Strange
Bedfellows
Community
college dropout Xavier Von Erck changed his name, started an online vigilante
organization, and now brags that he posed as a woman to trick an enemy into masturbating
in front of a webcam. Meet NBC's new savior
By
John Cook
PREDATORS SNAGGED in Xavier Von Erck's web of deceit
As
NBC gears up for fall, no doubt full of hope that it can avoid a third consecutive
season as the fourth-place network, you're likely to see a lot of familiar faces
plastered on the sides of buses: Meredith Vieira, Brian Williams, Steve Carell,
Donald Trump. One face you won't see, however, belongs to a 27-year-old community
college dropout from Portland, OR, who is responsible for an NBC ratings phenomenon
that has eclipsed or matched those stars' shows: His cunning idea, which makes
for endlessly watchable and deeply nauseating television, regularly doubles Today's
audience, draws more viewers than both the Nightly News and The Office, and nearly
tied The Apprentice in audience last season, a tonic that NBC desperately needs
as it founders in the ratings.
His
name is Xavier Von Erck, and the program he helped create is "To Catch a
Predator," the recurring special "investigation" into the sexual
depravity of drooling, sweaty creeps that periodically hijacks Dateline NBC during
sweeps months. Xavier Von Erck—if the name sounds invented, that's because it
is, but more on that later—is the founder and public face of Perverted Justice,
an all-volunteer online organization that seeks to expose adults who troll chat
rooms looking for youngsters to have sex with. Its members do this by posing as
12- or 13-year-olds online, engaging in sexual banter with older men, setting
up meetings purportedly for sex, and then, after verifying a target's identity,
posting his name and personal details online and encouraging readers to call his
family and employer to let them know what he's been doing with his free time. But
it's not only predators who have found themselves duped and publicly disgraced
by Von Erck. He once set out to destroy an enemy by posing as a woman, seducing
him online with graphic sex chats, posting the transcripts on the web, and threatening
to release a purported video of his target masturbating—not the kind of behavior
you'd expect from NBC News's golden boy. X-MAN:Von
Erck Von
Erck, who previously worked tech support jobs, launched Perverted Justice in 2003.
"I was a chatter in the Portland Yahoo regional rooms," he tells Radar
in an e-mail. "I, like many, had the notion that individuals going online
to solicit kids would be arrested, that cops were all over the chatrooms monitoring
things. However, week after week passed and the same guys who would mass-post
things like, 'Any 14-to-15-year-olds in here want to make money modeling?' and
other solicitations would still be there. It was disturbing." He figured
that if he could pretend to be a kid, he could embarrass the lurkers and make
every potential predator paranoid about contacting children online. Perverted
Justice initially limited itself to publicizing the names and contact information
of its targets on the website. Eventually, local news crews in Portland and elsewhere
began collaborating with Von Erck to set up sting operations—drawing perverts
to a rented house, filming them as they approached, and using the footage to scare
the shit out of parents during sweeps. It was, at best, a mediocre gimmick suitable
for mid-market local news until Dateline hit on the idea that would make "To
Catch a Predator" a cultural touchstone: Set up a pompous correspondent inside
the house to interview the startled pervs and make them sweat. With smarmy host
Chris Hansen onboard, the show takes on the classic elements of Aristotelian drama.
First, viewers feel pity for the marks, who slowly come to understand before our
eyes that they've just wrecked their lives; next comes fear, enhanced by creepy
graphics and hard-to-prove statistics indicating that everybody on the Internet
wants to molest your daughter; and finally we experience a satisfying sense of
purgation as each sucker is taken violently to the ground by local police waiting
outside the house. Even
by the bug-eating, race-baiting, promiscuity-celebrating standards of reality
television, "To Catch a Predator" is monstrously exploitative—a Television
Age Roman coliseum where freakish criminals are publicly humiliated for bloodsport
and ratings. Granted, these are bad men, and it's a good thing they are being
stopped, hopefully, from hurting actual children. But they can be stopped—and
are stopped all the time by local police stings—without parading them across our
television screens for titillated and enraged audiences to gawk at between commercial
breaks. And,
of course, "To Catch a Predator" is not reality television. It's produced
under the auspices of NBC's vaunted news division, which has gone to unprecedented
lengths to secure Von Erck's ongoing cooperation, reportedly paying him in excess
of $100,000 per episode for his services, and even giving him, according to one
source, a cut of any revenue from future DVD sales of the shows. That arrangement,
and the show's sensationalism, make some at the network squirm. "I
think it's fascinating television," says one former NBC News producer who
loathes the show but often can't look away. "Although I find myself rooting
for the pedophiles." Not
much is known about Von Erck's background. He's cagey in interviews—he agreed
to talk to Radar only via e-mail—and doesn't reveal much personal information
for fear of being targeted by one of the men he has exposed. He was raised in
Portland by his mother, who struggled to support the family by working odd jobs—from
Taco Bell to a gas station—and moved 12 times before his junior year of high school.
