Living in US Today? The River Denial Is Deep and Wide
Climbing out of the pit of denial of just how bad child sexual abuse in our our society really is, is one of life’s biggest challenges
When I first began dating noted horror writer and editor Alan Rodgers (1959–2014), I, like many of his friends, was astonished and appalled by the terrible child custody battle in which he was embroiled.
There was some type of karma involved on my part, because Alan’s child custody case took me through one of the biggest, most difficult lessons of my life. It was a multi-year process. Alan’s custody battle had been raging before I met him and it continued after my baby’s death in January 2005.
Before I met him, Alan had been living in Oregon with his then-wife and their three young children. When his youngest son was a baby, his wife left him while he was at work at a furniture factory making $10 an hour. The woman took off with a man who’d previously stated he was his “best friend.”
Alan got home from work to find the apartment completely trashed, his kids and wife gone, and a note that said,
“I’ve left. Don’t do anything stupid.”
This is back in the 90s and these two high-minded charmers had also stolen the hard drive out of Alan’s computer.
Nice, huh?
You’re gonna hear a lot out of these two and maybe even the children. Over a decade later at the very end of the multi-year child custody battle, long after my baby had died and my daughter and I had suffered as collateral damage, one of the children testified in Family Court in downtown Los Angeles that her father, whom she hadn’t seen in person for about three or four years, had sexually molested her and also stalked her at school.
The young woman didn’t know that her father was physically incapable of going to her school by that time.
But the judge, who quietly brought the testimony to a close: did.
So, in 1999 when I was first involved with Alan, he was picking his three children up at a police station for weekend visitation.
His ex-wife and her not-yet husband, male partner Daniel Keys Moran, were living near my hometown of Redlands. The children were being dropped off at my hometown PD parking lot, where I not only knew the police chief, I knew and had even gone to school with several officers. Six decades earlier, my own grandfather had been the Constable, aka police chief, during the second World War.
If only — during several occasions of threatening and abusive behavior on the part of Moran during these exchanges — I’d just gone into the station and told the people I knew what was going on — if only — maybe things would have gone differently.
Maybe that really would have been an inflection point in the multi-year, absolutely insane, true crime podcast custody battle.
But I didn’t do that. Alan had gotten an attorney and had filed for a review of his child custody case. I not only knew the courthouse, I knew the judge. Phil Morris, brother of my friend Pat Morris, another San Bernardino County Superior Court judge who later became mayor of San Bernardino.
“Alan,” I said, “This is a good judge. He’ll understand how they’re harming the children and make a ruling.”
Phil Morris never got that opportunity. When the couple was served with a summons to appear in court in San Bernardino County, they just moved to Los Angeles. At one point in time, the mother had two open child support cases (Los Angeles and San Bernardino Counties). Alan was garnished to the point of death. And his children, I estimate, were parentally kidnapped anywhere from a dozen to two dozen times over the next fifteen years.
By the time this thing ended, my baby was dead, my daughter and I both had PTSD, I thought Moran had murdered my dog, Amy Stout had smashed my baby’s Christmas houses, torn up my clothes, and destroyed my pots and pans, and the final judge at Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles told me, “This is one of the five worst cases ever seen at this courthouse.”
My mistake?
Of course I shouldn’t have stayed with Alan in any way. I should have stopped talking to him the day I volunteered to pick his children up at the Redlands Police Station and instead of their mother dropping them off, it was Moran, who threatened me, and Alan’s daughter right in front of me, and acted like a deranged chimpanzee right there — I should have damn well walked into that station, made an assault complaint, and hoped that my friends were there to put that lunatic in cuffs.
My other mistake?
Thinking people I knew in decent ways back in town could actually do something about this insanity.
Do I, today, knowing what I know, believe that these people — in addition to the horrific abuse they did to these kids by pulling them out of school and moving them all over the western US and Mexico just to “keep them away from their father” —
If you believe that, then see the illustration above. The motive was to keep them away from anyone who might treat them decently and normally.
This was about something dark and horrible. It was about something neither their father nor I could alter or change in any regard.
My chat with Children’s Services in 2000
By 2000, Alan and I had gotten together (see above, yes do see my picture in the Urban Dictionary under “dumbass”), were planning to marry, and I had managed to rent a nice duplex in San Dimas (also yes, where Bill & Ted hailed from). It had a pool, was set in an orange grove, and was right by Raging Waters.
