Catholic priest "addicted to child porn" busted after cross-country investigation

The Rev. Dennis Carey, a 65-year-old Catholic priest in Connecticut, was arraigned today on child pornography possession charges. He claims he is receiving help for the "addiction" to illegal pornography that led to his arrest. He is out on a $100K bond, prohibited from computer and internet access, and barred from contact with children under 13 years of age. His lawyer says the priest is staying in “another church location.”

The Hartford Courant reports that the investigation leading to Carey's arrest originated in Los Angeles, when LAPD contacted police in Connecticut about a child porn suspect believed to reside in the state.

Getting to the contents of the computers was not easy. Materials police wanted to view were in a hard drive that was password protected, the affidavit said. Aresco, the author of the affidavit, said Carey had to give him the password.
Aresco said he found 338 files of suspected child pornography, including 275 photos and 63 videos. The children in the images appeared to be under the age of 16, some as young as 2 or 3. The children were naked, posed suggestively, and engaged in "sexually explicit activity," the affidavit said.
America Online had submitted a report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children about the possibility that child pornography had been sent to someone in California via an AOL email account linked to the rectory.

(via MSNBC via Sean Bonner)

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jonathan_v

So he’s free to molest 13-17 year olds? Brilliant.
- abstract_reg
  
  Hey, don’t forget the 18-100+ year olds too.
Glen Able

>He claims he is receiving help for the “addiction” to illegal pornography…

I do rather hope this “help” isn’t just from the power of prayer.
Teller

100k. Larry Brinkin, the SF gay rights activist, only had to pay a 70k bond for his arrest on child porn. Wonder how they set this stuff?
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Likelihood of skedaddling. Ability to pay. Potential danger to the community.
wysinwyg

In before “OMG WHY ARE YOU SO MEAN TO CATHOLICS”
Boundegar

I’m wondering why he gave up the password. It sounded like his encryption was doing its job.
- http://twitter.com/davidtreadmill David
  
  I agree – giving up the password makes no sense. Can’t he just be silent? Or just claim he fogot the password? Something odd here..
  - That_Anonymous_Coward
    
    FTFA – When the police landed on his door step he knew why they were there, admitted having lots of files, and confessed. There was nothing to be gained at that point by trying to deny what was very clear.
  - tyr
    
    Sense of moral obligation to confess once he was caught ? I mean, he’s a priest after all.
http://twitter.com/CaptainAssclown Captain Assclown

I hope this doesn’t damage the stellar reputation of the Catholic church.
- That_Anonymous_Coward
  
  No but the Bishop speaking sure as hell helped…
  “”These allegations are extremely serious and run contrary to everything we believe as a church,” Cote said in a statement. “To exploit children in that fashion is absolutely reprehensible. We pray the allegations are not true.”
  
  He admitted it to the police and in court. But we are gonna pray that sin away as being untrue.
- Albie Farinas
  
  Just one bad “apple”…
http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby

I wonder if he was addicted to child porn before he’d amassed a large collection of it.
- fuzzyfuzzyfungus
  
  Given that amassing a collection of child porn is a pretty massively bad idea, from a legal-liability-and-probable-social-ostracism-for-ever-assuming-they-don’t-shiv-you-in-prison perspective, I’m going to go out on a limb and suspect that the hankering for kiddie porn preceded the collection…
  - http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
    
    My point was, how can you become addicted to something without exposing yourself to it? Surely his collection began due to him being a pedophile – not due to some uncontrollable urge to collect pictures of naked children.
    Maybe I read it wrong, but it almost comes across as a defence, and I was just wondering what the logic would be there.
    You could feasibly become an alcoholic or scag head without having a particular fondness for alcohol or heroine (circumstance, bad times, etc.), but child porn isn’t the kind of thing that just ‘gets out of control’, know what I mean?
    - Ihavenofuckingname
      
      That’s delving into a tangle of psychological motivations that I doubt can be easily sorted out. Pornography of any sort isn’t exactly a ‘substance’ you can get addicted to, so I doubt the physical/drug addictions you’re referring to are really analogous.
      
      That said, I don’t think there’s always a direct correlation between the porn a person enjoys and their real-life sexual disposition. There’s usually a significant overlap, but It’s not 100%. If you google redheads one day, you can easily google brunettes tomorrow. Nobody would likely accuse you of being a redhead fetishist.
      
