“A Central Florida elementary school principal was arrested Friday on suspicion of possessing and creating child pornography, including pictures of a girl who attended the school last year, officials said. John Stelmack, 60, the principal at Scott Lake Elementary School in Lakeland, was arrested at his home… Stelmack was suspended from his job as principal by the Polk County School Board on Dec. 14 after an administrative investigation led to the seizure of a black briefcase that contained pornographic images from his office, sheriff’s deputies said. According to a Polk County sheriff’s report, Stelmack took routine photographs of children in a school setting, including a 10-year-old who attended Scott Lake Elementary last year, and digitally superimposed their faces onto nude images. The identified girl’s facial image was on four of the pictures, and another unidentified female child’s face was placed on the body of another nude image, the report stated.” — (US)

(Thanks to Peter for the link.)

Here is Mr. Stelmack’s mug shot. Authorities also released his driver’s license photo. Neatly trimmed gray hair, blue eyes, clean-shaven, pinkish complexion, a downward-curving mouth — there is nothing exceptional about his appearance. If you happened to sit next to him on an airplane, he wouldn’t ick you out. You might notice his black briefcase and presume he’s a businessman.

But as it turns out, the briefcase was less a symbol of his profession than a secret hiding place for his perversion. Evidently “school workers” opened his briefcase — perhaps innocently seeking some document; perhaps suspiciously looking for damning evidence, since Mr. Stelmack struck many as a bit too friendly with his girl students — and called the police when they discovered the digitally manipulated photographs. That Mr. Stelmack would print and carry these things with him is suggestive: either he was so attached to them that he couldn’t bear to be without them, or he had secretly nurtured a child-porn habit for so long that he had grown sloppy and careless about hiding it.

The complicated thing is that Mr. Stelmack had digitally altered — had personalized — his pornography. If he had transposed children’s faces onto adult bodies, it would have left authorities with a murky case. Is that child pornography? A private act of fantasy that hurts no one and is therefore beyond the law? There is a fine line between the two. After all, imagination cannot be legislated. No one can tell you what you can fantasize about. But what if you begin to give reality to your fantasies? What if you write them down? What if you draw pictures? Nabokov wasn’t arrested for Lolita. Henry Darger died before The Story of the Vivian Girls ever saw light of day — but now the art world celebrates its patently pedo illustrations.

Why are these things canonized while the Stelmacks of the world are arraigned for possession of child pornography? Partly it’s because Mr. Stelmack is an educator with access to children and no claims to art. Partly it’s because he appears to have transposed his students’ faces onto jailbait bodies. One report declares that the faces were copied “on top of photos of naked adolescent bodies.” The photos were described as “graphic,” which implies they might have been relatively explicit. Another report quotes the local sheriff as saying, “When you take a young adult body, and you put a child’s face on that nude body, you’ve just created child pornography.” Consequently, it sounds as though Mr. Stelmack did not create child pornography by grafting a child face onto an adult body but by matching child face to child body. That is clearly a punishable offense.

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