My friend Jesse Dailey’s trial in New York City has been adjourned until Monday. Jesse is trying to rest up and take care of his life, which has been upended for nearly two years after his arrest on charges of sexual assault – touching three young girls inappropriately on their rear ends on the street and Brooklyn, and also for assaulting and wounding an undercover police officer who tried to question them.
Jesse has pled innocent to all of the charges and has given almost all of what he has in the world to the lawyers who are aggressively defending him. It troubled me deeply that one of the first arguments in the trial was over my book “Geeks,” the story of how Jesse got himself out of Idaho and to Chicago and through the University of Chicago mostly on the strength of character and will.
When Jesse talks of the last couple of years, it is hard for me to hear it. He worked so hard to get out of a hard life, and he was successful building a new one, now he is in the hardest part of life one cold imagine.
It is horrific for me – him, too, I am sure – to even think of all that being destroyed, of him facing branding as a sex offender and the years in prison the prosecutor is demanding if he is convicted. The more I know about the case, the more certain I am that this will not happen, that Jesse will prevail. The truth does want to be free, and I believe justice often does triumph.
I think about how much of my own ego is unconsciously involved in this – I wrote a book about his strength and purpose, after all, and I can’t really be detached about the process. The man accused of these crimes is not the person I knew or know.
I’ve covered a lot of trials in my life as a reporter, and my instincts were pretty good, although never close to perfect. This one doesn’t feel right.
The prosecution says it wants to introduce 18 pages of my book as evidence of “prior bad acts” because there are vague references to Jesse selling fake photo ID’s in Caldwell, Idaho, 18 years ago. The judge is dubious that this says anything about Jesse’s character so many years later. The judge read the free excerpt on Amazon, but not the book, he says he is disinclined to admit this into evidence.
It’s not clear if I can be called as a character witness or not, the book was published in April of 2000. Jesse’s lawyers are not sure it is relevant now, but if the prosecution opens the door, they might just open the door for me to testify.
It is upsetting to see the book distorted, it is a celebration of Jesse’s life and to use it in this dishonest way to harm him is hard for me to handle. I’m going down there later next week – there will be days of hearings and arguments before the trial can actually begin – to testify if I can and to support Jesse in any way that I can.
I am basically a middle-class person, someone asked me this morning if I was a liberal or a conservative and I said I hope I am neither, I hope I am free to make up my own mind about problems and issues and not limit myself to two narrow ways of thinking and arguing. I hate labels, and resist having any put on me. I am very conservative about many things, I am very liberal about many other things. It’s called thinking.
I am learning this year that government has awful power to enter and destroy the lives of ordinary people, even innocent ones. All you can do is help, one person at a time, one issue at a time. I don’t generalize. There are good police officers and bad ones, good people and bad people, good trials and bad ones. I don’t want to swim in the dark stream of paranoia and conspiracy and resentment. I believe in government, it keeps our society intact, it keeps us from slipping into the Dark Ages, except when Donald Trump is opening his mouth.
Sometimes it stumbles and falls, and fortunately, I live in a country where I can write about Jesse like this and not expect to be hauled off and beaten in the morning, unless it is at the hands of an enraged protester from the far side of the moon protesting my abuse of border collies by making them work with sheep.
That is very possible, I get threats like that all the time. We live in a curious world.
Life is, as Wallace Stegner wrote in his great novel by the same name, is really about crossing to safety. We all want to cross to safety, to get ourselves and the ones we love to that mystical place of peace and security. There, we can leave the dangers and surprises and worries of the world behind. As we get older, we learn there is no such place, the dangers and worries of the world are as much a part of life as walking and breathing. Grace does not come from a life free from trouble, it comes from a life where trouble is dealt with honestly and with honor.
Our dreams of safety seem often to collide with the true nature of life in the world. Safety, like fear, is a space to cross. We are always walking, we never arrive.
Jesse is finding grace in his long ordeal, perhaps I can find some as well. I close my eyes and see him crossing to safety, his very hard work, honesty, great heart and courage rewarded in one of life’s most challenging arenas, a criminal courthouse in Brooklyn, N.Y.