One day I was sitting at the kitchen table, grading papers, and the house phone rang. It was Los Angeles County DCFS, and someone had made a report that I allowed my 8-year-old daughter to “play alone” by the pool.
“What?” I said.
I had to pull my child out of the Christian school I paid for and take her to the Pomona DCFS office and I had to sit through an interview with a Children’s Services worker.
At the end, she said, “You should leave him. There’s a pathology here that you and I can’t do anything about.”
If this woman had spoken in plain English, I’m guessing that not only would my baby Anthony not have died in January 2005, I’m guessing he would never have been born at all.
I didn’t understand what she was talking about. Almost twenty-five years later?
Yes, now I do.
I’ll never understand why she didn’t tell me the truth. Children’s Services already knew how bad things were for the Rodgers children in their full-time home with their mother and stepfather. And the pathology she meant was something that I, Alan’s several attorneys, and others involved only realized the full extent of for many years.
When Anthony died in January 2005 and I had to appear at the Ed Edelman’s Children’s Courthouse in El Monte, I received a stack of papers several reams high that represented over 100 false child abuse reports made against Alan Rodgers. The primary reporter of these false reports was Daniel Keys Moran, the children’s stepfather. You will find — it may even still be there, and no I am not going to “look” — a web page he created alleging that not only Alan, but I and my daughter, had murdered Anthony after fate gifted the couple with a child death that they could exploit.
You tell me how brazen a real abuser would have to be to call in that many false reports against a man who had plenty of problems (depression, eating disorder, alcohol and tobacco use disorders) but who didn’t have one: Alan Rodgers was not a child abuser. He was a hardworking man who wanted to be a good, decent father to his children. It was not Alan who dragged his children through an endless series of scummy apartments and who wouldn’t let any of them even finish one year in the same school.
You tell me how brazen a real abuser would be to mail real child pornography to a man’s place of work and even postmark it from the same place where worked at the time (Ventura County).
Yes, I have the distinction of also having to answer questions from an FBI agent working on the famous Operation Candyman child porn case. A couple of months later, sitting at the same kitchen table and doing the same thing I was when DCFS rang up, the landline rang again.
This time, it was the FBI. It was about 10:00 in the morning and Alan was at his computer firm workplace in the San Gabriel Valley. Agents were questioning him there because, and I quote,
“Someone mailed hardcore child porn to your boyfriend’s workplace addressed to A.R.”
It went to Accounts Receivable. The staff members there opened the envelope. Horrified at what was inside, they’d called the police, who had quickly contacted the Los Angeles FBI.
Yes, Alan, as one of four employees with the initials “A.R.” was sitting in an office at that location being questioned by the FBI, and apparently, he’d told them to call home.
I responded to the agent’s requests to search every computer in our house for child porn images.
I told the agent truthfully, “He looks at Playboy type images sometimes. He is a normal man sexually with me.”
Guess what I didn’t find on any computer in our house? Any kind of porn, much less child porn.
“It’s okay,” the agent said after I did everything he told me to do and I reported back. “We don’t suspect him.”
Then I told him about the custody battle and the things that had already happened.
“That could be it,” he said. “People like that do these things.”
That was when I left Alan and moved back to Redlands. While Meredith and I lived on San Pablo, I got Badger, who became my best friend.
The very last day of the last court proceeding at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse, I was sitting outside the courtroom beside Alan’s smart, sophisticated female attorney. She was from Santa Monica and knew a lot of people and cases.
We were discussing Mr. Smith, Moran and Stout’s attorney who seemed to be available on-call throughout the whole horrible battle and who obeyed few to no rules that other attorneys did.
The judge had just threatened to censure him for allowing Alan’s daughter to perjure herself by making impossible false testimony and for other wrongful actions like telling Alan’s ex-wife to disobey court orders.
“I did look him up,” I told Alan’s attorney. “There’s not much record of him practicing at all in LA County. They didn’t know him at the Van Nuys courthouse. I don’t get how he earns a living.”
She looked at me with a half-smile and said, “If I had to make a guess, I’d say he and Moran share a vice.”
You, I, Alan, and Billions of Others Don’t Share That Vice
This morning I saw the New York Times expose of parent-run Instagram accounts that feature pictures of children, primarily girls, who are under age 13, too young to have their own accounts. They are called “mom-run” accounts and have many subscribers. According to NYT, some parents even sell their childrens’ outgrown clothing, including “worn leotards” and “cheer outfits,” and it’s not for thrift-store prices.
