The Daily News asked me why I put the child molester story on my blog. A reason didn’t come immediately to mind. When I am being interviewed I try not to speak too quickly, try not to speak too impulsively.
After thinking about it a bit, I told her that I saw the letter at 8:30 Friday morning but didn’t blog about it until 4:00 a.m. Saturday morning (As I sometimes do, I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote the posts).
"This is my beat. You just know when it’s a story you have to tell," I said.
My reasons for doing it had nothing to do with outing a man who may or may not be guilty or humiliating a 13 year old girl, who has already been humiliated enough. I certainly didn’t want to name names or print addresses.
My reason was simple: The note was on my mind and it felt like an important wake up call about the world we live in. This is an issue that sneaked into our idyllic little world on Third Street. Park Slope may seem like a smally town where this kind of thing doesn’t happen.
But it does. It can happen anywhere.
I keep thinking about that David Lynch’s movie, "Blue Velvet," which opens with a simple, idealized "technicolor" depiction of small town life. The slow-motion shots, however, suggest that there is something not quite right with what we are
looking at. When Lynch pushes his camera through the soft
green grass of a regular front lawn and shows us the slithering insects
that hide in the darkness, we realize that we are going to enter a very dark
world.
There is darkness just below the surface — beneath the facade.
No matter how you look at this story – whether it’s true or not. Whether the man is guilty or not. Whether the mother is telling the truth or not – there’s darkness here. Sadness. Pain.
All my attempts to delay talking to my daughter about it came undone when I was being interviewed by the reporter. She sat down right next to me on the stoop and later wanted to know what was going on. I had to bite the bullet and gently tell her why the reporters were here. It’s hard with a 9-year-old because so much about sexual behavior hasn’t really been discussed in much depth yet.
But I kept it pretty simple: There’s a man who may have touched a girl in a way that was inappropriate. He was much older and it isn’t right for an older person to touch a child…
Just as was getting into it, we saw two police cars in front of the home of the alleged perpetrator. "What are the police cars doing there?" my daughter asked. "Are they coming to get him? I thought he was in jail already? He should be in jail."
I explained the old "innocent until proven guilty" thing – one of the foundations of democracy. He will be tried in front of a court of law, he will not go to prison unless he is found to be guilty by a jury of his peers.
My attention turned to the door of the building. There was a sign on the door that said, "NEIGHBORS. THE LOCKS HAVE BEEN CHANGED. GO TO APT. X FOR YOUR NEW KEYS."
I walked back across the street and saw a couple, longtime residents of this street, standing in front of their building across the street wondering what was going on. They were staring but clearly had no idea why the police were there…
"I guess someone tried to break in," the woman said. "Must’ve been an attempted robbery or something."
"No. I think it has something to do with that note on the door," her husband said.
"They’re all pointing to that note on the door. I think it has something to do with that note on the door."
I don’t know what that note on the door means. It’s amazing how much of this story is about notes on a door.