Jail Baited

The Strip weighed in a few weeks ago about KCTV Channel 5's Internet perv series ("Hard Sell," February 19), drawing attention to the questionable tactics used by the vigilantes Channel 5 hooked up with to produce last month's six-night broadcast.

This reporting ribeye was concerned that the volunteers at Perverted-justice.com -- who trawl Internet chat rooms for men they can lure into sexed-up conversations with younguns and then post the men's pictures on its Web site -- might snare someone who didn't deserve to be publicly humiliated and labeled an "Internet predator" by Channel 5's hyperactive investigative reporter Steve Chamraz.

Turns out this meat patty wasn't the only one who felt that way.

As early as next week, one man targeted in Channel 5's sweeps-month ratings orgy will file a federal lawsuit against the CBS network; Channel 5's parent company, Meredith Broadcasting; and Perverted-justice.com; claiming that he was misrepresented as a pedophile by the TV stunt and that it cost him a $50,000-a-year job.

The man's attorney, Miriam Rittmaster, says she plans to identify her client only as John Doe in the lawsuit, so the Strip will refer to him by that name.

Everybody heard about the series. Over several days in December, Chamraz huddled in a rented house in Independence with one or more unidentified volunteers from Perverted-justice.com, who went into regional Internet chat rooms pretending to be underage boys and girls. Time and again, local men engaged the supposed youngsters in dirty talk. Eventually, 16 of them traveled to the Independence house, supposedly in hopes of having sex. Each time, Chamraz was waiting with a camera crew.

The stunt, aired during the February sweeps period, won Channel 5 big ratings -- just as it has for the other TV stations around the country that have signed up with Perverted-justice.com for their own "media busts." The first such bust occurred in Milwaukee last fall, but Channel 5 was apparently the first station to show faces and name names.

"We never called anyone a pedophile," Chamraz tells the Strip, and he's right. The TV station avoided that word by constantly repeating, like a mantra, that it had found "Internet predators" with "perverted purposes" who wanted to "have sex with underage teens."

But there's little question what impression Channel 5 wanted to give: that its ploy had rooted out disgusting, pedophilic monsters who would prey upon Kansas City children unless local law enforcement got off its lazy ass.

Only, Channel 5 appears to have overlooked one detail.

Unlike the other men caught in the sting, John Doe never propositioned the supposed young girl he chatted with.

He never described sex acts -- something the others did in great detail.

And he signed off his computer chat without setting up a specific meeting -- and without even knowing the supposed young girl's address.

John Doe tells the Strip he decided to travel to the house in Independence only after he received a phone call some time later from a woman he says sounded middle-aged and offered to give him oral sex.

When the Strip asked Chamraz and Channel 5 News Director Regent Ducas if they could refute Doe's claim, each was quick to doubt the man's story, but neither could offer any detail about the woman who made the phone call.

In fact, Chamraz admitted he didn't know who she was.

"If [Doe] thought she was 35, then why he showed up, I don't know," Chamraz says today, a month after broadcasting a very different assertion: that Doe showed up to have sex with an underage girl.

Last week, CBS compounded Doe's trouble when Dan Rather pimped Channel 5's success, showing Doe's face again -- this time on national TV -- and treating Chamraz like a star. Yes, Chamraz admits to the Strip, John Doe's was "one of the most tame chats." And during the program, Channel 5 indicated that Doe's was "one of the less graphic."

Less graphic? After reading the chat transcript, which is still posted at www.perverted-justice.com, this cutlet doubts that a Sunday school teacher would blush after reading it.

It's nothing like the stream of filth that came gushing out of many of the other men's chats. (Those screeds are also still recorded in archived transcripts.)

There's the guy, for example, who within seconds of discovering he's chatting with a supposed 12-year-old girl asks if she's a virgin and then, after she answers "yah," responds: "wanna change that?"

Soon he's offering her these choice lines: "u do know that it might hurt a little at first when i put it in?"

"think u could handle anal?"

"do u want to swallow? or would u like to have a facial?"

And then there's the 58-year-old perv who three times uses his webcam to transmit photos of his penis to a supposed 14-year-old boy and offers this caveat: "I am a top only. I get sucked and I do the fucking."

Another guy asks a supposed 14-year-old girl if she's up for a threesome. He later puts her through an interrogation: "You swallow? ... Ever had anal sex? ... Condom or no condom?"

In chat after chat, there's a depressing repetition of the same themes. Within minutes of meeting, the men explicitly propose sex acts with people they believe are underage teens.