Reply All - #35 One Strike

Episode Date: August 10, 2015

This week, 10 Minutes On Craigslist is back! Preston has posted the same ad to Craigslist over 300 times. He speaks to Sylvie Douglis about why he keeps posting. And in the second half of the show: Barry Crimmins is an influential comedian, and a survivor of sexual abuse. In the mid-90's he embarked on a one-man crusade to stop child pornographers who were operating with impunity on America Online. You can find tickets and showtimes for the Barry Crimmins documentary by going to http://www.callmeluckymovie.com Sponsors: Audible (http://www.audible.com/replyall) Slack (http://www.slack.com/replyall) Squarespace (http://www.squarespace.com) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, this is PJ. And this is Alex. We just wanted to do a content advisory for this episode, like a no joke, no singing content advisory. Yeah, I think the first half just has some bad words. And the second segment in this episode includes a story about sexual abuse. If that's something that you might find upsetting,

you're probably better off just skipping the second half. Okay, here's the show. From Gimlet, this is Reply All, a show about the internet. I'm PJ Vote. And I'm Alex Goldman. And this week we're doing a segment that some listeners might already be familiar.

you're with. It's called 10 minutes on Craigslist. Alex, how does it work? We, uh, do you know? I think. Just give me a second. Geez. We go on Craigslist and we find posts that are a little enigmatic and we'd like to learn more about and then we email them, and then we go out with our microphones and ask them questions. Okay, you want to hear the post that we're doing this week? Sure. Okay. I think it's story time. Um, subject title, looking for old friends from the Sea Colony Bar in Greenwich Village in the 1960s. And then the post reads, I'm a man who worked there part-time in the 60s and consequently made a lot of great friends.

When the bar closed, everyone went their own way and sadly I lost touch with them. Does anybody remember Maria, the bartender? Wish someone could tell me what happened to her and everyone else for that matter. If there's anyone out there reading this and you were there, please contact. I'd love to hear from you. All right, you ready? Yeah. Okay, so first you could introduce yourself just like how you'd like to in a complete sentence.

Yeah, my name is Preston Mardenboro. I'm an artist now, and I sell art in the street. I've been doing that for a number of years. We sent Reply All's own Sylvie Douglas to go talk to him. Every four days I renew the ad. Just press a button to renew ad. It's very easy. So if you had to guess, how many times do you think it's been posted?

Or renewed. My ad? Oh, that's easy to figure out. mathematically. I'll tell you a minute. 300 times. That might be a conservative estimate. I would have thought it would got more response than it did. But as the years go by, the chances are diminishing of finding people around from those years. Yeah. So can you walk me through Sea Colony and what it looked like?

Yeah. It was one of the top lesbian bars. I was a waiter. the only mail waiter there. One time they had me as a bouncer. And you would walk into the first room, and it was a bar on the left-hand side, and the second room was basically mostly tables and shares, and the third room was dancing. And if the police would come, somebody would press a button. Everybody would stop dancing.

So what did the button do? The button, there was a red light and a bell. All right, everybody stopped dancing, and everything would freeze, and people would run to their tables and just sit like they're having drinks. So everybody was paranoid. There was a paranoid atmosphere about who's going to find out I'm gay, is my job going to find out? Everything was paranoid about people's sexuality. And I went home with quite a few women, and I lived with quite a few women. Did they consider themselves bisexual, or did they still consider themselves as bisexual?

Now, that's a good question. When I say that I went out with lesbian women, I guess from a technical standpoint of view, they were bisexual, but they certainly didn't go out with any other men. The whole thing was a, it was just magic from the very beginning. I mean, straight man being plunged into the world of lesbians. I don't know if I ever, what, how once?

who, I mean, a million, I didn't even have time to get the answers to the questions. But you felt at home right away. Yeah, I was very comfortable with these women. It was sort of a very caring type of atmosphere. There was a girl in there by the name of a woman, by the name of Maria. She was a famous bartender in there for years. I don't know what happened to her. I'd like to see her.

