We Need to

Talk About
Max
My journey into the world’s
most hated community

Andrew Gold, 2019 ©

 1

The Muse
There are many reasons to study German. Perhaps you want to enjoy Goethe or Kafka in
their original language. Or you’re a glutton for punishment and feel like sitting through –
and understanding the melodramatic subtext – of a German opera. Or maybe you’re that
weird history teacher we all seem to have had; you know, the one who was a little too
interested in the Third Reich.
But you do need a good reason to tackle what Mark Twain called ‘the awful German
language’. Oscar Wilde apparently quipped, ‘life is too short to learn German,’ and, as I
write this from the terrace of a hipster Berlin café, mired in relative clauses, 40-letter words
and three different genders, I can’t help but agree.
Around this time last year, I was locked in a room in an impoverished Buenos Aires suburb
by an obnoxious exorcist, who was screaming at me for abusing his trust (by hinting at his
own abuse of trust of young women he’d plucked from a nearby psychiatric ward).
I should clarify that this was for a documentary I was making for BBC 3. I don’t typically
wander around evangelical churches confronting priests as a vacation pastime (much as I’d
like to, it wouldn’t be much fun for my girlfriend).
A few months later, I was still in Argentina, following the so-called Crazy Baby Lady – an
eccentric and conservative ‘pro-lifer’ – for another documentary, in the lead-up to the
country’s vote on legal abortion. The law didn’t pass, but I was water-cannoned and tear-
gassed at the rallies, before, once again, being confronted angrily by the antagonist of my
film. This time, I’d simply pointed out that it was hypocritical of her to oppose legal abortion
and be the face of the ‘saving life’ campaign, given that her family had allegedly been
involved in the stealing and selling of babies during Argentina’s dictatorship in the 1980s.
She told me, ‘When I told my father you were British, he warned me not to trust you. He
was right.’ Funnily enough, the exorcist said a similar thing when his guard was down:
‘They’re British, they took the Falklands. You can never trust the British.’
 What I learned from these escapades was twofold. One, I had myself become a glutton
for punishment. Don’t get me wrong; in real life – when there’s no camera to hide behind –
I’m neurotic, anxious and desperate to be liked. My therapist even told me as much on our
very first session. The idea of somebody thinking I’ve been in any way impolite is enough to
keep me up at night. But while working on documentaries, I’m somehow drawn to
controversial characters, desperate to understand them, to call out their hypocrisies and,
apparently, to be scolded by them.
Secondly, it made me wonder whether there was anything quintessentially British about
this kind of journalism. If I were feeling particularly patriotic, I’d say this meant we’re known
for seeking the truth and exposing wrong-doings around the world. But you could also say
there’s something meddlesome and maybe even sneaky about us; and, if feeling particularly
un-patriotic, one might surmise the colonial spirit never died. Who am I to mosey into these
far-flung corners of the world, telling priests and anti-abortionists what’s what?
Not that I felt I was telling them what’s what. Rather, I preferred to believe I was
documenting them and trying to empathise with their points of view. With the Crazy Baby
Lady, I couldn’t find myself agreeing with her anti-abortion stance. To me, a foetus – up to a
point – is a collection of cells, rather than a child…and it feels only right to let the pregnant
woman decide. But I did try to empathise with her and understand that, to her mind, the
foetus is a fully-formed being from the day of conception. I mean, if you genuinely believe
that (no matter how deluded it may be), it must really feel like abortion is the murder of a
baby. And that’s pretty horrifying.
I was torn about the Crazy Baby Lady because, on the one hand, I think it’s important we
allow for all kinds of different views; that’s what makes us tick as humans. But ultimately,
her views and, in particular, her campaigning cause a great deal of pain to the women of
Argentina and the rest of the world.
That said, I did end up really liking her; at least, outside of the abortion issue. During the
weeks we filmed with her, she invited our crew into her home and treated us like family (up
to the point where we fell out). To me, she could have been that crazy aunt with whom you
debate politics at the dinner table…but love all the same.
A third theme from both documentaries emerged inadvertently, leaving a lasting
impression on me.
When I went out to Argentina to film the abortion documentary, I hadn’t realised how
closely the film would be tied to paedophilia. But we uncovered countless cases of underage
girls trying to terminate their pregnancies in a country where the practice was illegal.
In one case, when a 12-year-old girl with an intellectual disability was finally allowed to
terminate her pregnancy, a Catholic group flocked to the hospital in which she was having
the abortion to hold a candlelit vigil-cum-protest. They were protesting the decision to
abort rather than the actions of her uncle, who had molested and impregnated her.
As for the exorcism film, we had initially planned for it to be a sideways glance at the
practice of exorcism and its effect on people struggling with mental health issues. It also
explored the theme of cults and the followers’ undivided belief and worship of their
exorcist. But a brief look at the YouTube comments made me realise what had made the
biggest impression: the priest’s relationship with young women.
Rather than praising or disputing his paranormal claims or commenting on the intense
exorcism scenes, many of the comments focussed on his alleged bizarre relationship with a
woman with schizophrenia.
 The most popular comment at the time of writing comes from Eliza, ‘I don’t like how the
Padre acted towards the end at all, super creepy.’

Asians hustler helpfully replied, ‘Most priest are pedos child molester and gay’.

BaBaBee said, ‘I had a gut feeling from the start that he would be bedding at least one of
those girls and sadly I was right.’

Marc Kunisch wrote, ‘Yeah ‘t was quiet obvious that that Padre is shagging her!’

And VENATOR SIX added, ‘Why is it that they are always Fat, wear glasses and look like
Peterfiles.’

But things got heated, as Jaime n. hit back with a zinger, ‘Marc Kunisch, Maybe your unclean
thought is coming from someone in your family or friends or even yourself doing the same.’
And yes, I am sad enough to have looked through nearly all of the thousands of
comments. As you know, the YouTube comments section makes for a wild ride and there
were, of course, also many, many comments attacking me for making a mockery of the
church.
One person wrote, “THAT WAS THE BEST ENDING TO A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT
EXORCISMS I HAVE EVER SEEN.’ That would have been better if he hadn’t qualified it,
because I’m not sure how many films about exorcisms there are. But it sounds like that
person’s been through a lot of them.
I think my favourite was MrsVenus27, ‘30 seconds in & I can already tell this is going to
be a load of shite. Nothing else on to watch though so…’ She did sit through it and later
came back with, ‘It filled a gap so to speak. I have no urge for a sequel on this though. I
don’t like seeing people being taken advantage of.’
I have a feeling MrsVenus27 won’t be buying this book.
I also received threatening emails that looked like the kind of thing someone writes in
faeces on a public toilet wall before topping themselves. Emails filled with random
capitalised sections about Leviticus, the antichrist and the end time…one came just the
other day came from a guy who signs off his emails as, ‘The Shadow of Light’.
You’d be amazed how many people like that seem to be out there; it’s not just a movie
trope. It’s scary. Next time someone acts weirdly on the tube or is rude to you in a shop,
think about how they probably go home and start composing huge essays about pseudo-
religious hokum.

