Lies of Michelle Yezerski September 17th, 1997. I was driving to work and listening to the Diane Rehm show, which is broadcast from American University over National Public Radio. The guest in the last hour of the show was John Walsh, who is the host of America's Most Wanted. I don't watch the show, but Mr. Walsh was an utterly captivating and powerful speaker. For the first half-hour of the broadcast I was listening with rapt attention as he painfully recounted the abduction and murder of his young son Adam, sixteen years ago. Mr. Walsh's show has resulted in the capture of hundreds of wanted criminals -- criminals who have beaten, robbed, kidnapped, raped, and murdered hundreds of people. Four hundred and eighty-three, he repeatedly said: 483 violent felons have been brought to justice through his efforts. I applaud his efforts to try to turn the tide of violence in this country, and I believe he's doing fine work. But when one of the show's callers turned out to be from Medina, Ohio, I listened with growing surprise. By the end of the call, I was aghast that the bloody garments of brutalized children were being draped around the internet, by an organization intent on demonizing the net and particularly libraries that allow access to it without filtering software. The caller was Michelle Yezerski, director of Citizens for the Protection of Children. The best I can say for her is that she began her call honestly, saying: "I've got a slightly different topic to talk about." Here's the text of what she said: Diana Rehm: All right, thank you, and to Medina, Ohio. Michelle, you're on the air. Michelle Yezerski: Ah, hello. I've got a slightly different topic to talk about, but I want to tell you who I am. I'm the director of a citizens' group in Medina, Ohio called Citizens for the Protection of Children. And the reason why our group formed is because, this has to do with a library. Many libraries across the country are now getting internet access, and what we are finding out is that there are tons of just unbelievable sites on the internet dealing with the rape and torture of little children. There is so much text material on these computers and on the internet about how to abduct a child from a mall, how to set up your basement as a torture chamber, how to slowly murder these children, how to decapitate them, it's absolutely gruesome. In fact, I've been involved in legislation in the state of Ohio, we did get a new law passed, it's the only one in the country right now, dealing with illegal materials being accessed by anyone, whether they are an adult or a child, but it is -- it will be very hard to enforce. But we have got a real serious problem here in Medina because we've got pedophiles coming in, and in fact there's an investigation going on right now, where they have, in one of the libraries, they have a man who's been printing off pictures and showing kids and watching children going to the bathroom, in the library bathroom. And this stuff has been going on and on, and the library board absolutely refuses to do anything about it. We have become incensed here, but I just want you to know that this internet, there is a real serious problem with providing all these hundreds of thousands of sites on how to mutilate children out there. John Walsh: You're absolutely right... Shortly after hearing this nonsense, most of which bears little resemblance to reality, I ordered the tape. I then contacted Bob Smith, the director of the Medina library system, shared with him what I knew, and asked him if he could talk with me briefly so I could write an informed essay on the subject. I did get from him that Michelle's claims about pedophiles in the library were a distortion of what really happened, but I didn't hear many details. Mr. Smith never got back to me, as I'm afraid he was too busy fending off lawsuits to worry about my one little transcript. Recently, he resigned from the Medina library system, after twelve years. You may listen to the audio transcript, but your browser will download it rather than playing it immediately. Of course there are not hundreds of thousands of sites on how to mutilate children. There is not even one site on how to mutilate children. There are probably several webpages on the subject, yes; more likely, Usenet postings archived at Deja News. They are works of fiction, not instruction manuals. And the problem Ms. Yezerski is principally concerned with -- installing censorware on the library computers -- has nothing to do with the ejection and/or prosecution of a man who spies on children in the library bathroom, nor with the other criminal acts she describes and implies. For the record, I don't blame Mr. Walsh in the slightest for going along with what he was told. His comments on the subject touched briefly on how child abusers and child pornographers used the internet to communicate, presumably using email and chat and similar technologies, but these are things people do from their own homes. Such communications are unrelated to material put on public websites, and unrelated to library access policies. The person I do blame is Michelle Yezerski. It is clear that her call to the Diane Rehm show was not an attempt to educate. It was an attempt to spread false propaganda about how frightful and evil the internet was. She tried to turn an issue of free speech, and (at worst) children viewing obscenity, into an issue of child abuse, child abduction, child molestation, child exploitation. Under normal circumstances, this would be reprehensible. For her to tell lies about made-up crimes, to a man who lost his son to real criminals, and to use that man's good name as a springboard for those lies, is utterly unforgiveable. Links: Medina County District Library Library Watch Letter from Brock Meeks to Library Watch, September 2, 1997 Letter from Michelle Yezerski to Brock Meeks, September 5, 1997 "Librarians to Monitor Net," February 27, 1997 "Marking the Limits of Morality," March 4, 1997 "Putting New Policies to Work," March 27, 1997 "Plot Thickens in Ohio Censorware Battle," May 19, 1997 "Parents Group Wants Net Censored," May 1997 and, finally... "Censorship and Politics are Local," June 15, 1998 "[The library's] battle with Citizens for the Protection of Children (CPC) and its impressive victory in a tax levy election were the good news. Previous MCDL levies won about 52 percent of the vote, but CPC opposition angered mainstream voters, and the 1997 levy garnered 57.2 percent." Jamie McCarthy's home page jamie@mccarthy.org
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