She was a Spanish woman from northern. in Spain and she was a butch woman, extremely attractive. I don't have a picture of her. I don't have anything. She looked something like a gaucho. You know what a gaucho? It's a Spanish gaucho? Something on the order for bullfighter, something like that.

If ever you would have painted, I'm an artist, you know, if ever you would have painted picture of somebody who is Spanish from Spain with the features and everything else, Maria would be it. And, you know, she knew I wanted to go to bed with him. I never told her. Everybody wanted to go to bed with her. Were you in love with any of the women?

Yeah, I was. I was, yeah. Were in love with Maria? That's a hard question. Sort of. Of course, I knew it was impossible, but I wasn't a person who bothered or anything like that. Secretly, the secret love.

Yeah, Maria, sure. It seems like you were putting yourself in this position where you were kind of setting yourself up to fail, that you were in love with these women who wouldn't necessarily have the same feelings towards you back. I don't know. It was sort of a challenge. It was sort of a challenge.

I guess you might call it that. I kept going back for more. It became compulsive. They got to be a habit. Some people take drugs. Some people gamble, but I couldn't stay away from them. And what was their attitude towards you? Well, they liked me.

They did like me. Or maybe they were fascinated with me. I don't know exactly. I wondered what they found in a male. I thought that it was females that they were mostly interested in, which it is in all reality. I mean, it's, you know. And I always said I wanted to get away from them.

Why? Because it wasn't normal, I guess, you know. But it doesn't strike me that normal is important to you. For me. In other words, I used to always constantly think about the future. And I used to think what's going to happen if and what's going to happen when is just going to go on all my life? What is wrong? Am I going to find a straight woman soon?

And I'd meet straight women. I'd meet straight women. I'm going to be honest with you now. I've been honest. I'm going to tell you something personal that I've never felt as comfortable with a straight woman as I have with a gay woman. Ask me why? Why? I don't know.

And what drives you to repost the ad all the time? Probably an obsession. I'm sure it's an obsession. There's got to be someone out there. You know, got to be someone out there. Maria and I have the same birthday, you know. She's going to be ADSO. I'd like to say her.

I'd like to where she is. I don't even know if she's in this country. I have no way of tracing her. I forgot her last name, which is key to finding anybody. Gradually I lost touch, and I knew hundreds of people. Literally hundreds of people.

I don't know where they are. It's like they disappeared into thin air. You're not old enough to have these experiences, but what the hell happen to all these people? It's like a whole continent that this, boom. Age is a terrible thing, you know.

Especially when you're a young boy in an old man's body. That's a... It's a part of my life that's gone. I can't bring it back. It's not... But you're trying to. I keep trying to. Yeah, I do.

I do. I just can't give up. It's a compulsion. someday maybe somebody will see the air but I'm realistic enough to know that the chances of that are slim at this stage of the game

only because father time comes into the picture I wish I could do it all again and listen maybe there's some lesbian woman out there who wants to go out with a 72 year old male if so please get in touch with Sylvie

a letter. She's going to be my proxy. Your matchmaker? Something like that, yeah. Reporter Sylvie Douglas. After the break, one man, without the help of the law, takes on some of the Internet's most heinous criminals. Welcome back to the show. This is just a reminder that this segment is definitely not something

that you want to listen to with kids, and if you are sensitive to discussions of sexual assault, you might want to skip it yourself. You know, Mount Rushmore. Wow. If they do that, we'll have to raise a bunch of money by Lincoln and Jefferson blindfolds. Honor them, they're going to put him on the million-dollar bill. This way all his friends will have something to remember him by.

This is Barry Krimands. He's a comedian's comedian. You may not have heard of him, but people like David Cross and Pat and Oswald name-check him as a massive influence. He ran comedy clubs in Boston in the 70s and 80s. On stage, Barry's unsmiling, stoic, a little wild-eyed. and his material is all pretty overtly political. Like, he tweets at the Pope every day,

begging him to be excommunicated. But he's not confessional on stage. I mean, I'm not the kind of comic who goes out and tells you every detail about his life. I don't talk about the women that have been in my life. I don't, you know, I'm not, it's like, I, like, who cares? That all changed on a night in May of 1992. Barry was hosting a show in Boston.