He was the captain of his high school's mock trial team, and he continues to demonstrate
a facility for debate and rhetoric on his blog, Angry German, where he alternates
between charming posts about his love of Portland, video games, and professional
wrestling, and vicious, unhinged screeds against various targets. Some of Von
Erck's rants betray a hint of the sadism that informs "To Catch a Predator."
After a spate of kidnappings and beheadings in Iraq in 2004, Von Erck wrote that
he was "positively appalled at Nicholas Berg," who "kneeled meekly
and struggled naught [sic] as his death was thrust upon him ... bending to the
will of the kidnappers." He was even more enraged by the "shameless
and pathetic" conduct of Kim Sun-il, a kidnapped South Korean translator
who appeared in a video released by Iraqi insurgents (he was later beheaded).
"The asshole, yes, the asshole, screamed in English, pleading for his life,"
Von Erck wrote. "Let me be the first and probably only American to wish for
his speedy death.... No life of such a worm, a coward, can be considered important."
Of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, Von Erck had this to say: "I wish I could fucking
kill 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Yes, kill. I'd like to kill them. Kill them all...
I want you to die. I wish you would die. Why don't you die? Just die."
Von
Erck's birth name is Phillip John Eide. Although he legally changed it earlier
this year in a Portland court, he says he has gone by Xavier Von Erck since he
was 15. Erck is his mother's maiden name, to which he added the "Von"
in a nod to his German heritage. "Xavier" he just picked. "My old
name was the name my father gave me," he says. "Being that my father
had no role in my upbringing, as a teen I did not see the logic in being stuck
with his name. So I took my mother's name as a tribute to her, and a new first
name." (In the Perverted Justice world, where anonymous volunteers going
by handles like Epiphany and Peppermint Patty pretend to be children online, identity
is a tricky thing to nail down. Von Erck's longtime friend and roommate, formerly
known as Nicholas Wilkins, has also legally changed his name to his online handle,
Phoebus Apollo.) Von
Erck briefly attended Mt. Hood Community College before dropping out in the face
of what he called a "productive Internet addiction." He then worked
various tech support jobs while building up Perverted Justice; now, running the
website and coordinating Perverted Justice's role in the Dateline busts is his
full-time job. As for how and why he made a career of humiliating perverts, Von
Erck is demure: "The site has grown and evolved because people have come
to it and suggested ideas, come up with technological improvements, etc. I just
organize and direct it. I try not to take credit for the site succeeding, the
credit goes to how pervasive the problem is online and how dedicated people are
toward fighting it." Nevertheless,
Perverted Justice has many enemies. There are websites devoted to attacking Von
Erck and his nameless volunteer corps, and to outing and identifying the people
who conduct Perverted Justice's stings. These anti-PJ activists describe themselves
as combating vigilantism and what they see as the group's entrapment tactics. According
to an account posted by Von Erck, one of Perverted Justice's fiercest critics
was a 44-year-old software developer from Searcy, AK, named Bruce
Raisley. Raisley was a frequent poster to a forum at an anti-PJ site
called Anti-Vigilante Special Operations (AVSO) and he posted several threatening
and seemingly deranged comments to the site. He claimed, among other things, to
have written a virus that he would unleash upon Perverted Justice volunteers,
and used his computer skills to harass Perverted Justice members by exposing the
online handles they used when posing as children and tracking down their real
identities. He once threatened, during an IM chat, to "fuck or beat"
one Perverted Justice activist if he ever met him (Raisley thought he was communicating
with a woman at the time). It's unclear why Raisley, a private pilot and ham radio
enthusiast, was so militantly opposed to Perverted Justice. He has claimed he
was once a Perverted Justice member but broke with the group after another member
found a photograph of Railey's son online and used it in a decoy Yahoo profile—in
other words, used his son as bait for perverts. Perverted Justice denies this. Von
Erck claims he contacted local authorities in Arkansas and the FBI about Raisley
but they "simply weren't moving fast enough for my tastes, considering how
bold he was getting about his threats." So he decided to mete out his own
form of perverse justice, introducing himself to Raisley online, via instant messenger. He
called himself "Holly." Holly
and Raisley hit it off. They conducted a months-long correspondence via IM, and
gradually, Raisley fell in love with his new online pal. Holly would occasionally
inquire about Raisley's anti-Perverted Justice activities, but eventually the
conversation turned to sex:
[Raisley]: what r u doing?
[Holly]: I have my fingers in
[Raisley]: i
am holding it
[Holly]: are you rubbing it
[Raisley]: r u rubbing your
clit?
