During the summer and fall of 2002 the investigation went-on and the grand jury continued to do their work. It was during the summer - and months after the search on my home - that Debbie revealed they had found one illegal image of child pornography. She explained they were continuing to look. {For the full story on that discovery see J'Accuse Part V}. I was devastated. I was sure there was nothing to find. My depression was getting worse. I was also gaining weight which always added to my depression. I decided to start exercising and went for 5-7 mile walks around the Central Park Reservoir every morning with Seabright and a friend of mine. It was a very hot summer and I started to sweat off a few pounds. I had a wedding to go to in Los Angeles that October and I wanted to lose as much weight as possible before then.
After the search warrant was executed, before anything was found, Debbie insisted to Jerry that I agree not to have a computer in my home. Jerry agreed. I thought this was ridiculous. I won't argue the merits of whether I should or shouldn't have had one. I will say that it was another of a long list of 'gives' by Jerry to Debbie. I was merely under investigation. At that point they had absolutely no justification for making the request or getting anyone to enforce it. What was her leverage? That she was going to indict me sooner? That's a meaningless threat and a good lawyer would have told her to fuck-off unless there we a reason to say yes beyond "goodwill." But Jerry was completely bamboozled by Debbie. He would go on and on about what a tough guy he was with prosecutors and judges and then in the end he was always the creampuff. In the three years he was my attorney he fought Debbie on two or three things, succeeded in one, and that was it. And the one thing he succeeded on, while important to me at the time, was very minor in the case. It was also the only time I saw Jerry truly stand up to Debbie and she backed down. If only that had been his regular practice.
As I have said, he would always rationalize her behavior. This was long after his associate, Henry Mazurek, came to agree with me that Debbie's behavior was vindictive and totally out of the norm of his experience. Henry confided to me that he saw that Jerry was simply blinded by his friendship with Debbie to see her true nature. She was a vicious, deceitful person. It spoke so little of Jerry that he would even be friends with the likes of her. I could never reconcile that.
In the fall, as my depression worsened, Mark Mills, the forensic psychiatrist in the case, prevailed upon me to seek out a therapist. Mark had been kind enough to talk me through some bad days, but he wasn't a therapist - that's not what he did. So I asked my walking partner if she was happy with her shrink and she told me he was very good. She told me he was the Chief of Psychiatry at Lenox Hill Hospital. That sounded impressive so I went to see him. My first appointment with Dr. Allan Collins was on the one year anniversary of 9/11. For reason I won't bore you with now, that day is always very difficult for me. At first, I thought he could help me. He was very understanding and told me flatly that whatever chats I had online about sexual subjects, even illegal ones, were not deviant and can in fact be healthy. He did not believe the prosecutorial view that discussing something means you will act on it. Quite to the contrary. He believed those chats could be a useful outlet for some as sexually repressed as I was. He charged $250 an hour and recommended I come 2-3 times a week.
He quickly suggested that I go on medication for the depression. I wasn't opposed, as I had been on various anti-depressants in the past. I had one condition. I would not take anything that had as a major known side effect of weight gain. I had been fat, was fat, and knew that gaining weight would defeat the purpose of any pills to cheer me up. He said he would prescribe nothing that had that side effect, he told me there were options in selecting which meds to choose.
After trying a few different things, he ended up putting me on Lexapro, Desipramine and a third pill I cannot now recall, to be taken in combination. They never really worked very well and the depression did not let-up substantially. But I continued to take them.
During part of this period, Tom Robbins and the Village Voice continued to run the fabricated chats that Robbins and Fred Sawyers had created. It was amazing to me that he could get away with this. Real newspapers continued to pick-up his stories and run them. I developed a new disrespect for the integrity of the New York media.
In one piece he quoted a fired HDC employee regarding my use of my company car. Robbins went to great pains to point out that this employee was fired by me for no apparent reason. I came off looking like a capricious, heartless boss. The truth was that this employee - a mail room worker who backed up my driver at night - had disappeared for three days from work. He simply didn't show up with no phone call as to his whereabouts. When he returned he gave the VP of Human Resources some excuse and he was warned. Again he disappeared for days with no word. His mother called to say that he was in jail again (we had no idea he had been previously) for having beaten up his sister. When he returned he was dismissed. All of that was left out of Robbins' article. The fired worker came off a saint in Robbins' hands. You think all I have just relayed might have cast some doubt on the employee's credibility?
For those of you who have read Tom Robbins, whether in the Voice or the Daily News, you know that this is his modus operandi. Why he behaves this way is a mystery. I have to assume it is because he is just a bitter person who thinks he should have done better with his life journalistcally than bounce back and forth between the Village Voice and the Daily News. But with Robbins, the axe is always out and the ethics sit on a shelf. Ironic since his bread and butter stories are based on the ethics of others. Can there be a lower form of journalist than one who simply concocts his facts and quotes?
As I have said previously, Debbie Landis, the prosecutor, was convinced of two things in this case: that I had absconded with millions of dollars as yet undiscovered and that I had done much, much more than chat on line about kids. Towards that end she turned the world upside down trying to find some "victim" who would come forward and point an accusatory finger at me. Of course, nothing came of it. But Jerry and I were tiring of this. Jerry suggested and found a polygrapher whom he hoped would allay Debbie's baseless concerns. Jerry hired a man out of Virginia who had the longest CV either of us had ever seen. He was the former chief polygrapher for the US Army and the FBI. Jerry asked me before he hired him and then again on the day of the test if I was sure I wanted to do this. I did not particularly want to, only because I resented the need. I was not obligated to prove I had not committed a crime. She was required to demonstrate that I had. Jerry had never seemed 100% convinced that my assertions were true. He told me that if I had something to hide we might not want to do this even though were the test to come out badly he naturally wouldn't turn it over to Debbie (she had no idea we were doing this). Jerry clearly had had clients lie to him before and he wasn't taking anyone's word as fact. I told him for the 50th time, I had done nothing, and there's nothing to worry about. It was after meeting the polygrapher that I saw in the modern era polygraphs are done on laptops, not those huge machines with bouncing needles and paper.
It's a myth that questions in a polygraph are usually sprung on a subject. i have done some research into this since I took mine. A bad reaction is heightened by the subject knowing a particularly troubling question is coming. On TV shows the questions are sprung on the subject without any warning. In real life an examiner will tell the subject what's coming, as it heightens the fear of that question you want to evade. The examiner in my case told me broadly what he was going to ask. He mentioned that he would ask me questions regarding sex with minors; the word he used was 'minors.' I told him not to ask me that. I told him it wasn't exculpatory enough. In some states it is legal, with consent to have sex with 14 or 15 yos. I said ask me if i have ever had any sexual contact or relations with anyone under the age of 18, as I had not - ever. Because of my sexual repression I had done nothing until college and then only with men my age or older.
When the test was done Jerry went to talk to the polygrapher and I waited. He came back beaming. I don't think i had ever seen him that happy. He told me I passed with flying colors (In reality, the polygrapher explained to me, this expression has no meaning, what you hope to score ideally, which I did, was the lowest possible on a deceptiveness scale). Jerry seemed relieved that what I had been telling him all along had been proved. He would send the results to Debbie who could not challenge this polygraphers work, much as she would have liked to. She did however back off on this part of the investigation. None of that episode made me especially happy. I resented that I had to take the test and then later on that it was and remains totally inadmissible. Debbie would frequently make cryptic allusions in court to not knowing what I may have done in my past with children. Since the polygraph wasn't admissible - however she knew and did not dispute the results - it was a cheap shot and another in a long series of disadvantages that defendants suffer under in Federal Court.
In Part VIII I am indicted and arrested.
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