Other children are not subscribing to these “mommy-run” child influencer accounts or paying for access to “special” images. Adults are.
I’ll never know if Alan’s children were directly sexually abused and exploited. I know that Moran choked one of Alan’s daughters and she came to live with us for three months after the incident. I know the type of violence and theft that Moran either encouraged or forced his wife and the children to do after Anthony’s death. I know that the family was living an essentially homeless lifestyle, and I know what kind of man Moran showed himself to be on the few occasions where I saw him. One person was convicted of felony child kidnapping at the end of Alan’s horrible custody battle. It was neither of the two men. So I know Moran willingly and willfully pushed his wife to the point of becoming a felon.
I was in no way deaf, dumb, or blind to child sexual exploitation and abuse. My own brother died of AIDS in a prison halfway house, and I’d been exposed to not one, but two “flashers” before I was six years old, including one in the children’s room at the Redlands library.
But what I was deaf, dumb, and blind to was how pervasive it is and how little our system is capable of helping, defending, or protecting children who are involved in it.
I was deaf, dumb, and blind to the fact there could be more than 5,000 parents in the U.S. alone who are putting up Instagram accounts for their vulnerable children and selling their child’s pictures and even their clothing to pedophiles.
The Times didn’t show the images of pre-teens whose parents are marketing their images via Instagram. Instead, it described them.
Yes, our children receive mixed messages. According to the New York Times expose, a third of pre-teen children list “social media influencer” as a career goal. South Park is making fun of this, with a whole episode where weed-grower Randy Marsh wants to supplement his income as an OnlyFans model, but who only gains popularity when he pours the children’s energy drink “CRED” onto his sadly shrunken genitals.
This isn’t just a generation gap, it’s a values chasm wider than the Grand Canyon.
South Park won’t even sink to the depth of these pre-teen influencer parents. Randy and his wife were the OnlyFans models, not the kids. Even, in another episode where the child reincarnation of Rush Limbaugh, Cartman, wants his mom to get breast implants to attract a new multi-millionaire in town — Cartman ends up with his own gigantic, absurd boob job — that’s as far as these guys are willing to go. Yes, even the South Park guys aren’t as sick as the real-world parents.
I used to hear adults making fun of “Third World Countries” where mothers would have dozens of babies to “support the family.”
We need to look in the mirror at this country, where parents are putting revealing pictures of their six-year-olds on Instagram and raking in the dough from the worst people on the planet.
I’ve often said “There’s one in every school, every church, every scout troop,” once I realized the real score — that it didn’t happen “just to me” or to my brother, it happens to one out of every five girls and one out of every twenty-five boys.
Either our society accepts that children are sex workers and deserve to be exploited and harmed for money, or it does not.
I do not believe our society does want to accept this harm to children. I believe it abhors these actions.
I did not understand that years ago. I thought our social structures and legal system were able to do the job to protect children.
I thought wrong. No one individual and our very system itself, can protect their child or themselves in this horrible anti-child, anti-morality environment.
I don’t pretend to know all of the answers, or even many of them. However, I do know that it must not be acceptable for parents to do these things to their children. A child should be allowed to be a child, not made into a sexual object for the gratification of perverted, evil adults.
Courts should not take decades to determine they may have made a mistake.
And good parents should not be punished while the very worst ones are allowed to continue to abuse forever until a child is permanently harmed or in the worst cases, killed.
We need to look at these problems with eyes and ears wide open even if they show us things we don’t want to hear or see. We need to find solutions and they are ones we create as a group, together, not as individuals.
My god this is so unhinged, Amy. I don't know where to begin. The violence with which Alan's home was treated on the separation/abandonment/kidnapping should have been a huge red flag, at least in retrospect.
There's a strange personal connection, as my mother was a clinical psychologist in the physical reab department of Redlands Hospital in the 90's. As for San Dimas, it was the home of Patti Cox, a woman I haven't thought of in over 30 years. In the late 80's I'd visit there and La Puente where her friend Pamela lived at home. I understand the bizarre and alienating world of the Inland Empire, which hasn't probably become a better human environment than it was in that era.
I really hope that though wiser, you are not too burdened by the trauma and torments of these things.