      There’s a large market for various ‘deviant’ porn categories out there. I doubt seriously that the consumer-base is nearly as high as the participant-base.
    - http://profiles.google.com/marc.k.mielke Marc Mielke
      
      If you’re exposing yourself to pornography of any type, you are doing it wrong. Just a hand down the pants would do.
      - Boundegar
        
        98% of men disagree.
That_Anonymous_Coward

One would be curious to see how many other email and transfers went in and out of the system to other accounts in rectories.
theophrastvs

Do people with child sex perversions become priests or does being a priest warp one sufficiently that such perversions are established? i’m guessing the former, with a side-order of some amplification via the latter. oh religious folks out there(!), here’s a hint, you don’t need a priest; and you especially don’t need a priest caste/class. just go and seek Jebuz or whomever via peer to peer. -sigh-
- fuzzyfuzzyfungus
  
  My suspicion is that (particularly among the more traditionally pious of the catholic population) having some sort of nonstandard sexual taste lowers the opportunity costs of being a priest.
  
  Let us, for hypothesis sake, imagine that I am a young catholic fellow of some piety, sufficient to consider the priesthood, rather than a fungus.
  
  If I choose the priesthood, no church-approved sex for me. If I do something else, I have the option of getting married and getting up to whatever mischief can be arranged along those lines(and, at least in most of the US, quibbles about contraception and non-procreative activities are substantially ignored).
  
  Now, If I’m straight, that means that the opportunity costs of priesthood are, among other things, some amount of sexual activity reasonably in line with my tastes.
  
  If I am not, I don’t have any church-approved sex options, regardless of career choice.
  - jellyfishattack
    
    That’s all true, but still, becoming a priest is a rather difficult thing to do; it requires a lot of schooling and effort, not to mention that they don’t just accept anyone who claims to have a vocation. A pervert can’t just decide, “the life of a priest is for me”.
    
    Despite all the news reports of pervy priests, I’ve never known any priests who were outed as perves myself. Not that that means they aren’t perves who are sublimating their desires successfully though, but most priests aren’t perves or jerks.
- Bill Hart
  
  There was an article in the news recently about police sexually abusing women in their care. I suspect (though I don’t have any figures to prove it), that all the catholic church has discovered is that deviant sexual behaviour is common amongst humans (whether catholic or not).
  
  It’s newsworthy when it is a catholic priest, because so many people confide in them and trust them and so it is an outrage when this happens. Thus you hear about those cases… because it is newsworthy.
  
  I used to take the opposite view, that it was because they didn’t marry. But I am simply not convinced about that. I’m open to being convinced either way with actual figures.
  - Josh Barnhill
    
    I think it’s mostly important because a Catholic priest is a representative of an organization that is supposed to be disseminating the word of God, and putting two and two together, a Catholic with any amount of functioning grey matter would question whether that representative, and subsequently all representatives of the religion throughout the life of the organization, are worthy of any amount of trust at all, thus calling the faith into question as a whole.
    
    At least that’s how I would feel if I were Catholic. Maybe there’s a reason I’m not Catholic.
    - GIFtheory
      
      Scientific retractions are at a record high. Clearly you should abandon all faith in science, if you have any functioning grey matter, right?
- Velocirapt42
  
  My guess is that realizing one is a pedophile is a pretty horrible realization. A Catholic guy thinks, Well, if I’m a priest I can’t have sex with ANYONE and so I’m safe there, plus maybe God will take this away if I devote my life to the priesthood? And then neither point which was supposed to prevent said priest from acting on his desires works. Which makes me wonder, are there priests who have done this and successfully refrained from molesting kids? I doubt the world will ever know.
- ocker3
  
  The Catholic Church fought very hard to keep the Bible out of the hands of the massees, I don’t think they like decentralised power
That_Anonymous_Coward

Its an addiction, which is often a useful way of saying “can’t blame me” what exactly are the DT’s one should experience from not having access to CP any more?

He has been seeing a mental health professional, which begs the question about mandatory reporters. While he was not abusing children, he was “enjoying” the labors of others who were.

One of the first things he did was resign, I wonder how he arrived at that decision so quickly.

They point out he is sick, recovering from chemo, a diabetic, and recently had a heart attack. (Insert thought about a vengeful god here) They left off he was sick because he enjoyed pictures of children being abused.