Some emails informed me about similar abuse scandals happening closer to home, in the
UK. And one person pointed me towards a controversial therapy program in Berlin called
Don’t Offend. Run from Berlin’s Charité Hospital, it invited paedophiles to come in and talk
about their feelings and any crimes committed without judgement or punishment.
This was extremely controversial, because it meant letting known sex offenders roam the
streets after therapy, with no repercussions. I was instantly curious, because it seemed
crazy to me that a doctor could just leave criminal paedophiles free to walk out of their
practice and back onto the street to offend again. I fired off an email to the hospital’s media
team to see if it was real.
 Meanwhile, it seemed like a new story about paedophilia was making front page
headlines on a daily basis. Still recovering from the shock of the Jimmy Savile revelations, we
were now reading about Jeffrey Epstein, who had been recently imprisoned for his sex
parties with minors (and would later commit suicide before being able to inform on a sex
ring allegedly involving celebrities and royals).
It felt to me like we as a society needed to talk about paedophilia. I’m not talking about
doctors and scientists, but people like you and me. And the more I investigated it for this
book, the more I realised how little we generally understood. I wanted this to be a more
accessible look at what paedophilia actually is and what we should be worried about. And
the difference between paedophilia and sex offenders.
We are already a little better informed, having gone through a period when the likes of
Michael Jackson and Jimmy Savile moved with impunity and the word paedophilia hadn’t
yet entered the lexicon. Arguably celebrated in the books and films of Nabokov and Woody
Allen and flaunted by the likes of Jeffrey Epstein in previous times, allegations of
paedophilia are today taken far more seriously.
When someone is found guilty of child molestation, they are cast out from our society.
But what happens next? What do we do with them? And how do we ensure they stay away
from further potential victims?
I wondered if I could delve into the world of the child molester without passing pre-
judgement. I began research into sordid and heart-breaking tales of horrific crimes and
state-involved paedophilia that wouldn’t look out of place in Chris Morris’ satirical
Paedogeddon special. This all led me down a rabbit hole to a man who goes by Max, who I
still can’t get out of my head. We need to talk about him and you’ll meet him in the
following chapter.

During the writing of this book, I also met many of the downtrodden ‘virtuous
paedophiles’, who claimed to resist their urges – it is estimated that there are far more
virtuous paedophiles than acting ones. I wondered if they could really suppress their sexual
urges toward children. Equally intriguing is the fact that most child molesters are not in fact
paedophiles. But more on that later.
I did worry that paedophilia might be a bridge too far; simply too taboo, too divisive and
tough to get on board with. But what convinced me to push ahead was the simple statistic
that around 5% of adult men are thought to be paedophiles or have some attraction to
children. This means that not only do we all know a paedophile; we actually know many.
They make up 1 in 20 of every faction of society. They’re our relatives, our teachers, our
doctors and politicians. They’re us.
Of course, the last paragraph may seem sensationalist. I don’t really mean to accuse a
huge portion of the world – and my readers – of harbouring desires for our children. But
with such a high rate of them among us, I feel it’d be irresponsible to continue to ignore this
matter, particularly for the sake of the victims.
Changed format here, as easier to write and edit with gaps between paragraphs.
And it’s important as well to clarify that I don’t intend for this book to serve as apologist
literature for paedophilia and some of the worst crimes imaginable that stem from it. As
someone in TV said to me recently, ‘If the virtuous paedophiles are so damn virtuous, why
do their message boards keep getting closed down?’ And for the victims, this is a crime that
never leaves them. I hope this book can offer some further understanding into the
formation of the paedophilic mind.

As I got started on a journey I wasn’t sure I wanted to go on, I knew that this was going to be
a far darker set of encounters than my previous documentaries. Those focussed on polemic
topics that had some eccentricity at heart, from porn stars and UFO-believers to the exorcist
and the ‘pro-lifers’.

But as I burrowed deeper into the paedophilic abyss, I realised that what lay ahead was so
dark and twisted – and also so nuanced – that it just wouldn’t work as a film. I knew this had
to be a book, where I could explore my personal journey into the most hated group of
people in the world. A book that would reveal all sorts of crazy-but-true stories, such as a
controversial hospital program that lets offenders off, a state-led project that sent homeless
children to live with known paedophiles and the truth behind the child porn available on the
dark web and what is being done about it.

After a few weeks, Berlin’s Don’t Offend program replied to me. Their program had played
on my mind, because here was a state-sponsored project that couldn’t be more
controversial if it tried. And a brief chat with their media team confirmed to me that the
program did indeed allow paedophiles – who had committed crimes – a free pass.

Criminal child molesters were being encouraged to drop in for therapy sessions, in which
they are free from punishment. Unlike Britain, Germany had no mandatory reporting laws,
meaning therapists could promise their patients that, no matter what they divulged, they
would not be reported.

On the one hand, this may be the only way to get paedophiles in for the help they badly
need and to potentially prevent them attacking more victims. I mean, they’d never show up
for therapy if they thought that what they admitted would get them locked up for life.
However, many believe therapy can’t help paedophiles; that they’re a lost cause and the
idea of doctors letting known criminal paedophiles roam the streets to potentially attack
more children doesn’t sit well.

Before going further into the Don’t Offend project and Charité Hospital, you’re probably
dying to know why I decided to learn German. I was still in Argentina and communicating
with a Don’t Offend doctor via Skype, when I asked who the biggest opposers to their
project were. I was expecting him to tell me about families of molested children and others
who were disgusted by the idea of paedophiles not being reported for their crimes.

But the opposite was true; as it happened, much of the public is actually on side with the
treatment. Its most vocal detractors are actually some of the most detested people on earth
- hardcore paedophiles who believe that adult-child relationships are appropriate and
should be legal. One man in particular, Dieter Gieseking, a former policeman from the
western reaches of Germany, even runs a publication promoting that very aim.

When I reached out to Dieter by email, I found that he was surprisingly arrogant, suspicious
and childish, speaking almost exclusively in pseudo-intellectual terms. He was proud of his
beliefs and more than happy – excited even – to discuss them with me. Just one thing, he
said: he spoke no English and would only cooperate with me in German.

At that, I composed an email in German, using Google Translate: ‘OK, I can try to learn
German.’

With an arrogance that I found typical of his behaviour, he replied, ‘That is clearly just a
German translation from Google. You can’t learn German so fast.’ As if I were trying suggest
that I’d learned a language in the 20 minutes that passed between our emails!

I set about learning the language – through German versions of Harry Potter and The
Simpsons – and told Dieter I’d meet him within a year. His email response was pretty
derisory, snorting that German is too complex to learn in such little time.

Having never studied a word of the language, I had no idea if this would be possible, but a
brief online search informed me it should take an English speaker 30 weeks or 750 hours.

Perhaps it says a lot about the fragile state of my own ego that my reason for learning
German wasn’t about opera, Goethe or history; but to prove something to the person with
the most abominable views I’d ever heard.
 2

The Swimming Pool

Of course, if you want to up roots and move to another country with a different culture and
language for the sake of one of the world’s most hated paedophiles, you need to have a
very understanding girlfriend. Fortunately, my partner of 5 years, Juli, was (and still is) just
such a woman and was finishing her 7-year law degree in Buenos Aires at the time. She was
ready for a move.

She was admittedly a little freaked out and put off by my reasons. My earlier documentaries
had focussed on themes like infidelity, porn and sex taboos, and she had been hoping for
me to move away from those kinds of sexual subjects and towards more mainstream
endeavours.

