The 13-year-old boy sat in his California home, eyes fixed on a computer screen. He had never run with the popular crowd, and long ago he had turned to the Internet for the friends he craved. But on this day, Justin Berry’s fascination with cyberspace would change his life.
Weeks before, Justin hooked up a Web camera to his computer, hoping to use it to meet other teenagers online. Instead, he heard only from men who chatted with him by instant message as they watched his image on the Internet. To Justin, they seemed just like friends, ready with compliments and always offering gifts.
Now, on an afternoon in 2000, one member of his audience sent a proposal: He would pay Justin $50 to sit bare-chested in front of his webcam for three minutes. The man explained that Justin could receive the money instantly, and helped him open an account on PayPal.com, an online payment system.
So began the secret life of a teenager who was lured into selling images of his body on the Internet over the course of five years.
From the seduction that began that day, this soccer-playing honor roll student was drawn into performing in front of the webcam – undressing, showering, masturbating and even having sex – for an audience of more than 1,500 people who paid him, over the years, hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Justin’s dark coming-of-age story is a collateral effect of recent technological advances: Minors, often under the online tutelage of adults, are opening for-pay pornography sites featuring their own images sent onto the Internet by inexpensive webcams. And they perform from the privacy of home, while parents are nearby, beyond their children’s closed bedroom doors.
The business has created youthful Internet porn stars – with such nicknames as Riotboyy, Miss Honey and Gigglez – whose images are traded online long after their sites have vanished.
A six-month investigation by The New York Times into this corner of the Internet found that such sites had emerged largely without attracting the attention of law enforcement or youth protection organizations.
“We’ve been aware of the use of the webcam and its potential use by exploiters,” said Ernest Allen, chief executive of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a private group. “But this is a variation on a theme that we haven’t seen. It’s unbelievable.”
Some children end up as pornographic commodities inadvertently – even unknowingly. Adolescents have appeared naked on their webcams as a joke, or as presents for boyfriends or girlfriends, only to have their images posted on for-pay pornography sites.
The scale of webcam pornography is unknown, because it is both new and extremely secretive. But Justin Berry is far from alone.
One online portal that advertises for-pay webcam sites, many of them pornographic, lists at least 585 sites created by teenagers, internal site records show.
The Times’ inquiry has already resulted in a large-scale criminal investigation.
In June, the Times located Justin Berry, then 18. In interviews, he revealed the existence of a group of more than 1,500 men who paid for his online images, as well as evidence that other identifiable children as young as 13 were being actively exploited.
In its investigation, the Times obtained the names and credit-card information for the 1,500 people who paid to boy to perform on camera, and analyzed the backgrounds of 300 of them nationwide. The majority of the sample consisted of doctors and lawyers, businessmen and teachers, many of whom work with children on a daily basis.
In a series of meetings, the Times persuaded Berry to abandon his business and, to protect other children at risk, assisted him in contacting the Justice Department.
Arrests and indictments of people he identified as pornography producers and traffickers began in September. Investigators are also focusing on businesses, including credit card processors that have aided illegal sites.
Anyone who has created, distributed, marketed, possessed or paid to view such pornography is open to a criminal charge.
In 2000, Justin Berry was a gangly 13-year-old who lived with his mother, stepfather and younger sister in Bakersfield, Calif., a midsize city about 90 miles north of Los Angeles.
As soon as he hooked a camera to his bedroom computer and loaded the software, his picture was automatically posted on spotlife.com, an Internet directory of webcam users, along with his contact information. Then he waited to hear from other teenagers. No one his age ever contacted him from that listing. But, within minutes, he heard from his first online predator. That man was soon followed by another, then another.
The men filled an emotional void in the boy’s life. His relationship with his father, Knute Berry, was troubled. His parents divorced when he was young.
In February 2003, the boy’s father, who had been charged with insurance fraud related to massage clinics he ran, disappeared without a word. Soon, Knute Berry called his son from Mazatlan, Mexico; Justin begged to join him, and his father agreed.
In Mexico, Justin freely spent his wads of cash, leading his father to ask where the money had come from. Justin said that he confessed the details of his lucrative webcam business, and the reunion soon became a collaboration. Justin created a new website, calling it mexicofriends.com, his most ambitious ever: It featured Justin having live sex with prostitutes.
Money from the business, Justin said, was shared with his father, an allegation supported by transcripts of their later instant message conversations.
In the fall of 2003, Justin’s life took a new turn when a subscriber named Greg Mitchel, a 36-year-old fast-food restaurant manager from Dublin, Va., struck up an online friendship with the boy and soon asked to visit him.
Mitchel arrived that October, and while in Mexico, molested Justin for what would be the first of many times, according to transcripts of their conversations and other evidence.
Mitchel, in prison awaiting trial on six child pornography charges stemming from this case, could not be reached for comment.