Sexual abuse is an intimate thing for me, I have been dealing with it my whole life, I take it seriously, when someone is accused of it, especially in our culture, it is a terrible thing, beyond a stigma. For years, the sexual abuse of children was often ignored or avoided, it’s perpetrators rarely exposed, treated or punished. That has changed, and like all change, it brings good things and bad, it stretches justice and weakens perspective.

When I think of people accused of sex crimes, I often think of the Salem Witch Trials, I think this period will be seen in that way one day in the future, the angry mobs, the packs of howling journalists, the ferocious crush of an overwhelming system, the unerasable black mark on a life, the Draconian sentencing and punishments, the horrors of prison.

Jesse Dailey, the subject of my book “Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode The Internet Out Of Idaho,” has been arrested for sexual abuse and the molestation of children – groping – his face and name spread across the media, his life in dreadful limbo, ugly clouds hanging over him. I talked with Jesse last night for the first time in several years, for the first time since his arrest. The story of his pursuit and arrest was hard for me to hear, the accusations impossible for me to believe. He is terrified, of course, stunned by the shattering of his normal life.

I remember every second that this is Jesse’s pain, not mine, this is his story, not mine, my discomfort and anguish is nothing compared to the challenge he faces and the dangers to his existence.

I spent several years researching my book about Jesse, I asked him thousands of questions – in person, on the phone, via e-mail, I asked him about every aspect of his life. Jesse never lied to me, never dissembled, never shaded the truth. He told me about his one arrest for marijuana possession, there was not a single statement he made to me that turned out to be a lie or untruth. The idea of him knocking an officer he knew was a police officer to the ground, kicking and beating her and dislocating her shoulder and fleeing is so far beyond the pale of my knowledge of Jesse that I simply could not accept or credit it. Jesse dreads confrontations, he is not a fighter, he avoids trouble in almost any way he possibly can.

A stranger demanding an identity – he says he did not know she was a police officer – would be especially frightening to Jesse, he would be thinking identity theft the whole way, he is a computer geek and programmer,  he knows the travails and pitfalls of the online world, he knows what identity is worth there. We didn’t talk about the details of the other accusations, it would not have been appropriate.

I was not there, I cannot tell anyone what happened or didn’t happen – this position of mine is hard for some of Jesse’s loving and very loyal family and friends to understand. It is simply the truth, I have learned to tell it. One cannot hear Jesse’s story and not be deeply frightened at the ferocity and power of what we call law enforcement – they swept into Jesse’s life, guns drawn, shouting at him to get down,  took him to an interrogation room, ignored him for eight hours while he waited for a lawyer, and when he emerged, he learned that his photo had been on every TV station in New York all day as the suspected “Park Slope Groper”, and his life was forever changed. Hard to even imagine it.

We seem, in our world, to be losing the notion of the troubled person – and I am not suggesting Jesse is that – we forget that the people pursued and charged with crimes are human beings too, not animals to be hunted down and displayed and thrown into dungeons and branded for life. I am confident that will not be Jesse’s fate, but I have to wonder about the people whose fate it is, whatever it is they might have done. I think sometimes we are among the most vengeful and uncaring people’s on the earth, we lurch from one hysteria to another, the fires fed by fickle politicians and  journalists who scream and shout, but rarely stop and think.

This may or not be justice, it also embodies the great Orwellian nightmare, the sanctity of the individual destroyed by the vengeful authority, the raging mob, unable to listen or wait, rushing to justice, destroying the notion of a life in the name of loving children.

Emotions and judgements are easy to come bye, wisdom and compassion are difficult to find. So, perhaps is true justice.  Does it really serve or children or protect them when they grow up in a world where mobs shatter and defame people’s lives almost with impunity – for people accused of sex crimes, the burden of proof is on them to prove they didn’t commit the crimes, not the accusers (Jesse now has to prove where he wasn’t on a number of days months ago)  –  but disturbed men with machine guns can walk into schools and butcher them in their classrooms? I don’t see any mobs of people or journalists rushing to ban the sale of lethal weapons to the mentally ill. I guess I don’t understand this kind of a world, our ethical compasses seem derailed, even our idea about what abuse can really be. No civilized country on earth treats people or children in this way.

I am no knee-jerk sucker for a story, I was a police reporter and journalist for many years, and I learned young and quickly that bad people do bad things and good people can do bad things. I am neither a judge or a psychic, any good reporter becomes a realist or folds in the process. The courts and his lawyer will decide Jesse’s fate, not me. I can say, though, that if Jesse is a child molester, then I am not the writer or journalist I believe myself to be, I am a blind fool.

I will be thinking hard on this over Thanksgiving, coming to terms with it, praying for my friend Jesse to come out of this dark tunnel and into the light, where he worked and struggled for so long to be. I know him as a good and brave and generous man, and that man will prevail once again, as he has before.