this case.

A Real Housewife of Orange County

Erika I. Ritchie of the Orange County Register reports on some interesting doings in Lake Forest, California. Looks like more script material for Law & Order: SVU. For the sake of discussion, I will assume the article accurately reports the relevant information of a truthful police report and truthful statements from the wife. Remember, everyone is considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law... blah blah blah...

So the hubby was arrested after turning himself in. He is accused of beating and duct-taping his wife. But there's more. A lot more.

Alireza Sazegari, 31, was arrested on witness intimidation, spousal abuse, kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon, said sheriff's spokesman Jim Amormino.

Can’t you just see this guy on Dr. Phil?

According to police reports, Orange County sheriff's deputies responded Wednesday morning to the couple's home in the 25000 block of Rivendell after the wife's friend found her beaten and bound in duct tape in the bathroom.

Thank God for that friend.

The 30-year-old wife, who's name has not been released, told police that her husband frequently beat her and didn't let her leave the house unless she was with him or unless she went to work, said Deputy Richard Nelson. She also told them that she is limited to specific rooms in the house.

Please tell me that they don’t have any children. If they don't, one might wonder why she didn't flee while at work. But she’s most likely developed something like the Stockholm Syndrome.

Deputies found 20 cameras in the house that appeared to be remotely monitored by Sazegari via his iPhone, Nelson said.

Freak.

The wife told police that her husband became angry after she spoke to an unauthorized man. She said he beat her and forced her to call in sick at work, Nelson said.

An "unauthorized man"? Unauthorized by her husband, I presume. Or is that some bizarre new euphemism for an illegal alien?

She told deputies that she'd been warned by Sazegari not to leave the bathroom and that if police became involved Sazegari had threatened to kill her. She told police that Sazegari had taken her cell phone and locked the house phone, Nelson said.

Deputies also found $10,000 worth of surveillance cameras and fingerprint-activated door locks, Nelson said.

He'll have better conditions and less supervision in prison.

What are the odds that this marriage was essentially forced?

What are the odds he'll still get chicks?

This is an example of where I would be in favor of a woman getting just about everything in a divorce. Should a guy like that really get half of the marital assets? No way. Just think... their money (which means her money, too) will go to pay for his defense. Ugh.

Another Rapist Off the Streets

When I saw this story, I knew something rotten was going on. Either a guy was being slandered in the worst way, or a defense attorney was adding to the pain of rape victims. The jury decided it was the latter, finding Carlos Aguirre Jr. of Wilmington guilty on all counts. Long Beach Press-Telegram writer Tracy Manzer reports.

The 25-year-old Wilmington man was initially charged with six felony counts stemming from rapes of the victims - ages 14 to 16 - from 2004 to 2006.

Included in the filing was a count of possession of ecstasy and marijuana for sale - drugs that were used to incapacitate his victims - and a count of possession of child pornography for some 120 images found on his computer - featuring an 18-minute video of one victim being raped by Aguirre and a 12-year-old boy.

Six additional rape counts were added to the case shortly before trial.

Prison was made for guys like this. In the old days, he would have been beaten to death by men in the family of these girls. But we’re much gentler and orderly now.

All the counts stem from incidents in which Aguirre was an adult, though jurors heard from several witnesses that he began molesting his niece when she and Aguirre were children.

I would guess someone did something to him when he was younger. But at some point, a person is fully responsible for their actions and must break the cycle.

Aguirre's niece said the abuse started when was 5 and included her uncle forcing her 8-year-old brother to have sex with her as well as the molestation of she and her half-sister at the same time.

Multiple witnesses testified that Aguirre was convicted of raping his other niece when he was juvenile, resulting in the defendant serving two years in a juvenile detention facility.

It obviously didn't help, other than keeping him from hurting innocent people for two years. But I do have to wonder – what kind of parent, knowing what this guy did, allowed him around their children?

[Defense attorney] Russ argued that victim's problems in high school, her struggles with depression and alcohol and her father's taking away her car prompted her to lash out at her uncle.

People do tend to have problems when they've been raped, or are being raised by the kind of people that allow them to be around rapists. Oh, and yeah... a typical reaction of a teen who is mad at a parent is to accuse someone else of rape, right? I know people have a right to a legal defense, but I don’t think I could defend a client in a case that would require me to verbally attack minor rape victims.

He's facing a sentence of more than 100 years plus multiple life terms. The best thing he can do now is admit what he did, apologize, beg for forgiveness, expose anyone else he knows who aided his crimes, and write from prison to warn others how to avoid becoming vicitims of people like him.

Should She Tell Her Bride Sister the Groom Raped Her?

Can you believe that is even a question?

PREGNANT SISTER wrote into Dear Abby:

I was sexually abused by my sister's boyfriend, "Teddy," three months ago. He is five years older than I am, and now I am pregnant.

Notice the phraseology. She doesn't say that they fooled around. She recognizes what he did as sexual abuse. Although she doesn't give her age, it sounds like she is a minor.

This guy is a creep who should be locked up.

I don't want to tell Teddy or my family because I am afraid of the consequences -- especially because he and my sister are getting married in three months.

Now you know she's immature. She's not realizing that she's about to let her sister marry (and, presumably make babies with), a child molester - or at the very least someone who "cheats" on his fiancée with her sister - or rapist.

I don't want to ruin their marriage, but I can't keep this a secret much longer.

Uh, he is what would ruin their marriage. He is to blame.

I don't know what to do because Teddy is a respectable person and I know they won't believe me if I tell the truth.

No, they think he is a respectable person because nobody has exposed him - and he needs to be exposed. DNA will prove the truth. He'll probably claim that you jumped his bones, but even if it had happened that way, it is no excuse.

Turns out my response is very much like the one Dear Abby gave. I usually read the letter and write my response before I read the actual response, just to compare.

What a creep. If he finds out about the pregnancy, he'll probably try to drive her to an abortion clinic without her family even knowing. And if her sister knows what a creep he is and chooses to look the other way, then she is horrible, too, and has probably passed over some genuinely respectable and nice men. Hopefully, this guy will get prosecuted and the entire family will realize they've dodged a second bullet. Adopt that kid out to a loving mother and father who can take care of a baby, and get this guy away from your family and other families. PLEASE!