National Association of Adult Survivors of Child Abuse
National Association of Adult Survivors of Child Abuse
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NAASCA Highlights
EDITOR'S NOTE: Occasionally we bring you articles from local newspapers, web sites and other sources that constitute but a small percentage of the information available to those who are interested in the issues of child abuse and recovery from it.
We also present original articles we hope will inform the community ...
This video is from the Dr Drew show, Nov 17, 2011. The panelist is a
convicted sex offender who served 5 yrs & now works to help others
in
prison for the same crime. http://drdrew.blogs.cnn.com/
Out of the Shadows: Jake Goldenflame wants the world to know he is a convicted child molester
by J.D. Heyman, Vickie Bane
San Francisco
People Weekly
March 24, 2003
Jake Goldenflame remembers exactly when he realized he couldn't escape his past. It was 1996, and he was working as a clerk at a hotel in Jerusalem, where backpackers would chat with him into the wee hours.
"A gal in her 20s was talking to me about her childhood, and all of a sudden her eyes filled with tears," says Goldenflame. "She said, 'How am I ever going to love my father? He molested me when I was young.' I just stopped. I knew wherever I went there would always be another girl like this. It was time to come back."
He returned knowing that people might consider him every parent's nightmare. A child molester who served five years in prison for sexually abusing his daughter, Goldenflame, 65, has emerged instead as an unlikely spokesman for Megan's Law, the controversial 1996 federal statute that requires sex offenders to register with local authorities. On March 5 the Supreme Court rejected two challenges to the law--a judgment Goldenflame wholeheartedly supports.
"The court did its job," he says. "The public has a right to know who I am, and every time I register, I am forced to remember who I have been."
Critics say the law--named for Megan Kanka, a New Jersey 7-year-old murdered by a convicted child molester who lived across the street--invades the privacy of those who have paid their social debt. "It isolates offenders and does not prevent child sexual abuse from happening in the first place," says Fran Henry of Stop It Now!, a group that combats child sexual abuse. Goldenflame disagrees: "The only reason for a sex offender to want privacy is to go back to be-ing a sex offender." Megan Kanka's mother, Maureen, who has never met Goldenflame, is surprised but glad for the support. "He has found that being under Megan's Law keeps him on the up-and-up," says Kanka. "It's wonderful."
Supported by a small inheritance, Goldenflame runs a Web site (calsex offenders.net) from his two-room San Francisco apartment that is devoted to helping sex offenders understand Megan's Law and what they need to do to conform to it. He has had no contact with his daughter, now 22, since his 1985 arrest, nor is he in touch with three ex-wives or four sons. Ever since his incarceration he has avoided children, believing that sexual obsessions, like any addiction, "can't be cured but can be controlled."
To keep himself on the right path, Goldenflame, a lay Buddhist monk, counsels offenders who seek him out via his Web site and apologizes to victims on behalf of those who have hurt them. "When he said, 'I'm sorry,' I just started crying," says Lillyth Keogh, 25, a San Francisco homemaker who met Goldenflame when he spoke to her rape survivors' group. "It was wonderful to hear somebody taking responsibility for what he had done."
Adopted in infancy and raised as Robert Gold (he changed his name in 1978), Goldenflame grew up feeling alienated from his parents, Seymour, a prominent attorney, and Susan, a homemaker. After an older male schoolmate molested him at 13, he says, he developed a lifelong attraction to adolescent boys. Although his sons testified at his sentencing that he had never molested them, Goldenflame did begin seeking out boys for sex during his first marriage. After a short second marriage--which produced a fourth son--ended in 1977, Goldenflame, who has a law degree but never took the bar exam, began working as an investigator at a legal clinic. While there he married his third wife, a 22-year-old colleague. The marriage lasted on and off for four years, and the pair then shared custody of a daughter.
Depressed and lonely, Goldenflame says he began molesting the child when she was a toddler. "I loved her very much. And I found myself beginning to emotionally have a love affair with my daughter," he says. "That's incest. That's how it is. I was horrified. But I felt imprisoned. I couldn't stop." When his ex-wife confronted him, he readily confessed. "She said, 'Is this true?'" he recalls. "I said, 'Yes, it is. Thank God, it's over.'"
Released on parole in 1991, halfway through his 10-year sentence, Goldenflame later drifted around the world, hiding from his past before his encounter with the backpacker brought him home. He doesn't expect forgiveness from his daughter and others he abused, but he will spend the rest of his days trying to make amends. "The person I was, he was a shell," he says. "It's not me now."
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Now our next guest has a lot to say about sexual offenders. Jake Goldenflame speaks from personal experience. In his book, "Overcoming Sexual Terrorism," he not only tells you how to protect your kids, he candidly tells you about his own sexual addiction to children.
Jack Goldenflame joining us from San Francisco to talk all about that and much more.
Jake, great to have you with us.
JAKE GOLDENFLAME, RECOVERING SEX OFFENDER: Thank you, Kyra. Thank you for having me here.
PHILLIPS: Well, I definitely know this is -- we're about to enter a bit of a painful area for you. But you say it's therapy for you. Why don't you brief us quickly on your molestation case?
