Confessions of a Proud Pedophile ***WARNING: Possible graphic content***Confessions of a Proud Pedophile: Phillip Distasio says getting caught was all part of his plan.
PHILLIP DISTASIO LIVES in a tiny cell on the fourth floor of the Justice Center, away from most other suspects awaiting trial. He and eight other men are in protective custody because, as Lt. Ken Kochevar explains, “the nature of their crime or who they are would endanger them if they lived among the general prison population.”
But even among that group, the gaunt, 34-year-old Distasio is probably alone in the forthright way in which he describes himself as a pedophile. He uses the words “boy-lover” and “boy-lover’s boy” casually, even though he’s been accused of 74 crimes involving boys between the ages of 8 and 13 years old. Among them are charges of gross sexual imposition, corruption of minors, pandering obscenity, and 26 rapes.
After more than five months in protective custody at Cuyahoga County Jail, Distasio retains the ponytail and bushy red muttonchops seen in his mug shot. Sitting in a stark white visitation room while two law enforcement officers look on, Distasio talks freely about his past, distant and recent, and about the tormented lives he and his fellow pedophiles lead. He rocks back and forth as he talks, and his hands tremble when they are not clasped or resting on his knees.
He says he would never associate himself with Jesus, but his message is clear: He views himself as a self-sacrificial lamb. Getting caught, he says, was an intentional and necessary cost of his “secular ministry.”
That cost could be spending the rest of his years in prison. He was found sane enough to be tried, waived the right to a speedy trial, and told his court-appointed lawyer that he wants to strike no bargains. In his mind, facing 26 life sentences gives him the chance to speak out for the pedophiles of the world, and for his idea of “sanctuary.” His message: Pedophiles are people, too.
DISTASIO HAD WRITTEN to the Free Times in response to the story about how citizen journalists brought him to the attention of Rocky River police (“Neighborhood Monster,” January 18 ). The handwritten letter offered glimpses of the fear and elaborately rationalized tangents of a person aware that his sexual desire is not simply illegal, but among the most heinous crimes conceivable — and yet who believes that most pedophilia wouldn’t really hurt anyone.
Distasio describes himself as a second-generation pedophile: at the age of 12, he began a relationship with an older man, a swimming instructor named Charlie, at a boys’ club in Massachusetts. He says he’s known about his proclivity since age 9.
“To me,” he says, “it is as valid as any other sexual orientation.”
He says children can give consent long before they turn 18 years of age. He says pedophiles can be abusive, but denies they are inherently so. He says in such a relationship, the adult’s “trust” that the child won’t tell the “secret” is a manifestation of love — a vulnerability which, Distasio claims with conviction, puts the child in control.
The “secret” could dismantle a life with shame and violence. A life like Distasio’s. Or like his roommate, Chris Nolan, who was found hanged by an extension cord in the Rocky River Reservation of the Metroparks. Or like any one of the nine other people Distasio says he has known who killed themselves or were murdered because of what they did or because someone might tell.
“I lose a friend a year to that stuff,” he sobs. “And it’s all because the law gets involved. If you really want to do something about the sex offender problem and the drug problem, the first thing you need to do is give people a safe place to speak.”
Control is a recurring theme for Distasio. He claims that since he began a year ago talking at open mics about the legalization of marijuana, everything — except his roommate’s suicide by hanging from an extension cord — has gone according to plan. Even if the plan changed as he pushed it recklessly onward.
“My original idea was to devote myself to cannabis legalization so I could spend the rest of my life surrounded by pot- smoking grownups,” he wrote in the letter. “And hopefully start to create a platform for pedos like myself to talk about their lives.”
He claims that pedophiles have been using nonprofit organizations to conceal their activities since the early ’90s. He says he’s been involved with four such groups besides NAMBLA, but won’t name them
because “the power of knowing their names is the only leverage” he has in court.
None of Distasio’s own ventures achieved tax-exempt, nonprofit status, but he wanted that. He says he didn’t want the shape-shifting organization to broker sex, as the Free Times and others inferred based on some of his Internet correspondence, but to build a local pedophile community. He would found a ministry of the church of cannabis, declare himself the anarchist friar with a mail-order certificate of his ordination, and tell NAMBLA it was a safe place for pedophiles to socialize. He practiced a kind of suicidal honesty at open mics and drum circles around the city, speaking forthrightly about his interests.