[Holly]: yes. it feels so good baby The
couple had cybersex twice. Holly repeatedly begged Raisley to masturbate in front
of a webcam for her. Raisley told her about his son, his job, his role as a Boy
Scout troop leader. Eventually, Raisley came clean to his wife about Holly, told
her that they were in love, and declared that Holly was moving to Arkansas. After
securing an apartment for the two of them to live in, he went to pick up Holly
at the airport. He was carrying flowers. Von
Erck never got on the plane, but he did find someone to go to the airport at the
appointed time to snap a picture of a hopeful Raisley waiting for his love to
arrive. Then he posted it online, along with the entire text of their chat and
a threat to release a video file he claimed showed Raisley masturbating. And then
this message to Perverted Justice's detractors: "[W]hen you attempt to threaten
members of Perverted-Justice.com... this can happen to you. Tonight, Bruce Raisley
stood around at an airport, flowers in hand, waiting for a woman that turned out
to be a man. He's not in love. He has destroyed his relationship with his wife,
he has denigrated her, and he has betrayed all those around him. He has no one.
He has no more secrets. We at Perverted-Justice.com will only tolerate so much
in the way of threats and attacks upon us." Today,
Von Erck professes sympathy for his victim. "As much as I hated Bruce Raisley
for what he tried to do," he says, "I felt bad for him in the sense
that the guy definitely has some mental issues. My hope is that Raisley gets mental
health help, he sticks with his wife, and they live a happy, threatening- and
harassing-free life. The head game that was played with him was only done in order
to 'knock him out' so to speak." Raisley
was indeed knocked out. A call to his home in Arkansas was answered by a woman
who said she was his wife. "That was just a big old mess," she said.
"He's already lost one job over this, and he doesn't want anybody to know
about it. I'm just hoping this will just fade away." Though she would not
comment on the accuracy of Von Erck's online account, she admitted having read
it.
Von
Erck is not the first strange man—and pretending to be a woman for the purposes
of seducing a man over a period of months in order to publicly ruin him is nothing
if not strange—that NBC News has worked with in order to gather the news. But
the extent of the network's business relationship with Von Erck has raised eyebrows
in the halls of NBC News.
According
to an April Washington Post story, Perverted Justice was paid a "low six
figures" consultancy fee to organize a sting operation for Dateline in Ohio.
Sources knowledgable about the inner workings of NBC confirm that account, and
say NBC is paying the group between $100,000 and $150,000 per show. According
to one current NBC News staffer and one former NBC official, the figure was arrived
at after Perverted Justice saw the ratings success of its first three Dateline
shows and retained the services of Steve Sadicario, a former ABC News executive
and agent with NS Bienstock, a firm that represents Bill O'Reilly, Anderson Cooper,
and Dan Rather. Sadicario, according to the sources, started a "bidding war"
for Perverted Justice's services after shopping an idea for a show to Fox and
ABC. NBC won. The
deal that Perverted Justice cut with NBC is unusual in two respects: For one,
according to the former NBC News official, it was negotiated by the network's
entertainment lawyers, not by the news division's legal staff. Secondly, according
to an NBC News staffer, Perverted Justice is entitled to a portion of any revenue
from DVD sales of "To Catch a Predator" episodes—an arrangement common
in the entertainment world but unheard of in the context of a news division's
relationship with a consultant. The
staffer notes, "It would be the first back-end deal in the history of journalism." It's
not hard to see why NBC would go to great lengths to keep Von Erck in its stable,
and to ride the "To Catch a Predator" phenomenon as far as it can. So
far, the original broadcasts have averaged 9.2 million viewers, beating out such
entertainment-division staples as Will & Grace (with an average of 8.6 million
viewers last season) and The Office (7.9 million). In the advertiser-friendly
18-to-49-year-old demographic, "To Catch a Predator" episodes ranked
16 among NBC's 41 regularly broadcast shows last season, beating Scrubs and Fear
Factor. While it's a special edition of Dateline NBC, rather than a show in its
own right, it was one of NBC's few successful new offerings last season. Only
Deal or No Deal, Surface, and My Name Is Earl outperformed it in the 18-to-49-year-old
demographic. Both
Von Erck and David Corvo, executive producer of Dateline, who submitted to a brief
interview and did not return subsequent phone calls, say they are unaware of plans
for a DVD, and both say they don't know if Perverted Justice would get any portion
of the revenues if a DVD were sold. Sadicario did not return repeated phone calls. Both
NBC and Von Erck declined to discuss specifics of the deal, and Von Erck says
that "by and large," he hasn't seen any of the NBC money yet. (He told
Willamette Week in May that he'd only been paid $20,000 so far.) But if Perverted
Justice is getting paid more than $100,000 per sting, it has earned more than
$400,000 since April. "It
was getting expensive," Von Erck says. "We literally could not keep
our website up anymore due to the site traffic. At that point it was either no
more Datelines or a consultation fee. At the end of the day, the cameramen were
getting paid, Chris Hansen was getting paid, the producers of Dateline were getting
paid, the police were paying themselves via public funds to do the arrests, the
guy who owns the house was getting compensated, the security there was being paid.
