You get a strange sensation when you see someone you know on the evening news. It’s a feeling of disconnection, like what you’re seeing isn’t really real. You recognize the face in the still-frame, the name pronounced by the anchor, but you’re certain this can’t be the person you know, the one who’s been to your house, stood in your driveway chatting with your dad, drank your dad’s beer. It’s all got to be, as the disclaimers in the movies always say, purely coincidental that this guy looks so much like the one you know, and that he shares the same name, because, well, that just can’t be the same guy.
This curious feeling is doubled if your acquaintence is on the news because he’s done something… bad.

Last night, I heard on the news that a man named Thomas Brent Varney, a longtime city employee here in my hometown, had been arrested for soliciting sex from a 13-year-old girl. The story is unremarkable, if sordid, the same one that I’ve seen fifty times on Dateline and Primetime Live: Varney had been chatting online for several days with a person he thought was a hot-to-trot kid but was actually an undercover police officer. A meeting was arranged, and when Varney showed up, he got a big surprise.

Brent Varney is a friend of my parents. He’s not a close friend, just a guy they know, part of their social circle of antique-car enthusiasts. He and his longtime partner have gone with my folks to weekend car shows, they’ve camped together, and they’ve partied together. I’ve spoken to Brent many times myself and always thought he was a decent guy. I’ve liked him. And now… now I don’t know what to think.

My parents’ phone rang all night and half of today as members of their circle heard the news and called to see what my folks might know. Everyone is shaking their heads, tut-tutting, wondering what Brent could’ve been thinking and what’s going to happen to him now. His guilt is assumed, in spite of all our society’s high-minded talk about being innocent until proven otherwise. He showed up at the sting, after all, and he only would’ve done that if he thought he was going to get lucky, right?

I hear tell that strangers on message boards, people who’ve never met Brent Varney and don’t know a thing about him, are blaming his downfall on pornography. Porn is a frequent scapegoat here in Utah; the common thinking seems to be that it’s as addictive as heroin and the end result of enjoying it is inevitable, utter corruption. To hear the morality crusaders talk about it, you’d think that Playboy was analogous to The One Ring, and that anyone who thumbs through one is going to end up like Gollum. But I don’t think it’s that simple. If you believe the statistics and the dollar amounts associated with porn, millions upon millions of Americans look at dirty magazines and movies on a fairly regular basis. If it was that dangerous, that corrupting, you’d think our streets would look like something out of Stephen King’s Cell, with sex-crazed pervert zombies attacking people right and left. And yet that’s not happening.

The crusaders would argue with me, and say that the incidents are increasing, but are they really? Or are the media just reporting on them more now than they used to? I’m inclined to think it’s the latter. Sex crimes are sensational, especially the ones involving children; they grab your attention, inflame your sense of outrage, keep you from changing the channel, and sell a few more papers. But I suspect that if you could get some accurate stats, the actual percentage of pedophiles and rapists in the population has remained more or less constant over the ages. It’s just like the rates of violent crime — statistically, such crime has been declining for years, but to hear the blow-dried Aryan clones on the local news broadcast, we’ve got anarchy breaking out all over the place. Our perceptions of how dangerous the world really is are skewed by the constant coverage, and we feel more scared than we really need to be. In my opinion, anyway.

Getting back to Brent, I’m having a hard time processing the whole thing. I, too, think he’s guilty, but I don’t understand how it can be. He’s an ordinary guy, not some clammy-fisted mouthbreather in a greasy raincoat. At least, I’ve never sensed anything creepy about him. A 13-year-old, though? Holy shit… that’s the same age as Anne’s niece, the one who dragged me to see a teen flick a couple weeks ago. I think The Kid is a very pretty girl, and I’ve often told Anne that she’s going to be a real danger to all the poor high-school boys this year, but I wouldn’t want her myself, for God’s sake. She is just a kid after all. And so was the girl Brent thought he was talking to, and apparently wanted to have sex with.

I wonder, though…

This thought is likely to upset some folks, so let me make it absolutely clear that I would never excuse or justify a 49-year-old man trying to boff a 13-year-old girl. But I wonder how much of the meeting was Brent’s idea. Obviously, he agreed to it and went to the meeting place expecting to go through with it, but was it his idea? How enticing, or even outright pushy, was the person on the other end of the Internet? I must be honest, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with these sexual-predator sting operations when I’ve seen them profiled on TV; they seem to flirt with entrapment to me, and I do feel a certain amount of compassion for some of the guys who get nailed by them. Often, they seem less pedophiliac than bewildered. Was Brent set up? Impossible to tell without seeing transcripts of the chat, I suppose, and the fact that he did show up at the rendezvous is incontrovertible and utterly damning. But I do wonder how the whole conversation went down. I imagine a cop looking to bust a bad guy might be a little more zealous than a real 13-year-old girl. But maybe not. I don’t know.

All I’m sure of at this point is that it doesn’t feel like the guy on the TV screen, the guy who shares the same name as my parents’ friend, is the same Brent Varney I’ve known for years. Surely he’s just some evil doppelganger that’s smearing Brent’s good name, and the whole thing is just one big coincidence…