blogger interrupted

I’ve been reluctant to blog about this subject for obvious reasons.  But I’m ready to now, and I definitely have something to say about this.

NBC Universal has “amicably resolved” a $105-million lawsuit filed by a woman whose brother committed suicide during a taping of its controversial “Dateline NBC” series “To Catch a Predator,” both parties said today.

I don’t know the facts of this case, but I do know the facts of mine.  No one was touched.  No one was hurt but me.  No “victim” existed.  In this NBC case, whatever the man who killed himself may have done before NBC literally killed him, the facts which led NBC to his front door were at least this identical to the facts of my case, except worse.  They went to his house.

“To Catch a Predator” has quietly gone off the air, and for good reason, not least of which is the liability which a broadcaster now faces when it crosses this line, as WEWS Channel 5 did with me in 2001.   One part of me wonders which lawyer I should retain to find out how much precedent this NBC case has actually set.  Another part wants to merely take solace in the knowledge that someone, somewhere, has decided that what NBC did was wrong.

I didn’t kill myself that night in 2001, because I was in cuffs before I had the chance.  I don’t know if I would have killed myself given the opportunity.  I certainly don’t have a gun at my disposal.  I don’t even remember much about it.  There is no predicting what synapses fire in one’s head at the moment of total collapse of one’s life.  

But what has happened to my life since is so profound that I doubt 90% of the people who judge me for it would survive as long as I have had they done it, too.  They’d long ago have put a bullet in their head.

Imagine the worst thought you’ve ever had.  The worst nightmare, or fantasy.  And imagine if the police came to you as you thought it, with TV cameras, and put your worst mistake of thought on the air.  How long would you survive before you put a gun to your head? 

I made a mistake, no doubt.  I’ve been apologizing for it every day, every hour, to friends, to family, to God, ever since.  But so did NBC, and NBC, and the man pictured above, have blood on their hands over it.  They now admit it.  With cash.

There is no blood on my hands.  There are electrons in my head that once fired off a thought I wallowed in too much, thanks to my own self-created nightmare.  That nightmare now continues, thanks to other broadcasters, whose actions have created, and perpetuate, on ongoing harm whose seed lie in my own actions, but whose continuance is an act solely perpetrated by them.

Perhaps I will test this in a court of law. Perhaps not.  It’s nice to know I have an option now.  Whatever legacy that man who killed himself may have, good or bad, this may be one of them.

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