Former District Court judge, former city attorney and Harvard Law School alumnus Larry Manzanares had a brilliant career that – if you believe the affidavits assembled by the Jefferson County district attorney’s office – has come undone over a botched attempt to conceal a fascination with porn.
The investigators said they found 10 videos containing “graphic sexual activity” and two depicting airplanes crashing (Dr. Freud, calling Dr. Sigmund Freud) on the computer Manzanares is accused of stealing from a storage room in the courthouse.
Some of the material had been deleted, but as we all know, deleting, emptying the recycle bin, maybe even backing a car over the blasted thing won’t help.
Nothing says forever like a computer hard drive.
Back in the 1950s when teachers threatened students with “this will go on your permanent record,” they could only dream about a future with a tattletale PC in every home, school and office.
Now everybody’s secret life is readily available, preserved in digital code somewhere among the circuit boards and the silicon chips.
If investigators ever check my office computer files they’ll find massive evidence of recipes collected from newspaper food sections, addresses for mail-order Belgian chocolates and even downloads of graphic videos featuring New York Times food writer Mark Bittman – cooking.
I’m a shameless culinary voyeur. So far, it’s not grounds for dismissal from The Post.
But even a porn stash on its own wasn’t Manzanares’ undoing. The investigators said the kinky videos didn’t feature children, so viewing them was perfectly legal. The DA justified releasing the details about them because they could suggest a motive for the other crimes – namely embarrassment.
Manzanares was charged with theft, embezzlement of public property, tampering with physical evidence, official misconduct and computer crime, which is plenty.
While reports that the former judge said he bought the computer from a stranger in a parking lot produced disbelieving snickers, the porn angle has generated wild speculation about the character of a man who from all accounts was considered a fine judge and all-around good guy up until that day in January when this bizarre episode started to unfold.
Now even if he’s acquitted, recovering from the humiliation may be impossible.
Never mind that the Internet has made free porn accessible to millions, that it is as ubiquitous on hotel room TVs as European chocolates are in the minibars, that it is a $12 billion-a-year industry, and that such buttoned-down companies as Comcast, Time Warner and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. share in the healthy profits to be had peddling graphic sexual imagery.
The trick for the millions of people who watch this stuff is never to admit it.
When it comes to sex, everybody’s a hypocrite.
Speaking of which, those self-appointed arbiters of morality – talk-radio gasbags – were in a full-throated frenzy over a discussion about sex at Boulder High school until the Manzanares porn story broke and provided them with breathless new material.
Among the statements from the Boulder High School event that drew their outrage was the suggestion that masturbation is normal.
Oh, the horror.
This upset the tender sensibilities of the gasbags, even though all but a few parents of students at the school were OK with the message.
Apparently not everyone is in complete denial of reality.
While the radio talk-show hucksters have held forth for weeks on elements of the discussion that were occasionally overly frank, even the conservative Independence Institute has criticized them for failing to acknowledge that the central theme presented to the students was to behave responsibly.
“This is about thinking about the choices you’re making today and how they’re going to affect you over the long haul,” said Andee Gerhardt, one of the speakers from the Conference on World Affairs.
It may not make for titillating talk radio, but it’s good advice.
Just ask Manzanares.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Reach her at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