He didn’t think he shared the pictures, but someone was really insistent he share with them via email.

It is wonderful how all of these things just happened to him, and nothing he could have done to prevent any of it. Everything was out of his hands, out of his control, he was just strapped in and forced to ride along as the addiction made him do it.

I get addiction is a real thing, but it really looks like this is just an excuse… not my fault “I’m addicted”. Well your addiction was based on the abuse of children, and there seems to be no remorse only “but its not my fault” as a response.
- EvilTerran
  
  I’m not convinced that addiction is the right word — compulsive disorder, perhaps, or something like that.
  
  But, regardless, do you really think anyone who finds themselves with a child pornography habit feels like they had any choice in the matter? Why would anyone wish that upon themselves?
  
  I doubt a single day passed for him without soul-crushing guilt and fear of being caught filling his mind; no wonder he’d already decided what needed to be done when it finally happened.
  
  He has been seeing a mental health professional, which begs the question about mandatory reporters. While he was not abusing children, he was “enjoying” the labors of others who were.
  
  As you say, he wasn’t harming children, so I don’t see how mandatory reporting rules apply here. Or would you rather people who struggle with sexual deviancy (but haven’t actually harmed anyone) be forced to manage their problems completely alone without a single confidant, because they’d get shopped and their life destroyed if they went to a shrink for help? That seems like a bad idea to me.
  
  Oh, and that’s not what “begs the question” means. “Prompts”. Please.
  - That_Anonymous_Coward
    
    Having never had a CP habit, I am gratefully unqualified to answer that question. But I do agree that addiction seems like the wrong term, and I would prefer that diagnosis from a professional not his lawyer.
    
    We do not what went on inside his head, I would assume the resignation was prompted by the church trying to make sure they quickly severed ties with him to avoid being tainted by the scandal.
    You can hope he was wracked with guilt, but we can never actually be sure of this. What I can tell you is the children in the pictures will spend years wracked in emotional and physical pain that nothing he felt will ever be close to.
    
    There are several issues at play, and while it is nice he was seeking treatment he also was amassing a large amount of CP and had deleted and replaced it. Maybe outpatient treatment wasn’t the best option.
    
    Possession of CP is a crime, and he was escalating. He began to trade CP with someone else. At what point would this mental health professional needed to pull the trigger before something horrible happened?
    
    It is one thing to have feelings and be talking to someone to work on the issues. It is another when they are talking about how they want to rape someone and they went out and got a new knife and rope.
ffabian

Is there some sort of study that suggests/proves that there is a higher concentration of child abusers in the catholic church or is it just a case of distorted perception in so far that a abusing priest is more likely to show up in the news than an abusing plumper?
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Plumbers don’t normally have access to altar boys or other youth who trust them as part of their work-related duties.
  - vrplumber
    
    That is absolutely correct. Plumbers are upstanding members of society, and should not be scrutinized for the filthy things they do behind closed bathroom stall doors. Totally job related, I swear.
- Jonathan Roberts
  
  It’s pretty hard to find an objective view on that point, but the general consensus seems to be that the number of perpetrators among clergy is not really any higher than any other sector (considering their greater levels of trusted access to minors, in a similar way to family members and teachers). Here’s one Newsweek article which seems fairly fact-based:
  http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/04/07/mean-men.html
  
  I’d say the most shocking thing is the way that church leadership have often shown very little desire to give the offenders over to the authorities or even remove them from situations where they present a threat to minors. If a father abuses his child or a priest abuses a child in his care, the father or priest is rightly held responsible. If the family or church knowingly covers the actions up and allows the abuse to continue with this child and others, while using their power to silence the victims, they are all responsible.
- That_Anonymous_Coward
  
  The other problem with priests is there are many cases where it comes out they were moved from place to place with no warnings given about the reason for the move, just sticking them into a new hunting ground where no one was the wiser.
  Then there is the history of coverups and spending money to fight laws allowing longer time for victims to come forward with their claims, and trying to limit their ability to go after the people who knew what was happening and just moved them from place to place.
jwkrk

“CROSS-country investigation” I see what you did there…
Palomino

Aren’t Catholic priests supposed to be addicted to Jesus? I’m sure that’s the only condoned addiction allowed.