So it was only natural to seek compensation for the expensive work that we do." Asked
to outline the expenses involved in operating Perverted Justice, Von Erck cites
only server costs to handle traffic driven to the group's website by the exposure
on Dateline and "confidential" expenses associated with the stings.
Perverted Justice has no paid staff and no offices. In fact, it is not even a
legal entity. Von Erck says he is in the process of incorporating it as a nonprofit,
but claims not to know in which state. Von Erck says he is not personally being
paid by NBC and claims not to know precisely to whom NBC is making out the checks. The
arrangement, and the fact that the shows involve cooperation with law enforcement,
has some NBC News staff apoplectic. "We've crawled into bed with the cops.
People think this will be the pickup truck for the new decade," says one
Dateline producer, referring to the notorious episode in 1993 in which Dateline
was caught faking exploding gas tanks in GM trucks. "One of these guys is
going to go home and shoot himself in the head. The Perverted Justice people are
insane, and they'll do something to embarrass us. One of the biggest corporations
in the world ought to find a better target than skanky guys in shorts." "There's
no doubt," says another NBC News staffer, "that somewhere down the line,
some district attorney is going to ask us for outtakes or footage from a story,
and we're going to say, 'We don't do that because we don't want to be an agent
of the police.' And he's going to say, 'You did with "Predator." There
is a sense [in the news division] that standards don't matter." Indeed,
the network has already been confronted with such a dilemma: In one prosecution
that resulted from a Dateline sting, that of Rabbi David Kaye of Rockville, MD,
the defense issued a subpoena for the unedited footage of Kaye's conversation
with Chris Hansen. NBC's lawyers filed a motion to quash the subpoena, according
to Kaye's attorney, in which they signaled their intent to argue that as a news
organization they should be shielded from having to reveal the products of newsgathering.
But it would be incoherent of NBC to assert its independence when it comes to
judicial subpoenas at the same time it invites police officers to participate
in its newsgathering efforts. NBC's lawyers quickly realized this and agreed to
make the unedited footage available for download on the Dateline website. If the
network published it for the world to see, the twisted logic went, it could avoid
the unpleasant prospect of defending in court the very principle of independence
that it had sacrificed on the screen. It's
not just NBC staff that finds fault with "To Catch a Predator." Brad
Russ, the former commander of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force
(ICAC) for Northern New England, a federal program designed to help local authorities
fight child pornography and Internet predators, has participated in many online
sting operations. "I have a real problem with any citizens' group conducting
any investigation into any crime," he says. "It's a mistake for law
enforcement to abdicate its responsibility to citizens." And NBC, he says,
is playing with fire by drawing potentially dangerous men to residential neighborhoods
and confronting them. "How would you feel if the media rented a house in
your neighborhood and drew 30 people who've demonstrated a propensity for children
to your house? What happens when they flee at a high rate of speed and they T-bone
your wife's car? We would never set up a sting in a residential neighborhood."
Russ adds that targets could be armed, and that an ICAC officer in Florida was
shot and killed during a sting.
Kimberly Mitchell, a researcher for the
Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, has
studied both the efficacy of Internet stings and the risks that children face
online. While she says properly conducted stings by law enforcement are a useful
tool, she worries that "Predator" overstates the problem. "We've
talked to kids, and I think [sexual solicitations online] are something they've
come to expect to happen," she says. "It's fairly common for them to
see these things and experience them." In fact, according to Mitchell's research,
fully two thirds of children who were solicited online last year brushed off the
incident, and only four percent of children who regularly used the Internet received
"distressing" solicitations. "On the one hand," Mitchell says,
"it's good that people are aware. On the other hand, it's blown very far
out of proportion—it's extreme. It tells you one small piece of the story. It
can distort the truth and present this false fear." NBC
and Perverted Justice are in the process of filming more stings for this season.
"They have a whole fresh new bunch for September," says the Dateline
producer. "Several weeks' worth. There are a lot of people who would like
to see it as a show." But
if initial reports from the unaired stings are any indication, a new series based
on "Predator" wouldn't last long. One of the key elements of "Predator"
segments is Chris Hansen's "and you won't believe ... " moment, when
the predator turns out to be a teacher, a lawyer, a rabbi. It's a message that
plays well to the upscale audience NBC caters to. These people could be your neighbors.
But according to an NBC News staffer, the stings have become a victim of their
own success. "What I heard was that they had a tough time of it," the
staffer says. "The smarter predators have figured it out. You're not getting
the rabbis, doctors, and teachers. You're getting losers." And
losers, as the former NBC News official put it, "aren't in the demo." |