Naturally he met pot smokers. Some of them were parents. Some of them were young boys. He seems to believe he was not in control when his circle of friends “turned into a school.”
But he says those kids needed help, and he wasn’t going to turn them away.
So he called the school “Class Cutters,” and with loose agreements by which he was paid with food from one family, marijuana from another, and $20 a week from a third, he convinced the parents of three young boys that he was home-schooling them in his Rocky River townhouse, a place he called “the sanctuary.”
In addition to having three boys in his home-school program, he claims to have worked in “four schools and three civic organizations” since moving to Cleveland in 2000. He won’t name the schools, he says, because of the damage that would cause. He claims that pedophilia gave him unique and useful insight into the children he worked with. He says bosses, co-workers and parents praised his natural talent with children.
“I credit it all to being a pedophile. We’ve got an angle on kids no one else has.”
DISTASIO LIVED WITH Chris Nolan for eight years, he says, and the only thing they had in common was fear. As much as he painted their Rocky River townhouse sanctuary as a place of safety, it seems they were never far from terrified.
“We owned a police scanner so we could hear if the police were coming,” he says. “We kept baseball bats by the doors. Whenever a pedophile was in the news we would call off work, pull all the fuses, and sit there in the dark.”
Now he wants to invoke something he calls “Sanctuary” as a legal strategy. His court-appointed attorney, Thomas Shaughnessy, says he is only helping with technical and protocol aspects of the case. Distasio is building the argument himself on the premise that because, he claims, the U.S. Constitution guarantees the separation of church and state, spiritual communities should have jurisdiction over their members when it comes to certain behaviors. He says that because he listed his house as his place of worship on a form filed with the county, the place is officially recognized as his sanctuary.
Shaughnessy says he advised his client against discussing this with the media, but he couldn’t prevent him from doing so.
Distasio points to pre-Civil War history of criminals and desperate people seeking sanctuary in their churches and, if the churches granted it, protection from the law. He’s not aware of any such cases involving pedophiles, but he believes his case could re-establish the idea of religious “sanctuary” in the courts.
“This isn’t about justice,” he declares with vehemence. “It’s about punishment. And I know what happens to people like me in prison.”
So instead of going there, he wants Judge Kathleen Sutula to remand him to the judgment of his own congregation, a nominal church in which he is the minister. He says there may be 100 families in his congregation, if you count all the people he’s had in serious conversation about his beliefs.
None of his congregants has come to visit him in jail. He says that’s because they’re afraid of incriminating themselves.
ANN COX, a freelance computer forensics consultant in California, has been monitoring Distasio’s career since 1997. She has followed his trail from state to state and job to job through online pedophile group chat and other communication. She says Distasio “couldn’t shut up,” and so he was ostracized from other pedophile communities because he was attracting too much attention.
“And the more he talks, the worse it gets for him,” she says.
After years of watching through the window of her computer monitor, all his arguments sound like tired rhetoric to Cox.
“This is his twisted thinking,” Cox says. “Everything that happens is someone else’s fault. It’s not that they’re being prosecuted because they violated another human being. They try to draw far-reaching analogies that don’t hold up. That’s how they believe they are going to mainstream this. Or by getting the age of consent legally lowered. So they can say a child gave consent.”
She says the rest of the pedophile community isn’t “mourning him” or welcoming him as a champion for their cause. Far from it: his argument is bringing them unwanted attention.
As Cox says, “They care about saving their own skin.”
Distasio’s next pretrial hearing, during which he will continue trying to argue for “sanctuary,” is February 21. Sutula’s bailiff says a new trial date will probably be chosen at the hearing. In the meantime, Distasio continues to formulate his argument.
“When I got arrested,” Distasio says, his voice shaking with emotion, “it was like a starting gun. Now the real work of this ministry can begin. I’m tired of lying, of hiding, of living in fear of my life. Now it’s time for me to stand up for everything I believe in.”
mgill@freetimes.comhttp://www.freetimes.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=3073
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