Disney Official Guilty in Pornography Case
A prominent Internet executive for the Walt Disney Company was convicted today of possessing child pornography on his computer, but a Federal jury deadlocked on the most serious charges against him: that he enticed a minor to have sex and traveled across state lines with the intent of doing so.
The executive, Patrick J. Naughton, 34, oversaw Internet content for Disney and was earlier a creator of the Java computer language.
Mr. Naughton faces up to 10 years in prison on the pornography charge and 15 years each on the two other counts if he is retried and convicted. The government has until Jan. 5 to decide whether to refile the charges: sentencing was scheduled for March 6.
Mr. Naughton was arrested in September after he flew from Seattle to Southern California for what the authorities said he believed was a rendezvous with a 13-year-old Los Angeles girl he had met online. His arrest became a tremendous embarrassment to Disney, which announced simply that he no longer worked there. At one point his name was expunged from several past announcements on a corporate Web site, Wired magazine reported.
Still, Mr. Naughton's lawyer, Donald Marks, said today that the jury's inability to agree on the more serious counts represented a victory for a defense that portrayed the Internet as a fantasy land where others are not what they claim to be.
We're very gratified, Mr. Marks said. The problem with the case is that a lot of people do not believe that being involved in chat rooms, and being involved in the fantasy of having sexual talk with unknown persons of unknown genders and ages on the Internet, represents anything but role playing.
Taking the stand in his own defense, Mr. Naughton testified that he did not really believe the girl from Los Angeles whom he met in the dad&daughtersex chat room, with the online identity of KrisLA, was who she said she was.
She was not. KrisLA was in reality a male agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation named Bruce Applin. In an affidavit, Mr. Applin wrote that he repeatedly told Mr. Naughton, who was using the name hotseattle, that he was 13.
Mr. Naughton responded by saying he wanted to come to Los Angeles to kiss, make out and play and stuff.
Mr. Naughton was arrested on Sept. 16 at the Santa Monica pier after approaching a woman who was an undercover Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy carrying a green backpack, as Mr. Applin said had been agreed to in one of the chat sessions.
https://archive.is/iAuD0#selection-433.0-485.240
Not any of this is new for Disney.