The last thing she wanted was for me to be discussing my new paedophilia project with her
grandparents over apple crumble at the dinner table. I mean, it’s hardly the kind of Pulitzer-
winning human rights topics they expected to hear about, when she first introduced me to
them as a journalist.

But for better or for worse, right? Plus, she actually quite fancied the prospect of moving to
Europe. And she managed to get a visa to live and work in Germany for 1 year.

This was a double-edged sword. The 1-year period didn’t give me much time to learn
German to a level where I’d be confident interviewing, getting to know and taking on proud
paedophile Dieter Gieseking. I’d have to do that at the end. But it also concentrated my
mind, allowing me to obsess over the language of Goethe, Bach and Hermann Hesse – and
use it to confront a sordid child molester.

You could say it’s ironic that I used children’s material to learn the language of a known
paedophile. But it was simply far easier to learn a language using material I’d known since
my own childhood. The dialogue of The Simpsons and Harry Potter had long been engrained
in my brain, so it was far easier for me to fill in the blanks and work out what each word
meant. It also meant that I learned words like invisibility cloak (unsichtbarkeitsumhang) and
magic wand (zauberstab) before I knew how to introduce myself.

Nothing could have prepared me, though, for the insanity of the German grammar. I could
handle the long words, because they weren’t so tough once you broke them down into
smaller parts. And I didn’t mind the pronunciation or guttural sound of the language. But
the grammar seemed as though the Germans invented it purely to make their language
impenetrable to foreigners. They didn’t really need an Enigma Code.

The language is ranked 10th out of hundreds in a list of the world’s weirdest languages,
which I think puts it right up there with the alien language from the film Arrival. That list
sounds like a subjective ranking, but is actually compiled scientifically, based on how ‘unlike
any other language’ each language is.

Much like that alien language, you basically have to re-train your mind to think backwards.
Just one of the many quirks of this ridiculous language is that you have to stick the verbs at
the end of the sentence in certain clauses.

To give you an example, that earlier clause could read in German as, ‘You the verbs at the
end of the sentence stick have to.’ So, getting used to speaking, listening and understanding
in reverse – particularly at the high speeds of native conversation – requires crazy mental
gymnastics. Similar patterns emerge in Latin and we all know what happened to that. I knew
I’d have my work cut out to be able to communicate with Dieter.

Fortunately, the German doctors at the Don’t Offend program spoke fluent English. I began
exchanging emails with its media head, Maximilian von Heyden, whose name, I thought,
would have been perfect for a German James Bond villain…not to mention Dracula.

Whenever I asked to meet, he seemed to be away on business, helping to set up similar

programs to Don’t Offend around the world. One such endeavour has been set up in Pune,
just outside Mumbai in Western India. This also sounded like Bond villain territory for some
reason. In our communications, I fought the urge to tell him that.

I wanted to get a meeting with the illustrious Professor Beier, who heads the Don’t Offend
program and is pretty much worshipped in this line of work. He proved to be elusive for the
time being, but Maximillian promised to find me a paedophile to interview from the
program.

While waiting for a meeting to be arranged with my first paedophile, I wanted to get to grips
with the Berlin culture. We’d arrived in early March, in a frigid and snowy landscape
reminiscent of the Cold War films I’d been watching in anticipation of our arrival. Whenever
I crossed a bridge, I half-expected to see Tom Hanks shifting nervously on the other side.

And there was the so-called Berlin Schnauzer (Snout) – the biting, acerbic attitude of the
non-smiling locals. We encountered the Schnauzer right away. Juli and I had first arrived in
Berlin frozen, tired and starving in the middle of a snowy winter night. We’d popped into a
restaurant near our flat and hadn’t been greeted for a good 10 minutes. Finally, a middle-
aged lady with a stone-cold expression shuffled over and raised an eyebrow at us.

‘Can we sit here?’ I asked.

‘Né.’

‘No space?’

‘Né.’

‘It’s really cold and snowy out and we’re hungry. Could you recommend us anything
please?’

‘Yes. Book next time.’

And that has been my experience of the people in Berlin ever since. To be fair, they would
argue that the way that we smile and greet one another is fake. It’s all subjective. But this
was where I’d chosen to live, a cold, dark place, as I looked into the coldest and darkest of
themes.

I spent the next weeks settling in and attending daily German classes to complement my
Harry Potter and Simpsons work. As the months rolled by, the snow dissipated and the
seasons switched. In no time, the city was heaving. It was hitting 38 and higher regularly
(while London stayed around the 20 mark), and, unlike my former home of Buenos Aires,
Berlin is embarrassingly underprepared; air conditioning and elevators are yet to make an
appearance in this hipster hub.

On a particularly hot morning, Juli and I were just getting ready to head to a nearby lake,
when my phone vibrated. An email had arrived from a strange-looking address that looked
something like mailbox@bej-dn.de. In it, a man known only as Max, said that Maximilian (a
confusing pair of names) from the Don’t Offend program had asked him to get in touch. He
wrote a lengthy email about how he was wary because the BBC (with whom he knew I’d
worked) had previously risked paedophiles’ anonymity ‘in a shocking way’.

I promise d I had no intention of exposing him and explained that I was here as a journalist
to shed light on an under-reported topic and cross-section of society: the 5%. I assured him
my task was not to make life difficult for people, providing they were committing no crimes
or abuses. Then, just as Juli and I were heading out the door with lake on the brain, he
replied again.

‘I am in Neukölln today. If it’s quite a short meeting, I could meet you today. The rest of the
week I am unavailable.

For more immediate communication, contact me via Threema.

Greetings,
Max.’

At this, it goes without saying that I cancelled the lake date. I thought about Max’s message.
‘Threema, you say?’ I thought out loud, like a detective in a movie.

I didn’t know what it was, but assumed it was some kind of app. I went on the app store and
found, to my dismay, that it cost £3. I bit the bullet and downloaded it.

I later found out that, while not all Threema users are paedophiles, nearly all paedophiles
are Threema users. It’s a messaging service that markets itself as ‘Seriously Secure
Messaging’. It’s not something your average punter would ever need, but it asks for all sorts
of verification steps, scrambled names and strange passwords. I felt somehow guilty just
looking at the thing, let alone downloading it.

I logged into the app and added Max’s handle, which comprised an jumbled-up string of
letters and digits.

And here’s where things started to get a little weird.

When I asked where he wanted to meet, I was taken aback to read that the place he had in
mind – that is, the site he had chosen to discuss his progression from the Don’t Offend
course and the restrictions he’d learned to place on his sexual urges – was an outdoor public
swimming pool.

At this point, I felt I had been falling so far down the rabbit hole, I might as well keep on
tumbling. I should add that I hadn’t yet been given the green light from a publisher to make
this book. My publishing agent had shown interest and wanted to read more, but nothing
was concrete.

This meant that I would be acting alone: I would essentially be going to meet and hang out
with a paedophile and potentially go swimming with him in a public pool. Of course, I said
yes. But I was curious as to why he’d considered that location appropriate to meet a
journalist. It was like an alcoholic working behind a bar.

I had a few theories:

1. He was hiding in plain sight and wanted to prove to me how normal he could be. He
was over-doing it, just like how Jimmy Savile spent so much time in children’s
hospitals.

2. He happened to be at the pool for innocent reasons anyway and didn’t have time to
make other plans.

3. He enjoyed the fact that I was writing this book and was being controversial to jazz it
up a bit…for entertainment’s sake.