I had just come from Los Angeles. It was right. After smoke was still in the air from the insurrection after the Rodden King verdict. And a lot of people were really indicting these young kids for their behavior. And I felt like saying to people, you know, there may be a little more context for this. Maybe you want to consider where kids come from. All of this is rolling around in Barry's head as he takes the stage. And he starts out with his normal routine.

I just did a lot of contemporary material like I always do. and was getting laughs. The crowd was having a great time. And then he addresses the L.A. riots. The terrible media coverage, those angry kids, the whole idea that strangers could really judge their behavior without knowing their pasts. So he launches into a story about his own past

that he'd never told before. Barry talked about how when he was a kid, his babysitter would sometimes bring a man over who would take him down into the basement and rape him. How old were you? Yeah, it was about four. Wow. Maybe pushing five, maybe high fours.

Barry says that this happened again and again over a period of possibly weeks. He's not sure. Do you remember the audience's reaction to your set? Well, they were laughing until they weren't. You know, they were laughing until they weren't. A reporter who is at the show wrote that during Barry's story, the room instantly grew as silent as a newly dug, too. It felt cathartic to be able to talk about what had happened on stage,

but Barry wanted to find other people who had lived through similar experiences. And fortunately, there was a place that he could go, the Internet. You know, I bought a new Mac in, like early 95, I guess, and got on America online. And was in some chat rooms with the abuse survivors. AOL chat rooms in 1995 were broken up into two sections. There were channels that were created by AOL about sports and TV and movies, and then there were rooms that were created by AOL members, which tended toward being explicit. Sure, there were chat rooms for abuse survivors, but there were also rooms to arrange anonymous hookups, to role play, and then there were some that were much darker.

Can you tell me, like, the names of the chat rooms that you found that people were in? You know, dads and daughters and, you know, child X, X, X. X-picks and, you know, you know, junior likes Daddy and blah, blah, you know, I mean, I mean, some of them you're going like, well, maybe this is some adult, but you go in and know again and again, it was about children. But I find, I mean, it was not hard. You'd find dozens of rooms in which clearly they're both trading child porn, exchanging child pornography, but also sort of holding a child molest. clinic. Barry had stumbled upon an enclave of child pornographers and pedophiles. The same site that hosted conversations between survivors of sexual abuse was hosting conversations

between sexual abusers. They finally had a community, you know, where would they have been able to gather in the past? So this was a new and clearly very dangerous thing. So I immediately contact AOL and they play at them. They go, well, well, thank you for being a good citizen of our service. And they try that on me for about a month. And I start getting a lot more specific

and telling them what's going on. And they say, well, it's a complex thing and they're talking about we have to balance First Amendment. First Amendment, raping children is protected speech. What are you? It's insane. How many times do you think you contacted them?

Hundreds, hundreds of times. Do you think that it's possible that there was a situation where the company built something that was too big for them to properly? moderate. Listen, that's crap as far as AOL is concerned, and I'll tell you why. If you wrote the following phrase, AOL sucks, they would throw you off in one second.

They had the ability. I mean, these people were in a specific place. I told them where they were day after day. There's just no, it wasn't too big. I mean, it was there. It was right there. The obvious question in talking about these chat rooms is why not just call the police? And Barry did.

He reached out to a number of different law enforcement agencies. But this problem was so new that they just didn't know how to deal with it. No one else was doing anything. I couldn't. It was like, you know, the fire was still going on, and children were still on the orphanage, and no one was running in the building. So I had to, you know, keep trying to put ladders up to windows. I just, no one was doing anything.

