MySpace lawsuit

February 23, 2007, 10:50 p.m.

When justice isn't enough

The Myth of Jones:
A Column

While justice breathes more easily as a concept than as reality, one can almost always count on Austin federal Judge Sam Sparks to make the right call in a sensible ruling.

Last week, Sparks threw out a $30 million lawsuit against MySpace from his bench on the U.S. District Court of Western Texas. The family suing MySpace argued that the website was negligent, contending that the site insufficiently protected said family's daughter from sexual predation. The 13-year-old girl went on MySpace, where she posed as an 18-year-old. By the time she met a 19-year-old Buda man on MySpace, she was all of 14. The two met, had a night out and ended it with sex.

For this, the girl's family filed a $30 million lawsuit against MySpace, also naming the Buda man who faces criminal charges of sexually assaulting a minor. Retorted Sparks in his dismissal, "If anyone had a duty to protect Julie Doe, it was her parents, not MySpace."

Bravo. After all, who raised this child to think it's all right to go on a website for which she's too young (MySpace requires 14 as a minimum age for registration), then pose as an 18-year-old, then hook up with a 19-year-old, then put herself in a position of having sex with him — however willingly or unwillingly — then lay the blame on everyone else?

One deeply respects good parents, of whom there are so many in the area, because kids aren't built to make it easy. Even when kids understand what's allowed and what isn't, they're bound to push the boundaries. That's one way human beings make discoveries in their lives and bring new forms of experience to the world.

Sometimes, the boundaries protect children from danger. When those boundaries are crossed and pain ensues, a lesson is learned. That's life. When a five-year-old burns his hand on a stove, the kid learns to keep his hands off the stove. The parents don't sue General Electric for negligence.

There's so much wrong with this story, and none of it has anything to do with MySpace. How these kids met is irrelevant. They could have met on the Internet, at school, in a park or at a shopping mall. Why MySpace should have to defend itself in cases of this sort is a mystery.

In addition to the practice of good sense, Sparks supported his decision with a specific legal point, saying the Communications Decency Act of 1996 immunizes interactive Internet services from third party lawsuits triggered by materials posted thereon. It's not the medium. It's the message.

As always, though, justice breathes more easily as a concept than as reality. Sparks' ruling leaves open the possibility that many of the charges can be refiled, which, said the family's attorney, will soon happen.

And where's justice for Pete Solis, the 19-year-old kid from Buda who is accused in this case? He said the sex was consensual. We don't know if it was or wasn't, except that, from a strictly legal standpoint, a 14-year-old girl can't possibly consent. But the girl represented herself as 18. Evidently, Solis took her at her word. He didn't know.

For all we know, they both represented themselves as 18-year-olds, they met, spent a night out and had sex, and she thought it was icky, so she told her parents. Next thing you know, this kid in Buda is an accused sex offender with a statutory rape charge looming and the police are characterizing his involvement with the girl as an "attack" in the media. And it's quite conceivable that none of this would have started if the girl didn't represent herself, fraudulently, as being of age. She's a minor, so she's protected from her lie. He's not a minor, so he isn't protected from her lie.

Of course, Pete Solis could have handled the matter differently. He could have been suspicious. He could have asked to see her driver's license. Sure, it would have gone over badly, but there are worse fates in life, as Solis undoubtedly now knows. He could have kept his head, waited a bit, maybe gotten to know the girl better. Maybe he would have spotted a red flag or two and figured it out before making a terrible mistake.

Try telling that to a 19-year-old kid.

At the root of this story is the definitive tension in contemporary America between, on one hand, the lives we desire in social and ethical terms that mark our citizenship and, on the other hand, the lives we allow ourselves to be roped into dreaming by the commercial infotainment apparatus that positions us as consumers. The consumer ethos, which lavishes and extends private desires past the bounds of social cohesion, is no friend of citizenship's call for the moral good of the whole.

The social and ethical sphere wishes to capitalize on the ease of modern life by raising children to be safe and protected, able to address the adult themes of life at an appropriately mature pace. In particular, the pleasures, dangers and mysteries of the sexual realm aren't toys for children. They are the province of adults who can take responsibility for their outcomes.

But the infotainment business sexualizes children. It tricks unformed and uninformed minds into believing the sexual realm is their party, too. After a while, adults stop noticing there's anything wrong with it. Parents don't bat an eye when their 14-year-old daughters wear hot pants to the bowling alley. Then, burgeoning sexual urges spill into action, encouraged by the media sexualization of children and untamed by parents who neglect their duties if they're not forthrightly grooming their kids to become responsible sexual agents.

Now, a young girl is badly hurt, and we're supposed to be outraged. We're supposed to believe Pete Solis is some kind of animal. We're supposed to believe we can't possibly understand how else such a horrible event could have happened. Apparently, some of us don't. Because who do the girls' parents blame? They blame MySpace and a 19-year-old kid in the next town.

One wishes to spin off here about the social condemnation of boyhood that has issued too many men in their 20s and 30s who are so angry, narrow and confused that they can't possibly become adept at anything beyond bigotry, sexism, market fundamentalism or quasi-criminal behavior, and the women who love them is an even more dolorous topic. But this girl's parents keep coming to mind.

Where were they? Without knowing specifically, and assuming they're not degenerates who lost track of their daughter in fogs of drug addiction, one can fully understand how their 14-year-old daughter wandered off into the night to meet a 19-year-old guy without their knowledge. Many households need two incomes now, so both parents often work. Employers increasingly place demands and surveillance on their workers, who labor for longer hours under panopticon conditions of constant observation. As it turns out, adults who don't need to be monitored are monitored so heavily that they can't sufficiently monitor their children, who need to be constantly monitored.

Some of us are old enough to remember when 14-year-old girls didn't date and, once they were old enough, no one took them out without first meeting their parents. Now, parents often aren't around, and they're just as often fatigued by professional responsibilities when they are around. So, their hyper-sexualized kids, barely supervised, are off to Sodom and Gomorrah, availed of sophisticated communications technology and the means of instantly hooking up. When a kid comes out of it hurt, the parents want to take a piece of someone's backside in court. The entire scene is utterly perverse.

Sparks is right to note that the duty of protection for Julie Doe lies with her parents. It should be added, though, that parenting is more difficult and complicated than ever, and it's always been much easier said than done. When one observes parenting done well, it's a beauty to behold. Otherwise, too often, it's news.

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