But the truth was stranger.

I agreed to meet Max and we arranged a time and place. To be honest, I didn’t know how to
talk to a paedophile. As far as I knew, he’d never done anything wrong, but merely
harboured a deep-rooted attraction he was fighting against. I thought I should feel sorry for
him and wanted to be friendly and jovial in our communications.

At the same time, I’m ashamed to say that the prejudicial part of my mind was scared of and
put off by him, as though he were a leper. I felt that, if he had committed crimes, then being
too friendly and light-hearted with him could somehow implicate me; perhaps as an
accessory in normalising or enabling his disorder. I was going to have to tread the line
carefully.

‘Should I bring my swimming trunks and towel?’ I asked, feeling a little ridiculous. It was
really hot and if I was going to be talking to him for hours while he was in the water, I’d be
annoyed if I couldn’t get in the pool.

‘That would be cool,’ he replied.

‘How will I recognise you?’ I asked.

‘Cyan t-shirt and blue baseball hat.’

For some reason, the strangest part of my preparation was applying sun cream. Something
about the action of spreading it on my shoulders and the nostalgia-inducing scent of the
cream was blending my childhood holiday memories with the cynical meeting I was about to
have. It also brought home the absurdity of the situation. Here I was in my trunks, applying
sun cream to go swimming with a paedophile at a public pool.

I put my other swimming gear in my rucksack and hopped on my bike for the 10-minute
journey to the complex. I arrived sweating profusely – it was 35 degrees – and bought a
bottle of water from a kiosk. Another euro Max had cost me. Then, I waited in a long queue
to get into the swimming pool centre.

I tried to keep an open mind, but was admittedly cynical about Max’s reasons for being
here. In my opinion, most adults would rather head to the many picturesque lakes in and
around Berlin on a hot day. I mean, I would never go to a public swimming pool here with
my friends, for example, as I’d prefer not to take a dip amid hundreds of screaming, pissing
children.

While slowly approaching the ticket booth, I considered how the adults accompanying their
kids would feel, knowing a paedophile was in their midst. I also thought about just how
many kids were here and wondered if Max was the only one at the pool that day with this
condition; after all, it’s supposed to be 1 in 20, right? There were hundreds here.

I paid 5.50 euros for a ticket, which I was livid about. But once I pushed through the
turnstiles, I was surprised to feel my emotions getting the better of me. The shakes took
hold and my heart kept skipping beats, which had me pretty worried. I’d handled an abusive
exorcist and been recently tear-gassed at an abortion rally. Surely, I could manage a chat
with Max?

I messaged on Threema to tell him I was at the entrance and waited a few minutes for him
to appear. While waiting, I scanned the vast swimming complex for a man in a cyan shirt and
baseball cap. Every person who entered my field of vision became a suspect, all hiding their
own complicated private thoughts and actions.

I was becoming increasingly nervous, to the point that I no longer trusted my idea of what
cyan was. I was pretty sure it was light blue, but why not just say that then? What sort of
person says cyan, when they could say light blue or at least turquoise. Could cyan be a kind
of red or purple?

At one point, I saw a father matching my light-blue idea of the cyan description, walking
hand in hand with his little girl towards me. A devilish thought struck me: ‘Imagine if that
were Max!’

To my horror, it was.

The man recognised I was looking for him and smiled at me to announce himself as Max.
Those who know me well will attest to the fact that I’m not easily lost for words. But I
struggled to compose myself and fully grasp the scenario for a good few seconds. Perhaps
I’d gotten the wrong end of the stick and Max was not a paedophile, but rather another
doctor from the Don’t Offend program?

He quietly introduced the girl to me as Mary (not her real name). She looked about 9, but
I’m terrible at knowing children’s ages. Somewhere between 7 and 10. And she was a
sweet-looking kid in a swimming costume; a little like an Olsen Twin at that age, with
strawberry blonde hair.

For lack of a better description, Max looked to me like a 35-year-old computer programmer.
Slightly podgy, with a round face and shabby beard. To the bystanders around us, he and
Mary looked like a typical father and daughter. I was the only one who knew the truth about
Max, although I didn’t know what his relationship was to the girl.

To me, the pair now looked like a warning from the Don’t Offend program. Did he look like a
paedophile? Well, now that I knew he was, perhaps yes. The most telling feature was how
his long cyan t-shirt concealed his tiny speedos, making him appear naked below the waist,
his podgy white thighs sticking out below, as he strolled with Mary.

Still lost for words, I tried to speak to Mary in German.

‘Hi, umm…do you like swimming?’

‘Yes, of course!’

Silence.
 ‘Is Max your dad, then?’ I said.

‘What?’ she asked. I’d forgotten Max was unlikely to be his real name. I could never be a
spy. Once, when filming the Crazy Baby Lady documentary, director Lucy D’Cruz and I went
undercover to bust a fake abortion clinic secretly run by religious pro-lifers looking to stop
people having abortions.

We spent days dreaming up and developing our back stories. We were pretending to be a
couple trying to terminate her pregnancy, while secretly filming their attempts to block us.
We had everything planned, down to the smallest details, even strapping a tube of urine
from a pregnant friend to her leg to keep it at room temperature, in case she was asked to
provide a sample.

When we got to the reception, a little kid was playing with toys. We believe they placed him
there to show us what we would be missing out on by aborting. Immediately, I said to him,
‘Hi, what’s your name? I’m Andrew.’ I’ll never forget the angry look on Lucy’s face. I’d blown
our cover in about 3 seconds. Luckily, my first name meant very little to the abortion clinic
anyway, so it was fine.

By the pool, I said to little Mary, ‘Um…sorry, I mean is this your dad?’

‘No.’

Silence. Max smiled, silently holding her hand.

‘How is your English,’ I asked, having run out of things to say.

‘Um, not so good,’ she said in German, smiling. There was another pause, while Max and I
looked at each other, nervously. At that, Mary ran off to one of the pools, leaving the two of
us to endure a ground-shattering silence. He wasn’t very forthcoming.

‘Perhaps we can sit?’ I said eventually, realising I was going to have to take the reins and
finding a seat in the shade. He joined me, as I tried to think at the speed of light about how I
could broach the subject of the child holding his hand, without losing his trust. Still, part of
me tried to believe he was, in fact, a therapist and that this was all a big misunderstanding.
‘Tell me about yourself.’

‘You mean, the therapy?’ he asked.

‘Yes, that’d be a good start.’

He proceeded to tell me about how he’d attended the course for a year in 2006. He was a
paedophile. The therapy had taught him to re-wire his brain to an extent. He couldn’t
change who he was attracted to, but he could learn how to understand his feelings and act
appropriately, not putting himself in difficult situations. (To my mind, hanging out in public
pools and holding the hands of little children did little to further this aim.)
‘Can you tell me about who you are attracted to? Boys or girls…both?’

‘It’s always been girls aged 5-12. I realised when I was a teenager that this wasn’t normal. It
was a very depressing time.’

I continued trying to work out if Max seemed like a paedophile. He wasn’t crawling in the
bushes and snarling at little girls, the way I’d conceived the typical child molester since my
own childhood. But his cyan cap and the long t-shirt hanging over his belly did fit the
stereotype.

He also had an intense, high-pitched laugh that perhaps revealed something about his inner
turmoil or angst. As we talked, it was noticeable how Max wasn’t straining to keep his voice
down, despite our proximity to many other adults. His brazenness surprised me. We were
speaking in English, but many Germans can understand.

