Lawyer Jeff Anderson has filed a lawsuit against a former St. Paul schoolteacher and foster parent charged with producing and distributing child pornography. He s also suing 100 as-yet-unnamed people who Anderson says downloaded the images. (Pioneer Press: Ben Garvin)
Jeff Anderson wants people who download child pornography to be scared.
The St. Paul lawyer has vowed to hunt down and expose anyone who so much as peeks at computer images of child porn.
Anderson said that a lawsuit he filed Wednesday in federal court in St. Paul is the beginning of an initiative to stop the sexual exploitation of children at its source.
“If you choose to download images of child pornography, we will find you, we will track you and we will expose you,” Anderson said.
Not only that, “we will sue you,” he said.
Defendants in the suit are former St. Paul schoolteacher and foster parent Gregg Alan Larsen and 100 as-yet-unnamed downloaders of child pornography.
Larsen, 49, of Minneapolis was indicted in federal court May 19 and charged with production, distribution and possession of child porn involving, in one case, a child he was acquainted with through his own children.
Anderson is known for his advocacy on behalf of victims of sexual abuse by clergy, a drive he began in the 1980s. He said the Larsen case will be the first in which he has taken advantage of the federal Masha’s Law, which says anyone who produces, distributes or downloads child pornography can be held civilly liable for damages of not less than $150,000 per download.
The law was named for a 5-year-old Russian orphan adopted by an American man who began abusing her the first night she spent with him. He created and distributed hundreds of pornographic images of her on the Internet.
Anderson said his office is working with police, specifically Sgt. Bill Haider of the Minnesota Internet Crimes Against Children task force, to trail the digital footprints of downloaded material ? whether it is viewed on a computer or a phone. He promised to send out news releases as the names of offenders who view and trade images are revealed, and he said he would add those names to the lawsuit.
Larsen’s criminal attorney, Joseph Tamburino, said he is not representing Larsen in the civil case. Larsen is being held in U.S. Marshals Service custody; a marshals spokesman said he could not divulge the specific location, though most federal inmates in the state are held in the Sherburne or Anoka county jails.
The plaintiffs in the Larsen lawsuit are a boy, who was about 9 at the time of the alleged 2006 abuse, and his parents. The child’s mother provided day care to Larsen’s children and foster children, and the boy sometimes went swimming with Larsen and his children and spent the night at their home.
While the boy was at Larsen’s home, “(Larsen) engaged the plaintiff in sexually explicit conduct … (and) created visual depictions of the sexually explicit material,” the suit alleges.
He then allegedly loaded the images onto his computer and distributed them to child porn websites.
That child is also one of the subjects of the criminal case against Larsen.
The downloaders are people who received and viewed those images on their computers, the civil lawsuit says.
“Right now, we have way too many primarily males who think there is nothing wrong with viewing pictures of child pornography,” said Cordelia Anderson, a Minneapolis educator who chairs the National Coalition to Prevent Child Sexual Exploitation. She spoke at Anderson’s news conference announcing his lawsuit.
“That feeds demand, and that is what we need to counter,” she said.
Child-porn viewers often don’t realize their actions are not harmless and not anonymous, she said.
Police have collected information from Larsen’s computer hard drives that will connect them to the users of the porn, they said.
“Now we will have the ability to identify every single individual who has downloaded the image of this child or others,” Anderson said.
Larsen taught special education at St. Paul Central High School. He resigned May 4.
Emily Gurnon can be reached at 651-228-5522.
- Size of the online child-porn industry: Multibillions of dollars
- Increase in the number of images online from 1997 to 2003: 1,500 percent
- Number of reports of child pornography from 1998 through April 2009: 594,000
- Number of children whose abuse has been recorded by pornographers in the U.S. alone: More than 1 million
- The vast majority of child-pornography crimes are never prosecuted.
- Quote from a child-pornography victim: “When I was a little girl, and when I was being photographed and raped, I used to try to send messages with my eyes down the lens and hoped that one day a good person might see and come to help us.”Sources: National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, U.S. Department of Justice, Jeff Anderson and Associates