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Former Disney exec dodges a bullet | page 1, 2
"I'm glad I'm at the top of the food chain," he said in a Forbes article ("Mr. Famous Comes Home") in 1998. "I came from a poor immigrant family. My father came from Ireland, and he basically reproduced Ireland in Rochester. We had ten acres of land with cows and ducks and pigs." A large family and its peculiar pressures was something that Naughton and the online correspondent I spoke with had in common. "He comes from a large family (he's the youngest) of highly successful professionals," she wrote me in an e-mail. "I, too, come from a large family of successful people. The kind of attention we received at home as kids was like ... 'tell me what you accomplished' kind of thing. Approval is very important to people like us. It's NOT unusual that we seek approval in other ways." Indeed, Naughton described his father to Forbes in fairly unforgiving terms. "My father has never been one to compliment anyone to their face," he said. "It reminds me of the time he signed my fourth-grade report card. I got straight A's entirely through Catholic school. Once, I got this report card and it had all these A's, but it had an A minus in religion or handwriting or something minor. My mother always signed the report card like a rubber stamp. When my father signed it, he made a few comments to the teacher. He said, 'I think Patrick can do better' -- which is just a classic line from dear old dad." Naughton met the woman I spoke with through a BBS in the early '90s. Though separated geographically, they shared some passions in cyberspace. "Back then he wasn't as famous or as wealthy," she recalled, "but he was the most amazing person I had ever met on the Net. When most guys were asking about sex, Patrick just wanted to talk about family, ambitions, and love of Irish music and culture. I was significantly younger than he, so I was bedazzled by his fast-paced life." They did chat about sexual fantasies, albeit somewhat cautiously. She was wary of commencing a non-cyber relationship, having been raped by someone else she met online, so she proceeded tentatively. (Naughton had his own reservations it seems, asking to speak to her on the phone on one occasion to make sure she was a woman.) She admired his success from a distance ("He was very proud online; he told me his salary was doubling every year") but any hopes either may have harbored for anything more came to an end when she sent him a photograph of herself. "He said I was too young for him," she recalls (something Naughton's attorneys must have been heartened to hear). She didn't hear anything from him for two years until she learned of his arrest. After posting messages to and about him on another bulletin board, defending his reputation in the wake of the charges and his dismissal from Disney, she received an e-mail from him during the trial. In his message he thanked her for her support and offered a rather unusual prediction. "i think i have a lot of good to do with my time Left in this earth," Naughton wrote. "in fact, i have a lot of good ideas which would protect both the children we are here to care for, as well as protecting the first amendment rights of the adults who deserve them. if i am acquitted, i think i will dedicate a big block of time to solving these problems." Such a line might seem self-serving, the sort of prayer one offers when the shit is about to hit the fan. And the temptation to make a pop-psych pastiche out of Patrick Naughton's character is almost irresistible: The remote and distant father; the up-from-nowhere success story with its timeless, Icarus-like denouement; the arrogance of a man who helped define the Internet and the lure of fantasy to someone stressed out and isolated in spite of all the "chatting." The feds could just as easily make a case for a predator-waiting-to-happen, a guy looking for younger women online who maybe just didn't like the looks of this one. It is doubtful that the mystery of Patrick Naughton will be settled by what happens in court. The reaction of Disney (which canned him within hours of his arrest) is indicative of how the topic of "inappropriate" sexual behavior is dealt with: Next question, please. And while an older brother, James, was by his side throughout the trial, Patrick's wife was conspicuously absent. There may finally be no right answer. Among the links that bear his name you will find "Patrick Naughton's Magnetic Poetry Applet," a Java version of the refrigerator-magnet poetry game. You can move the collected words yourself or click on "scramble" to produce something like But scramble the words another time and you might get a message such as this: "the friend and I go out Like Naughton himself, the applet offers no answers, just more possible word combinations, each one decidedly open to interpretation.
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