As I was trying to figure him out, another two Olsen-Twin-like girls of about 11 years of age
came over and stood in front of us, expectantly, having just come from the pool. They were
asking Max for more ice cream. They left and silence fell once more.

‘Umm…who are the girls?’

Max finally explained, ‘Those two and Mary are my friends’ daughters. I babysit them
sometimes.’

‘Right.’ I murmured, alarmed. I paused for thought. ‘And do the parents know about
your…condition?’

‘Yes. Actually we met on the GSA website.’

The GSA website is Germany’s main online forum for all things paedophilia. Max told what
seemed like a wild story about how the children’s mother had been asking advice on the
forum because a friend of hers had abused children and she didn’t know how to handle the
situation. Being one of the administrators of the website, Max apparently stepped in to
offer guidance and they became close friends.

The way Max tells it, the mother then asked him to babysit. He apparently said no the first
time, believing it to be inappropriate, but eventually gave in to her incessant demands and
started taking the girls out. I didn’t know how much of this story to believe. The whole thing
left me flabbergasted.

I didn’t want to press on about the kids, for fear of losing his trust so early on. So, I went
back into less-controversial ground and asked more about his condition. He explained how
he was what they call a ‘non-exclusive’. That means that he is able to form attractions to
adults as well as children. I also found this dubious, but maybe the whole ‘three little girls at
the pool’ thing had made me distrustful.
‘Actually, I’m excited to tell you,’ he said, smiling open-mouthed and slowly letting his guard
down, ‘that I’m in love.’

‘Oh that’s great. Is this the first time you’ve been able to feel this way about someone?’

‘Um…maybe. You could say that.’

‘That’s great news, Max. When did you meet?’ I asked.

‘We haven’t met yet,’ said Max, before a short pause. ‘She is also from the GSA forum.’

The GSA forum had apparently been a lifesaver for Max. First, it provided him with a string
of angelic young girls to babysit. And then, he met the love of his life – and only adult
partner – on it. She had apparently also used the website to ask advice, after a friend of hers
had been abusing children. Once again, Max was on hand to help. And this time, he fell in
love.

I also wasn’t sure that falling in love online was sufficient proof that Max was a non-
exclusive paedophile; online love has little to do with physical attraction. And it didn’t seem
likely a person would respond to finding out they had an abusive friend by signing up to a
paedophile network and either entrusting their kids to – or falling in love with – its
administrator, Max. I made a mental note to look into the GSA forum and find out what was
really going on.

I found it hard to hide my cynicism and this made Max nervous, his laugh becoming ever
more high pitched. I worried he might suddenly leave, so whipped out a couple of big
questions to end on. ‘Max, can I ask you something? Would you let your kids go out alone
with someone you met on the GSA message board?’

He hesitated and thought the question through. I thought I detected hurt – or anger – in his
eyes, as he responded. ‘Yes. I mean, I would want to be sure about anyone who looked after
my kids, whether they were from the message board or not. But yes, why not?’

‘Well,’ I explained, ‘because you’d know that anyone from the message board was likely
attracted to your children. Regardless of intent, they’d have a motive to harm your kids in a
way that someone not from the message board is far less likely to have.’

‘Of course, but just because you are attracted, it doesn’t mean you act on those desires.’

‘Max…I’m wondering…why did you decide to meet me?’ I asked. ‘I mean, what do you want
this book to do for you?’

‘I want to help others with attraction to minors. It’s important they know they’re not alone
like I was. And for the world to know we’re not like the child molesters in films.’

But if he was serious about presenting a wholesome image of paedophiles, he couldn’t have
picked a more inappropriate location for our meeting. What I couldn’t work out was: why
did he put himself in such a tempting position and surround himself with young kids that fit
his attraction brief? Surely, this was torture for him? Unless he was indeed molesting and
getting a thrill out of it. I wanted to get to the bottom of that, but instead, I somewhat
clumsily – and regrettably – went in with, ‘Max, have you ever molested anyone?’

After a short while, he answered, ‘Yes. Something happened when I was 16. But I was so
nervous that I wasn’t able to…you know.’ He gestured at his crotch, suggesting he hadn’t
been able to get an erection. ‘I just couldn’t go through with it.’

I wondered if Max was giving me just enough information for me to think he’d answered
honestly. As I opened my mouth to ask more, he rose suddenly, saying, ‘Now, I have to go.’
We walked together in silence around the edge of the swimming pool, as he collected Mary
by one of the pools. I said goodbye to them both and watched them walk off hand-in-hand
to another part of the pool complex.

I promptly left the pool and walked across the street to a vast and wild park. On the way, I
bought an ice cream from the same vendor who’d sold me water earlier. He’d done well out
of this. Once in the park, I sat down on a stump with my ice cream.

I hadn’t had the time to process what had just happened at the pool with Max or my
feelings about it. But seemingly out of nowhere, an intense emotion I couldn’t understand
hit me like a bus. My forehead pulsed and my eyes watered up (which hadn’t happened
since childhood), with my mind replaying the images of Max and Mary, hand in hand.

The weight of emotion took a little moment to pass and I tried to console myself with the
ice cream that had taken my day’s financial tally even higher. I began to think about what I’d
witnessed.

I felt powerless; I couldn’t just ring up the police. For what? As far as I knew, Mary’s parents
knew about Max’s condition and trusted him. And potentially with good reason. The girls
didn’t look visibly traumatised…and by getting involved, I could be unwittingly complicating
their lives further.

I sat for a while in the park, turning this over. Later, as I cycled home, a darker theory about
Max and his hidden-in-plain-sight behaviour came to me.

I wondered if the mild-mannered man I’d sat with had actually been concealing a
sociopathic mindset. If so, perhaps he got a kick out of inviting me to take part in some sort
of paedophilic date and pulling the wool over my eyes. Had I been an unwitting patsy,
complicit in his abuse?

That question would haunt me in the days that followed. I couldn’t be sure. Was Max an
innocent and naïve dope who hadn’t even realised how it might look for a journalist to meet
a paedophile surrounded by young children at a swimming pool? Or was he a psychopathic
abuser getting off on my gullibility? Either way, one of us was being fucking naïve.
I hoped it wasn’t me, for the sake of the girls. I now felt a responsibility to look further into
his circumstances and somehow meet the children’s parents. Since I didn’t know Max’s real
name, it would be tough to find out more about his situation with the girls and what really
happened when he was 16.

But there was one person I could turn to.

 3
The Scientist
Maximilian von Heyden is a handsome young man whose personal website describes him as
‘Scientist. Educator. Social Entrepreneur.’ He has for some time headed up the research in
the Don’t Offend program and dealt with the media.

I met him in his office at the back of a traditional Berliner courtyard. As he got up to greet
me, I was shocked by how tall he was. I’m pretty tall, at just over 6 foot 3, and found myself
gawping way, way up at him. He beckoned me to sit and I was already wondering how to
bring up my bizarre meeting with Max, who he’d introduced me to by email a few months
earlier.

On an objective level – and with this book in mind – I was excited to meet the doctor to
discuss the science behind the Don’t Offend project. Could it really be true that 1 in 20
people harboured attraction towards minors? Was there a cure? And how did he expect his
program to help change the world?