GOLDENFLAME: My molestation case took place approximately 20 years ago when at the -- what I call the bottom of my depravity, I finally molested my own daughter. And by the time we got to courting she wasn't even 5 years old. It was a complete -- an amazing turn to find myself in that position. Because four years previously, I'd been a sexual offender going after adolescent boy. This was so off the wall, so completely different it caused me to fear, in terror, what in me is so crazy and so at large, because I fear where will it take me next if I don't get help?
And so when she fortunately told her mother, and her mother confronted me, I immediately admitted it, I surrounded myself to police, I entered a plea of not guilty. And when I went to prison, I was fortunate enough to receive help during the five years I was in. I've now been out 14 years. I remain re-offense-free.
PHILLIPS: Take us inside your head, if you will, as we hear your case, we hear your testimony here, we talk about John Couey and the story of Jessica Lunsford. I know you even wrote to John Couey, and I'll get to that in a minute. But what on God's green earth causes somebody, like you, to think this way, to feel this way, to act this way?
GOLDENFLAME: Of course, I can't speak in Mr. Couey's case, because I haven't had a chance to talk with him yet. But in my case, and in most cases of child molesters, what you'll find is we were molested as children ourselves.
Now, of course, the question that comes up is, well, certainly not all children who were molested grow up to become molesters. And fortunately, they do not. So far as anybody can tell, the difference is this, if the damage is deep enough or if it continues over a long enough period, it causes a warp that takes place, a deviancy to form, you're fixated on it, and you'll find yourself in the grip of it.
Interestingly, some of the former child victims that I know now who are adults, tell me that they use the same prevention techniques that I do, so that they don't become offenders, just as I don't wish to become a re-offender.
PHILLIPS: All right, I want to ask you about that Jake, because you've come forward and said, no, you are never cured, you just learn how to deal with this. Tell me about the other day when you were getting off the bus, just recently, you felt a temptation.
GOLDENFLAME: Yes.
PHILLIPS: Tell me what you work on, what you learned to do, and how you prevented something from happening at that moment.
GOLDENFLAME: Sure. I was taking a bus here in the city to go on an errand, doing what many other of your listeners are doing these days, filing my income-tax report through a commercial firm, and I got off the bus stop. And just as I stepped off the bus, I found that no more than three or four feet away from me was this adolescent boy of exactly the kind that I find very attractive. So the first thing that happens inside of me is I experience the feeling of the attraction and a bunch of firewalls come up inside of me. That's what the therapy and the training does. It's automatic. It's a behavioral response that's there. And it's like a guide that comes on in you and says, OK, turn away and go on with your business. You can't be tempted by something you're not looking at. So you just -- it's easy, you turn your head away and go on your business, and the urge goes away, and you're safe.
PHILLIPS: All right, let's talk about the laws, whether you think they should be stricter. You see Martha Stewart, she's got to wear something on her ankle so people can track her on a constant basis. You wonder, why don't every sexual offender have this? Why aren't they kept behind bars? But then you listen to your story, you think, OK, maybe there's hope here, maybe there is ways to rehabilitate. You spent five years in prison. Others never spend that much time in prison. What's the answer here, because not everybody can be like you, Jake.
GOLDENFLAME: Well, yes, fortunately there are of course many others who do. What it takes, as far as I can tell and from all the men that I deal with who are in prison now as sex offenders, it takes a commitment to healing. It takes a commitment to getting into recovery and staying in recovery that allows a lifetime. It's a commitment of immense depth, and frankly, many of us, as we go through our deviant career, we hear of it, we flirt with it, we look at it, but we're not ready, unfortunately, in too many cases, until it's too late, we're not ready to make that commitment. And when you do, when you're committed to healing, when you're committed to getting recovery, then recovery begins for you and you're on your way. PHILLIPS: But, Jack, what if you're not committed to it, OK? Richard Allen Davis, before he was found guilty of killing little Polly Klaas, I mean, his rap sheet was -- it was just unbelievable. And then you've got John Couey, who had done this in the past. And now, finally, he's being charged with killing a little girl. I mean, not everybody thinks, OK, let's see, i've got a problem, i've got to stop, rehabilitate myself.
GOLDENFLAME: Right.
PHILLIPS: So what about those offenders that may possibly not be able to be reached?
GOLDENFLAME: The recommendation I make, and I make this unequivocally, I believe we should change the law so that everybody who is convicted of a sex offense, especially against children, should go to prison on a life sentence with treatment beginning to be available to them on day one, and they don't get out until they're treatment team finds reasonably they can be released safely under appropriate monitoring. And then if they get out and mess up in any way and even look like they're going to re-offend again, they can be taken back for the rest of that life sentence. And whether they get a second bite of the apple or not depends upon the circumstances and authorities.
PHILLIPS: Jake Goldenflame, amazing testimony, author of the book "Overcoming Sexual Terrorism: 40 Ways to Protect Your Children From Sexual Predator."
I know we didn't get into your daughter. I know you haven't talked to her in 20 years. You're leaving it up to her to contact you. I know it's on your heart. But I thank you for your time today, Jack, and your honesty.
