Publishers uninterested in tell-all book written by convicted pedophile
When police arrested David Goldberg in his N.D.G. home 18 months ago on child pornography charges, his first thoughts weren’t that his days as a baseball coach and community newspaper editor abruptly ended in shame, but rather that he’d like to write a book.
And while serving his 90-day sentence on weekends, he did. Problem is, no publisher as yet wants to touch his tell-all.
But Goldberg, 54, is adamant that he is in a “unique position to help others understand the bewildering life of a pedophile,” as he put it in a first-person article titled I, Pedophile, published recently in Atlantic magazine.
Attracted to children since his late teens, Goldberg claims that he has never sexually abused a child, even though he was in a classic position to do so for 33 years as coach of boys’ baseball. He says he was an upstanding, respected member of the community but at night he spent hours in front of his computer, trolling the dark world of child pornography, followed by a hangover of self-loathing.
“I would spend my days longing to get back onto my computer, the way a gourmand anticipates a scrumptious feast,” he wrote in the Atlantic article, for which he says he wasn’t paid.
The goal of the book, he told The Gazette in an interview Wednesday, is to help people understand that pedophilia is a sexual orientation that can’t be changed, and that those who suffer in silence need help and support.
Sex between children and adults is unacceptable, he said, and is careful to place himself in a separate category from pedophiles who produce pornography and those who abuse children. “Pedophiles who cross that line deserve the full thrust of the law and I think they have to be put away and locked away,” he said.
Rosalind Prober, president of Beyond Borders, a national organization that fights against the sexual abuse and exploitation of children, said she has no problem with a pedophile writing a book, but that Goldberg lacks credibility.
“All of a sudden, now that he’s hit the wall, been arrested and is in jail, he has a high level of believability just because he’s admitting he’s a pedophile?” she said. “His whole life has gone into conning people.”
Pedophiles are typically manipulative and narcissistic and the fact that Goldberg gave up therapy after just one year is a sign he doesn’t want to change, Prober said.
“If you look at this guy’s descent, I don’t think it’s rocket science for me to believe that there’s no way as he aged that he wouldn’t sexually offend against children because he’d already put himself in a position where he could; in a position where parents looked up to him,” she said.
But some researchers agree with Goldberg, that many people who view child pornography online never go on to abuse children. And while all child pornography involves children being abused, and consumers of it are complicit in the crime by fuelling production, some feel there can’t be one-size-fits-all when it comes to punishment.
Fred Berlin, director of the Sexual Behaviour Consultation Unit at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, said studies show that people who abused children had looked at child pornography but the inverse wasn’t necessarily the case.
In 30 years of practice, nothing has opened a Pandora’s box of problems like the Internet, he said, as people discover, sometimes accidentally, things they hadn’t realized would be sexually arousing.
“The Internet is like atomic energy — we can use it to light the world or to blow the world up,” Berlin said in a telephone interview from Baltimore.
Goldberg says the issue of pedophilia is “totally mishandled by society, by the justice system, by everybody,” but wouldn’t reveal what solutions he suggests in his book.
“Until we find a way to deal with it in a sensible way, it will only get worse and create victims,” he said. “You really feel there’s no place to get help and if there is, you’re terrified to go get it.”