On a personal and emotional level, I needed to know more about Max. I felt responsible for
what may or may not have been happening with the girls and wanted Maximilian to hold
some of his former patient’s stories up to scrutiny. In a sense, this was a cop out on my part,
as I was in too deep and wanted to pass this burden onto someone else: a professional.

We sat and, as if he were reading my mind, he asked with a smile, ‘So, how was it with
Max?’

I recounted the story, slowing down at the weirdest parts to inspect his facial expressions
for any sense of surprise. But if he was shocked by the fact Max had invited me to a public
swimming pool, it didn’t show. I went through each step – his arrival with little girls, his
claims about their family being aware of his paedophilia and the fact he’d met them via a
website for paedophiles. But nothing…from his reaction alone, he might have been listening
to a weather report.
Reaching, I added, “I thought that was really strange.” Nothing. I half asked, “It seemed like
a strange choice for him to meet me at a public swimming pool?’

“Well maybe he was showing you that he doesn’t have anything to hide. I mean, one good
comparison to that is obviously that just because you’re heterosexual, you don’t rape
women you’re interested in. Just because you’re sexually attracted to children, you don’t
necessarily just rape them.”

“Yes, but I might think twice about asking that woman to the swimming pool and taking her
through the changing rooms. And that woman wouldn’t be in my care.”

He thought for a while and laughed a little. Still smiling, he said, “Obviously it’s a very
strange choice for an interview.”

I was relieved he admitted that, as it showed I wasn’t totally nuts. I continued about my
suspicions. This wasn’t a neutral journalistic conversation; my questions were loaded
because I was so anxious to get a real reaction from him. I’d been re-playing the scenes
from the pool in my mind for weeks and I suppose part of me wanted him to say, “Shit, he’s
a monster. I’m calling the police.”

Why was he so composed? Was he hardened by hearing so many of these kinds of stories?

I said, “Presumably, you never lose that longing for kids, even after going through the Don’t
Offend program?”

He replied, “No, but on the other side of the coin, you have to know and realise that, at
least the data we have indicate that more than half of the cases of child sexual abuse are
not committed by paedophiles. So just because someone is potentially attracted to children,
doesn’t mean he becomes an abuser…ever.

“Some of the patients we see have high ethical standards. They just come to the therapy to
improve their lives and try to cope with this better. To be better socially integrated…but
they would never abuse a child.

“And then the other way round, we have family fathers with no paedophilic inclination who
will abuse their sons or daughters just because of availability or as an act of replacement
because they’re not able to fulfil their sexual desires or other needs with equipotent
partners.”

I interrupted at this point to compliment Maximilian’s extraordinary mastery of English. He

ignored that. I think he is a bit too scientific for wishy-washy compliments. Fair enough; I put
on my game face.

He continued, “So the point is, you just never know. And if someone approaches you as a
father or mother and tells you, “Hey, I’m a paedophile and I want you to know. And if you
let me take care of your children, I’ll make everything transparent and I won’t do anything.”
If he did that, the parents will probably ask their children whether something strange
happened. So, transparency is good, and if the story you told me is true, then I wouldn’t find
it suspicious.’

I was starting to think about how Maximilian’s role as the mouthpiece of Don’t Offend
potentially put him in a compromising position, when discussing Max and the swimming
pool incident. Max had completed the Don’t Offend therapy several years earlier, so if he
were molesting children, it wouldn’t look good for them. And Maximilian was the head of
the public relations section. But I also felt that maybe he could show a little more concern
about this.

I asked, ‘Would you let your kids hang around with someone who’d been through this
therapy?’

For the first time in our conversation, he seemed a little lost for words. His long pause was
revealing. He hesitated, ‘That really…I mean…I wouldn’t leave my umm children with
someone I don’t know.

‘But in general, if I had a good relationship with someone and he’s opening up and telling
me about that…I would be more cautious probably but I wouldn’t suspect he intended to
abuse my children.’

Intent is one thing, but personally, I wouldn’t like the idea of a man who I knew to have
attraction to minors being left alone with my kids, regardless of intent. It’s obviously tough,
because I also wouldn’t want to stigmatise someone for their sexuality; if they are attracted
to children, they can’t help that. We need to reach out to these people and make them feel
part of society; but maybe it has to go both ways. Maybe paedophiles need to accept that it
will be difficult for people to entrust them with their children.

For example, some people in heterosexual relationships might be a little jealous of their
partner hanging out with a new friend of the opposite sex, even when they trust them
completely. But if that new friend has a different sexual orientation – and could not be
attracted to your partner – it probably makes things easier. Equally, if your kids are out with
an adult who you know does not harbours desires for them, it makes it much easier to relax
at home, while your little ones are in their care.

Maximilian added, ‘We have quite a good success rate when it comes to establishing
behavioural self-control, but we don’t succeed all the time, so there’s always a risk left.’

He went on to explain how it was important to show that it wasn’t just the stereotypical
image of old men who offend; many paedophiles first offend in their adolescence. ‘Sexual
preference first shows up in puberty and you realise, “I’m a heterosexual or I’m a
homosexual or I’m inclined towards people my age or younger people.” And this is stable
from that point of time and evidence says it can’t be changed. It’s a constant factor in your
life; that’s why we don’t offer a conversion therapy or anything like that.
‘If you can’t change homosexuals into heterosexuals…you can’t change paedophiles into
teleiophiles (attracted to adults). Of course you can help them to not act out on their
fantasies. That doesn’t mean that you can just wish it away.’

It was interesting to hear Maximilian discuss paedophilia as a sexual preference. I pushed

him on that and he told me how it is defined as a sexuality, until it becomes a problem that
tears your life apart. Once you are depressed or abusing others as a result of said sexual
preference, that is the point when its definition changes from a sexuality to a mental
disorder.

I was fascinated by what he was saying, but suddenly realised he’d subtly shifted the
conversation away from Max.

Max was potentially an undesirable hitch in the Don’t Offend fabric and not something on
which the PR machine of the program wanted to linger. I would have to investigate his story
another way and find out the truth via less traditional means.

For now, I wanted to find out more about the crux of my book; the fact I’d heard that 1 in 20
men are attracted to children in some way. Maximilian explained, ‘Up to around 4% of the
general population include an attraction towards minors. There’s a difference between
exclusivity and non-exclusivity. If you’re exclusively a paedophile, then you probably have a
hard time because you will never be able to act out on your sexual fantasies without
committing a crime or hurting someone.

‘But if you’re non-exclusive, then you will be satisfied having sex with a partner in the
normal age range. You might become aroused by a child that’s running around naked but
you’re not totally obsessed with it.’

Max had said he was non-exclusive, but I sensed that was an attempt to normalise himself
and allay my fears as well as his own. His online relationship with a woman he’d never met
in person was his first and only one with an adult; and did nothing to prove he had any
physical attraction towards adults, as he’d never met her in the flesh.

I mentioned this to Maximillian and he again swerved the topic of Max: ‘It’s very
complicated. Sexuality has three dimensions. Reproduction (not all the time, obviously),
relationships (cuddling, talking to each other and a fulfilled platonic level) and of course, lust
or desire. And these three dimensions can be fulfilled by themselves.

‘For example, an exclusive paedophile can have a platonic relationship with an adult, but of
course you might only be aroused by children.’ He was suggesting you can decide to forego
the lust/desire part of a relationship, if you have the other two parts. ‘There are exclusively
paedophilic men who have children and have relationships with women, but are not really
sexually interested in adults. So it’s all very tricky and complicated.’

