Child Molestation

A pastor was charged today with molesting a 14-year-old female parishioner, the Orange County district attorney's office said. Ricardo Avalos Maffey, 42, a pastor of the Apostolic Christian Church in San Clemente, is accused of engaging in illegal sexual contact with the alleged victim by kissing her on the mouth on multiple occasions. He also contacted the victim to meet and engage in kissing, authorities said. The district attorney's office said Maffey of Santa Ana was charged with three felony counts of lewd acts upon a child and one felony count of contacting a minor with the intent to engage in child molestation.

Three decades ago, they were teen idols. Todd Bridges played Willis on the popular sitcom "Diff'rent Strokes. " Corey Feldman starred in "Gremlins,""The Goonies" and "The Lost Boys. " The two men held the same dark secret: Each had been molested in his adolescence by men with Hollywood connections, experiences that would lead to downward spirals and years of drug addiction. Today, they are making a highly public case for California legislation they hope will protect child actors from sexual predators, a problem they say continues to bedevil the entertainment industry.

In his private journal, Jason Michael Handy once described himself as a "pedophile, full blown. " Handy snapped more than 1,000 photos of girls at the elementary school across the street from his house, using a camera with a telephoto lens, according to court documents. He volunteered at a Malibu church, where he worked with 6-year-olds. And his job as a production assistant at one of the nation's most prominent producers of children's television programs, Nickelodeon, gave him access to child actors on and off the set, and allowed him to exchange email addresses and phone numbers with them.

I have been attending trials in Los Angeles for 20 years. I've covered torture and murder, drug smuggling and bank robberies. I covered the trial of the officers who beat Rodney G. King and the rioters who beat Reginald O. Denny. I covered the murder trial of O.J. Simpsonand the child molestation investigation of Michael Jackson. I've been put on the stand and been told to reveal my sources for some unflattering documents regarding Police Chief Willie L. Williams (I refused). But one type of hearing has remained presumptively off-limits.

Brian DeVries, the first violent sexual offender to graduate from a state treatment program, was granted unconditional release Monday after a judge ruled that surgical castration and seven years of intensive psychiatric treatment qualified the former predator to live free and unsupervised. DeVries, 45, wore a wide grin as a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge formally ended DeVries' regimen of mental health counseling, supervised living and tracking by global positioning satellite.

A jury on Tuesday found a former Newport Beach youth recreation leader guilty of 22 felony counts of lewd conduct, mostly for sucking the toes of more than a dozen young boys under his supervision. Jurors also found Trenton Michael Veches, 32, guilty of three misdemeanor counts of assaulting a child. Veches' lawyer, John Patrick Dolan, said he will appeal the verdict, which could carry a sentence of more than 300 years in prison but with the possibility of parole.

An anti-drug activist who was arrested as a suspected child molester--but then released as innocent--has filed a federal court lawsuit alleging that Los Angeles police violated his civil rights and smeared his reputation. James Elliott Singletary of Encino, who was jailed for four days last year amid mounting public furor over attacks on children by the so-called Valley molester, was arrested mainly because he is black, said attorney Marion R. Yagman, who filed the suit Monday in U.S.

After Eileen Franklin-Lipsker witnessed the murder of her best friend, she wondered why no one, including police investigators, thought to question her because she was only 8 years old. Now, at 29, she will finally testify, and what she will say, she promises, is that the man she saw commit the crime was her own father. Franklin-Lipsker, who came forward with her accusation for the first time last month, is the key witness against George Thomas Franklin Sr., 50, a former San Mateo firefighter.

Young Jake, the tennis pro at the club, is the perfect romantic lead--tall, dark, handsome. But something is amiss; he's haunted, tormented. The gorgeous Felicia is likewise troubled because Jake won't or can't make love, and he won't tell her what's wrong. He won't tell his sister Margo either. Even after several eternities on the afternoon CBS serial "The Bold and the Beautiful," Jake wouldn't tell anybody . . . until a recent day when he confronted his father: "All these years I was tortured.

Career felon Warren James Bland, already serving a life sentence for terrorizing women and children in a series of sexual assaults in Southern California, should be executed for the 1986 kidnaping, torture and murder of a 7-year-old South Pasadena girl, a jury determined Monday. A Riverside County Superior Court jury deliberated just 90 minutes Monday before returning its verdict. Judge Gordon R. Burkhart set sentencing for May 28.

