“A 31-year-old man was sentenced Monday to more than 24 years in federal prison for posing online as a teenage boy dying of leukemia in an effort to coerce young girls into sending him sexually explicit images. Joshua Kistler chatted regularly with at least nine girls nationwide who ranged in age from 12 to 14. He used the condition to gain the girls’ sympathy, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. He even sent them pictures of his stepson, an actual 15-year old, to further his story, authorities said. He also posed as the stepfather of his online persona. In one case, a victim and her mother visited the ’stepfather’ during a family trip, believing the teenage boy was away receiving treatment. Several victims said they loved and trusted Kistler, who asked them to send photos of them nude or perform sexual acts for him in front of Web cameras… The victim whose case led to Kistler’s arrest was a Utah girl who started chatting online with him when she was 12. According to the Justice Department, Kistler told the victim that he had cut off contact with another girl because of the Utah girl’s jealousy and that the other girl had killed herself. Overcome with guilt, the Utah girl attempted suicide, and law enforcers became involved. The girl attempted suicide a second time after the mother tried to stop the relationship. The mother read the words of her daughter in court. ‘He taught me stuff a 12-year old should not know,’ KGW-TV reported. ‘My love of my life turned out to be a 30-year-old pedophile.’ Kistler told agents that he knew what he was doing was wrong and that he had always ‘been a collector.’” — Yahoo (US)

(Thanks to Furpo for the link.)

Everyone plays the identity game online, inventing new personalities to suit the occasion. There’s no harm in that. However, some people play the game in a mean, vicious way. If you read the court documents relating to Mr. Kistler’s conviction, you can see that he didn’t have much clue about the unspoken rules of sportsmanship in the online identity game. He not only talked to underage girls, he told them manipulative and cruel lies. He told them he was dying of leukemia. He told them “about the rape and murder of his older sister, the murder of his younger sister, and his parents’ divorce.” When one girl broke off with him, he posed as the father of the boy he had pretended to be, and told the girl that the boy killed himself as a result of the break. And these were not just online lies. He attempted to make offline contact with the girls as well. In a separate case, he is still facing charges for travelling to Idaho to sleep with a girl. When he claimed that he “wasn’t aware I was causing harm,” it’s hard to take seriously.

Mr. Kistler is not the only predator playing this game, which has become drearily familiar. Consequently, what distinguishes this story is not the crime but the demonstration of how online actions can have real-world results. A predator might rationalize to himself that virtual lies only have virtual effects — that they don’t spill over into the real world, that they don’t cause any real harm. But then a lie is a lie is a lie. What difference does it make whether the words tumble out of your mouth or spit through your fingers into a chat program? Sooner or later, if you use tales of murder and suicide to sweet-talk impressionable young minds, you shouldn’t be surprised if one of your sweethearts does something violent.

This is not to say that the creep bears sole responsibility for this girl’s attempts at suicide. If you read the text of a statement she prepared for the court, you can see that she had some issues: cutting herself, turning to marijuana (at age 13), getting “locked up” in a youth crisis center, and eventually ending up in a foster home. (The girl’s mother seemed very involved in the case, so it’s hard to understand why she ended up in foster care.) It seems likely that there were other difficulties in her life. But still, most young people are volatile. When a creep tosses his lies into the mix, is it not like dropping a match into packet of gunpowder?

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