I told him how I’d been speaking to several paedophiles during my research and how they
just couldn’t resist the children around them.
In my experience, non-paedophiles are rarely, if ever, attracted to our parents, our siblings
or our kids. So why didn’t that same ‘attraction block’ seem to apply to paedophiles? I
asked, ‘Is the paedophilic urge somehow stronger?’

He answered, ‘Not necessarily, because people really differ when it comes to the intensity
of their sexual arousal. For some people, it’s very easy to abstain, and for others, they just
can’t…behave. But some heterosexual teleiophilic (non-paedophilic) men abuse their
daughters, even though they’re not interested in children.

‘Most people have an inhibiting factor towards their relatives…so cousins, that’s kind of
where people begin to tolerate it. Even though the person might be attractive, you’re not
usually interested. But that’s the big question. For example, “Why do some people become
rapists and others don’t?” You need some personality characteristics, a certain degree of
sexual arousal and problems inhibiting your own impulses.

‘These are all the factors we try to work on with therapy here. In prevention, we always talk
about risk factors and protection factors.’ He named some risk factors, such as drinking
alcohol, being in an area full of kids and keeping this sexual secret to yourself. ‘You’re alone
with a child in your sexual attraction range, you’re drinking alcohol and you feel socially
excluded; this is the perfect storm. These are factors we work on.’

‘We help people feel more included. Imagine you’re a father and you can’t abstain from
children and your child loves you and hugs you and you get sexually aroused and you don’t
want that. What’s your choice? You can take medicine that reduces your sexual arousal or
you just leave. It’s a good idea to tell your sexual partner and open up.’

‘Imagine that conversation, though,’ I interjected.

‘Look, there are homosexual men who have families that have to wait for their coming out
until their 40s, as it wasn’t allowed. Imagine that for a family; it’s very difficult. But it
happens and if homosexual men can do it, then paedophilic men can do as well.’

I was a little worried by this conflation of homosexuality and paedophilia, but Maximilian
was a staunch believer in the fact that they were both – along with heterosexuality – merely
unchangeable sexual preferences. I was willing to go along with the doctor on this concept
to a point, but of course the difference between homosexuality and paedophilia is huge.
The former is an expression of love between two obliging adults, while the latter is based on
a power imbalance and can ruin the lives of the children involved.

I said, ‘Coming out as a paedophile is much harder though. I’d much rather tell my family I
were gay.’

‘Yeah, because it’s more stigmatized. And stigmatization is also a risk factor that leads to
child sexual abuse. Because you’re left alone with that. Everyone hates you and it becomes
part of your identity: “Society hates me, so why not do what I want?” So it’s really wrong to
stigmatize people with attraction to children just because they’re born that way. But of
course it’s very important to point out clearly that abuse can’t be tolerated. That’s the red
line, right?’ He asked. I nodded.

He continued, ‘Everyone’s welcome to be who they are and can have his or her fantasies,
but abuse is a no-go. Because we’re interested in the well-being of the children. Because we
know that – and the degree varies – there are severe consequences for the victims.’

And how did Don’t Offend actually go about stopping this crime of all crimes from
happening? As it turned out, the media side of this program involved far more responsibility
than your typical PR jobs. As well as having to understand the science and research to
communicate it to people like me, his role was to cast out a net and bring paedophiles in
before they offended, like something out of Minority Report.

And this small office at the back of a courtyard had become the world’s leading example of
how to do this. Just last week, they’d had the head of police from Norfolk in to learn how to
spread their methods to the UK. And the system was being set up as far afield as India. For
many potential offending paedophiles – and for many unsuspecting children and their
families – the PR work by Maximilian and his colleagues was life-saving.

I asked, ‘How do you reach them before they commit crimes?’

‘That’s my job, I develop strategies for that. One thing is talking to people like you because
we consider the reduction of stigmatization a necessary step in order to help.’

Again, I could see why he hadn’t shown much concern about Max. I also wondered for the
first time whether my own worries about Max were a little overblown; and whether, as
Maximilian had said, I could be creating further stigma by writing about it so dramatically.

Was I reacting to the stigma surrounding paedophilia rather than the man himself? He’d
seemed perfectly nice and the kids had looked happy. Homophobic people have been
known to conflate homosexuality with paedophilia, by claiming they don’t want gay people
around their kids. This is an atrocious view, but was commonly held just a few decades ago.
Would my book age badly? In 100 years, would people in high schools read it as an example
of outdated prejudiced world views, the way we’d look at a 19th-century text on the
wonders of colonialism?

Maximilian was doing his best to convince me that was the case. But it was very hard for me
to stay on that side. He explained the ways the catch paedophiles online.

‘Most people search for porn online according to what interests them most. Of course,
paedophiles and hebephiles search for certain contents.’

‘Child porn?’ I asked?

He corrected me, ‘We don’t call it child porn, because it implies that they’re participating
out of their free will or are being paid for it, which is obviously wrong. We call it child sexual
abuse material.
‘Being in Germany…’ he started, beckoning me over to his computer on the other side of the
room. I stood beside him, as he sat and took the reins. ‘If you go to Bing and put PTHC,
which means Pre-Teen Hardcore…’

He started typing it in. As a reflex, I automatically jumped. I thought, ‘Surely, he’s not going
to click enter? Oh he just did.’ I half-expected the police to be here at any moment to take
us away. But I suppose he and his office have some sort of immunity and agreement with
them. Or maybe just PTHC in a search bar is not enough to warrant a police investigation.

Thankfully, no images popped up, but a list of websites claiming to show pre-pubescent kids
filled the screen. I was surprised, because I’d always thought these kind of websites were
systematically shut down and that it was incredibly difficult to actually find them…and it had
to be through the Dark Web, whatever that really was. Maximilian explained that there is
just way too much of it out there and that it really is easy to find.

What is not so easy is to find this kind of material without being tracked and monitored.
Although he went into further detail, I don’t want to repeat too much more about the ins
and outs, in case this serves as a Child Porn for Dummies book. I’m sure 99% of the people
reading this wouldn’t dream of it, but there are always one or two who might be tempted.
Although, it’s likely those people know far more already than I do about how to access child
porn.

But what Maximilian had wanted to show me was the line across the top of the Bing search
results page, which read, ‘Es Gibt Hilfe’. Help is available. The PTHC abbreviation was one of
the many keywords organised with the search company to bring up this slogan and direct
people to the Don’t Offend program. It was the perfect advertising campaign, with a direct
feed to its potential clients. As well as Bing, Facebook, Google and many other companies in
Germany were also on board.

I thought this was brilliant and played on the guilt of paedophiles typing in such search
terms. These were, I supposed, not monsters laughing at child victims, but afflicted and
depressed people who were sad and lonely.

But I also feel a bit like, well, if it’s that easy to stick an advertising line at the top of the
page, wouldn’t it be just as easy to also block the search results beneath it? This felt a little
like the warning labels on cigarette packets. It doesn’t stop everyone from smoking, but
perhaps has long-term effectiveness in making people re-evaluate their choices.

He told me how the torrent downloading apps that are – or were – popular for downloading
music are now overrun with child porn. I used those torrent servers, like Napster, LimeWire
and eMule, when I was a kid to download bizarre mash-ups songs of Britney Spears and
Eminem and put little albums together.

