According to a long, disturbing article in Vanity Fair , online predators who seek out sex with kids are much less numerous than we think — and police efforts to catch them may be imprisoning innocent men. Mark Bowden tells the story of J, a 42-year-old man who spent a year in jail for using a chat room to set up an assignation with a mother and her underage daughters — except that the “mother” was Detective Michele Deery, the daughters didn’t exist, and J swears he was never interested in children in the first place. A lot of things about J make him seem untrustworthy — he was using steroids at the time, which gave him a runaway sex drive. He spent hours in cybersex chat rooms, playing out involved sexual fantasies with strangers while his wife slept. And he was willing to describe graphic sexual scenarios with children. But there’s …