In his private journal, Jason Michael Handy once described himself as a "pedophile, full blown. " Handy snapped more than 1,000 photos of girls at the elementary school across the street from his house, using a camera with a telephoto lens, according to court documents. He volunteered at a Malibu church, where he worked with 6-year-olds. And his job as a production assistant at one of the nation's most prominent producers of children's television programs, Nickelodeon, gave him access to child actors on and off the set, and allowed him to exchange email addresses and phone numbers with them.

Reporting from San Francisco -- The California Supreme Court appeared reluctant Thursday to give adult victims of child molestation the right to sue decades later those who knew of the abuse and failed to stop it. During oral argument, several members of the state high court expressed skepticism toward a lower court's finding that gave adult victims flexible legal deadlines for bringing such third-party suits. The court is considering a lawsuit against the Roman Catholic Church by six brothers who were in their 40s when they said they discovered that they were suffering the effects of abuse by a priest decades earlier.

In November, former Penn State football defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was accused of sexually abusing eight boys over a 15-year period, and head coach Joe Paterno was fired for not doing enough to stop it. Syracuse University basketball coach Bernie Fine is now being investigated for alleged child molestation. Shouldn't somebody do something? Maybe we need more criminal laws. How about a law that makes it a crime to witness child sexual abuse and not report it to the proper authorities?

Former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky said he never spoke with Joe Paterno about any suspected misconduct with minors, the New York Times reported Saturday. Sandusky has been charged with 40 counts of molesting eight boys over 15 years and is free on bail while awaiting a preliminary hearing Dec. 13. A grand jury investigating Sandusky said in a report that some of the allegations occurred in the team showers, including a 2002 allegation in which a graduate assistant coach testified he saw Sandusky assaulting a young boy. University trustees fired Paterno on Nov. 9, four days after charges were filed against Sandusky, amid mounting pressure that school leaders should have done more to prevent alleged abuse.

A convicted child molester working as a Hollywood casting director began cooperating with a Los Angeles Police Department investigation, while child protection advocates called for background checks for those with access to child actors. Jason James Murphy, who served prison time for the 1996 kidnapping and molesting of an 8-year-old boy in suburban Seattle, has spent the last decade working as a casting assistant. He helped find young actors for movies including the science fiction hit "Super 8" and the forthcoming comedy "The Three Stooges.

Graham Zug used to call this place home. Until a year ago, he was a Penn State receiver. His older brother was part of the school's Blue Band. As Zug stood behind the Nittany Lions' bench Saturday alongside countless other former players in a symbol of solidarity, he said he could sense something inside Beaver Stadium wasn't normal. There were 107,903 fans in the building, but the atmosphere was subdued. "It was different," Zug said. "You could tell. " Only three days after child sex crime allegations against a former defensive coordinator cost longtime coach Joe Paterno his job, Penn State resumed playing football.

The Los Angeles Archdiocese knew for three decades about 1967 child abuse accusations against Father G. Neville Rucker, a retired priest living at Corpus Christi church in Pacific Palisades until his April 23 removal. Rucker was ordered to move from the Corpus Christi rectory and permanently leave the ministry as Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and other prelates met last month at the Vatican to discuss the growing sex abuse crisis.

WHEN Times editors assigned me to the religion beat, I believed God had answered my prayers. As a serious Christian, I had cringed at some of the coverage in the mainstream media. Faith frequently was treated like a circus, even a freak show. I wanted to report objectively and respectfully about how belief shapes people's lives. Along the way, I believed, my own faith would grow deeper and sturdier. But during the eight years I covered religion, something very different happened.

The right to vote Re "GOP tightens election laws in key states," Oct. 31 In many countries, voting is mandatory; it is considered an obligation. Here in America, on the other hand, election day turnout is embarrassingly low, especially at the local level. Yet we have Republican lawmakers in several states going all out to reduce the numbers of eligible voters because voting should not be convenient or easy; after all, it is "a hard-fought privilege" that people died for, according to Florida GOP Sen. Michael Bennett.

Stuffed animals, teen magazines and children's underwear were found in a raid of a Wilmington motel that was home to dozens of convicted child molesters and registered sex offenders, authorities said Monday. Eight people were taken into custody Friday for alleged parole violations, including possession of child pornography or narcotics. Most of those arrested were middle-aged men whose previous offenses included lewd and lascivious conduct with children or other sex crimes, said Det. Patricia Batts of the Los Angeles Police Department.