Barry thought if there was just enough evidence, he could build a strong enough case to show that the trading of child pornography on AOL was systemic and unchecked. So he did something that sounds unthinkable to me, but he felt was his only option. He went undercover. I created a fake screen name like everyone else on AOL, but mine said I was two kids because these people were fixated on girls and some were fixated on boys. I just said, our stupid parents make us share an AOL account and, you know, and it was a couple

kids' names. And then I would just go in and just sit there, observe what was going on, and they'd start sending me the child pornography. You walk, you go in these chairrooms and people instantly start sending you child pornography thinking it's going to be quid pro quo, you know, and you're just going to send it back to them. When you were communicating with people and collecting information on them, were you getting actual, like personally identifiable information about the people or were you just collecting screen names? Sometimes I was trying. Sometimes when they would try to set up meetings and stuff, I would figure out, you know, where they were in general. there was one guy who, you know, he was fixated on boys and he asked the boy,

do you know what a Ziplock bag is? I said, yes. And he said, well, I want you to pee on your underwear and put it in a ziplock bag and mail it to me. And I said, sure, give me your address. Finally, one of the law enforcement agencies that Barry had been trying to reach got back to him. This is Rick Bell. He's a prosecutor for Cuyahoga County where Barry, was living at the time. And he says that he found Barry's story very confusing.

And he wanted to know if our office was aware that there was child predators on the computer trying to rape children, that there were conversations that were taking place in different rooms on the computer. And we had no idea what he was talking about. He took us to AOL. and which we didn't even know what that was at the time. He showed us some of those pictures, and we were horrified. And when you say that you had no idea you were talking about, like, what was your experience with computers at the time? None.

We might have had one computer in the office. We did not have a computer analyst. So there was little knowledge on our part of how you would even obtain the information to be able to figure out where people were in their different houses speaking to each other. It was very, very difficult. It's like trying to catch a bat with a fishing rod. Rick couldn't do anything. There was no investigation, and they made no arrests. And so Barry was just stuck. All he could do was continue to log into the chat rooms. How much time were you spending in these chat rooms, like all day every day?

Pretty much. I was pretty focused. It must have been really frustrating and lonely and at some ways really traumatic to be doing this. I mean, I guess I'm being presumptuous. How did it feel? Well, it felt all those things, but it felt something else. And that is sincerely concerned about the children.

I wasn't in those pictures, those children were, and that's who came first. And all I know is if I hadn't stuck to it, I wouldn't have been able to live with myself. It was, of all the options made available to me, the easiest one was to do what I did, because otherwise it would be like opening a door up and seeing a bunch of children getting raped and go, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to come in here, closing the door and going, I didn't see anything. The only thing that I can think of that's worse than having to look at child pornography, every day, is having to do so when you yourself are a survivor of childhood sexual assault. But Barry continued to stake out AOL's chat rooms and try to get law enforcement involved

for seven months. Seven months posing his children, collecting as much information about the traitors of child pornography as he could. Finally, Barry managed to reach a U.S. attorney who put him in touch with the right people at the FBI, and they came to his house to get everything he'd collected over that period. I wanted the authorities to know what I had. and I wanted them to come in and take over as soon as possible. When I gave the discs to the FBI, which is hilarious, me and the FBI, because I'm just lefty comic, and they come in, I got a Guatemalan wall hanging with, you know, 200 political pins on it. Half of them have a red fist on it, you know, so it's pretty funny. Talk about strange bedfell.

So I hand over the discs, and they walk out, they leave my apartment, they close, I hear them go down the stairs. and I just broke down and I just wept because I was done. In May of 1995, the FBI launched a program called the Innocent Images Initiative. Barry was told that soon after he turned in his materials, the Bureau had arrested 100 people and that a number of those arrests were based on information

that Barry had given them, including the guy who tried to get buried to mail him urine-soaked underwear. He got rounded up right away. And I was, at the time, I said, yeah, handcuff him to the bars with a jail cell. But he was a particularly bad one.

And I believe he was out of Rhode Island somewhere. So if NPR's on in prison, I'd like to say hello, friend. Barry was relieved to have this period of his life behind him, but he wasn't done. Despite the arrests, AOL still hadn't shut down these chat rooms. And in the summer of 1995, the Senate held a hearing on the problem of child pornography on the internet. And Barry was invited to testify. Can you tell me about the day that you testified in front of the Senate? Do you remember feeling, do you remember what it was like?

I remember that very well. It's because you're walking into, you know, I mean, it's a movie. My name is Barry Crimmons. I'm a writer and a children's rights and safety advocate residing in Lakewood, Ohio. I'm also an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse. Barry is seated two feet away from his nemesis, Bill Burrington, Assistant Counsel for AOL. Burrington's young, handsome, slick as hell. And Barry, well,

Barry just kind of looks like Barry. I look like a marijuana grower at his arraignment. He's in a rumpled suit. His curly hair is all over the place. He has a beard. But his delivery is deadly serious. The video of this hearing is pretty intense. Barry argues with Bill Burrington from AOL,

who's attempting to defend the company's policies, and he doesn't mince words. And I haven't heard back about those files, for example. And I very rarely do. Now, in your case, you did receive responses. I've reviewed the correspondence, and you received responses. at times, but I haven't received responses at other times.

And the more heinous it is, the less response I get. It's like there's denial involved or something. Well, there's no denial. And it was like a long fight. It went on for an hour or so. And by the end, the guy looks like he has just been taking a, he's a boxer, and he's taken a savage beating and hasn't landed a punch all day, which he didn't. And then at the end, he makes the mistake of telling the truth.

Barry's referring to a specific exchange in the testimony. This is Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold talking to Burrington. Let me make sure I understand what your testimony is. You mentioned that it's your company's policy that if we've got a room full of pedophiles and you see that going on, that you try to zap that out. Is that correct? We truly have pretty much three strikes you're out at Maricom. Three strikes?

Like this guy basically says, you know, like, oh, you can't find any four-time child pornography trainers on our service. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding? And I jumped right in and said, that's a one. one-strike offense in any league I believe in, you know, and it was over. It was over. And he was done, and he deserved to be done. Goodbye. After the Senate hearing, AOL changed their policy to zero tolerance for the transmission of child pornography. I talked to John Ryan, who was AOL's senior vice president and general counsel for 17 years and later went on to work for the Center for

Missing and Exploited Children, and he told me that this hearing, the one where Barry testified, was responsible for jolting the internet industry into dealing with this problem. I actually was hired shortly after the hearings. I was hired in January 1996, and I would say the hearings were one of the catalyst for my recruitment. And I think there was a wake-up call for both industry and the law enforcement community, that this was a problem that was just going to get worse. John told me that before this hearing, when AOL got reports of bad behavior,

they might close the offending users' account, but they had no idea what to do with the evidence they were collecting. They would just throw it away. Quite frankly, the industry at that time was caught off guard. They were focusing on building the product and expanding into the mainstream. in USA, and they weren't factoring at that time the abuse of that technology in the wrong hands. Things have gotten better since then. Since 1995, companies have gone from being voluntary

reporters of suspected child pornography to mandatory reporters. And the Center for Missing and Exploited Children keeps a database of suspected images and helps companies work with law enforcement. The authorities have caught up with the technology. There's no longer a need for Barry to be an online foot soldier. But he's still a guy who just can't help but care. Hopefully, everybody has at least a couple close friends they can talk to something about. If not, they can always contact me.

I'm easy to find, and I'm happy to hear anybody's story. Wow, that's an incredibly gracious offer. Well, no problem. I mean, it's not an act, man. Thanks to Barry Crimmons. This is just a small part of his story. There's actually a documentary out about him right now called Call Me Lucky. I heard about him and this movie from the director,

comedian Bob Goldthwaite, on the Comedy Bang Bang podcast. The movie's in limited run in theaters around the country right now, and it is riveting. I strongly recommend you go see it. Go to call me luckymovie.com to find showtimes and theaters near you. Reply all was hosted by PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. We were produced this week by Tim Howard, Shruthy Pinnamanini, and Fia Bennon. We're engineered by David Herman. We had production assistance for from Sylvie Douglas. Happy birthday, Sylvie! Special thanks to Emily Kennedy, Austin Federer, and Dean Johnson. Matt Lieber is that moment when the band you love comes out for an encore.

Thanks to Gimlet member Nick Schweitzer from Somerville, Massachusetts. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder, and our ad music is by Build Buildings. You can find more episodes at iTunes.com slash reply all. Thanks for listening.