It now made me sad to think of programs that gave me so much joy as a child, now shifted
into the darker sections of the net and just about kept alive by child pornography. And
battling against them in this dystopic vision of the net was the Don’t Offend team, who were
disguising themselves as child porn distributors and adding fake videos to the these
filesharing systems, with their message in it. Help is available.

‘Users aren’t able to identify us, as we’re seemingly offering real content. But if you
download, you’ll get our spot.’

I imagined a paedophile on his laptop, excited for a clip of child sexual abuse images, only to
be greeted by goaded by a little sign saying Help is Available. I said, ‘They must get quite
angry, as they were expecting something quite different.’

He nodded, ‘Yes. But we are able to track the conversion. From people downloading – to
viewing the video – to actually clicking on our website. Most don’t…but many do.’

He said, ‘Just because you watch brutal porn, doesn’t mean you like having rough sex. And
just because a paedophile consumes this child sex abuse material, doesn’t mean they’d do it
in real life. But for the victims, the child sexual abuse material means that the nightmare
never ends. It means people are continuing to share, to comment and to masturbate over
your worst moment. So it’s an abusive behaviour to use it, even if you’re not directly hurting
someone.

‘It might help for someone to cope with their desire by masturbating; that’s what many
people do to reduce that pressure. But we’re working on that. We’re not as successful with
reducing the online consumption as we are with preventing hands-on abuse, but that is our
goal. That’s the job; it’s about trying to reach people in a non-stigmatizing way and getting
them to seek help.’

They have enquiries from all over the world, with people moving to Germany just for the
therapy. This shows how serious many people with this condition are about getting help;
and that is not the stereotypical image of a bloke hiding in the bushes.

Maximilian was a man on a mission. He said, ‘It’d be better to have all potential offenders
here; it’s not only paedophiles who commit child sexual abuse. But at least we can identify
these people through search engines. But if you’re not a paedophile - but a step-father
abusing your step-daughter just because you’re frustrated or whatever – it’s very hard to
target these people.’

I asked, ‘And these are people who lack empathy or are psychopaths?’

‘Yes, and it’s a rare mixture, finding psychopaths who are also paedophiles, but it happens.
And there, you’ll find things like handbooks written on how to find children and attack
them. Well written stuff, on how single mums can abuse their children.’

‘Like Dieter Gieseking?’ I asked, recalling the advocate of child-adult sexual relationships
who’d first encouraged me to learn German.

‘Yes, people like that, with an activist background. There’s a fraction of paedophiles like him
who say, “Don’t Offend is the worst thing on this planet. They seek to make us conform with
a sick idea because obviously abusing children is the best thing to do and if you do it the
right way, they will then become mothers of children that they also abuse.” It’s really their
fantasy and they have a paedophilic utopia in their minds. For them, we’re just part of the
enemies.’

‘I suppose it’s a cognitive bias?’ I asked.

‘Absolutely, and working on cognitive biases is a big part of what we do. They think, “Oh the
kids want it, they love it, they tease me.” But they have to realise that some normal
behaviour from children isn’t necessarily sexual and even if the child is teasing you, which
sometimes happens, it doesn’t mean you’re allowed, as an adult, to follow that impulse,
because the child doesn’t know the consequences. There’s a huge power difference; so
there are philosophical reasons, medical reasons and psychological reasons to not abuse
children; period.’

So, once people see the advert for Don’t Offend, some send an email or call the program.
One of the first things they’re asked is whether they’re currently going through the justice
system for any child abuse crimes, as Don’t Offend refuses to take these people on.

‘We only want people with an intrinsic motivation. We don’t want pseudo-patients who just
come to be able to say in court, “Yeah, I’m in therapy and doing my best,” in order to get a
lighter sentence. That’s why we’ve only accepted people who come with their own
motivation.’

If someone’s case has been completed, then they’re welcome. They’re then screened and
diagnosed in an interview, to be sure there’s really an attraction to children, as many people
imagine their paedophilia out of some sort of obsessive compulsion.

‘How do you measure that?’ I asked.

‘One test – that we don’t use as a standard means – is phallometric. It’s a little device
measuring blood flow to the male genital. You show them different pictures and, even
though you might not usually feel your increase in blood flow, there is a small increase
when your preference is shown.’

‘I’m imaging a little rope tied around your penis?’

‘Yes it is.’

‘God. It must be so humiliating.’

‘Yes it is. We try not to use it much here, but we’ve done it as part of sexual medicine and
sexology and social research. But it’s not very practical to do it with every patient. You can
also do an MRI scan and see different activation patterns in the brain, when you show them
something sexually arousing.’
This seemed like something out of A Clockwork Orange to me. The idea of someone being
able to hook me up to a machine and penetrate the deepest, darkest corners of my mind –
parts even I wasn’t aware of – was scary. I was relieved not to have to sit through that
experiment, as I suppose none of us can know how our bodies might react on such a tiny
level.

Maximillian said, ‘Obviously, these experiments aren’t always practical.’

A more commonly used test by the program shows images of different development stages,
with the subject asked to press a button to show whether or not they’re attracted to those
pictures. Interestingly, the button itself is irrelevant. The doctors are looking at another
aspect of your behaviour, which I shouldn’t reveal, for fear of ruining the test’s
effectiveness.

Maximillian showed me the images and I was surprised to see these were not in the least
arousing. They were just textbook outlines of a girl’s body at different stages, from flat-
chested to buxom. It didn’t seem very scientific, as the real world has adult women of all
different body types.

It’s known as the Tanner scale, the Tanner stages or the Sexual Maturity Rating (SMR) and it
uses diagrams based on the sexual maturity of breasts, genitals and pubic hair among other
characteristics that change with puberty.

I later looked up the Tanner system and found that it is considered controversial for its lack
of reliability. It has led to false child pornography convictions, with the case of porn actress
Lupe Fuentes standing out. A paediatrician used the SMR to testify that she was underage in
the film. She was forced by the defence under a subpoena to turn up in court with proof
that she was not underage at the time of filming; she was actually 19 in the video.

Her case makes for a bit of a moral quandary. As she was overage, she was legally – and
morally – able to make the decision to perform in a porn film as an adult. But if her body
fitted the SMR definition of a child, then who was the film aimed at? Wasn’t this just
encouraging those looking for child sexual abuse images? Or were porn actors like her
actually helping to allow those with attraction to minors to use their imagination and let off
steam through masturbation, rather than attack children in real life?

Many people come to Don’t Offend who would not find the likes of Fuentes or the diagrams
of pre-pubescent bodies attractive. These people may have even abused children in the past
but are not found to have an attraction towards them. In those cases, the program sends
them to other psychologists who can try to help them. I’m talking about psychopaths,
narcissists and people with obsessive compulsive traits.

But if the person passes the tests and succeeds in being certified a paedophile, they are
invited to therapy. Many still don’t show up, even though the program is free and
anonymous. Others are still very young themselves and still at school. They can’t tell their
teachers, so have to organise their therapy around their study schedule.
Maximilian said, ‘We know it can already be really hard for someone to come out as a
homosexual in certain societies. So imagine coming out as a homosexual paedophile. It’s
really hard for these people.’

Of course, it’s never easy to approach therapy, even with a lack of mandatory reporting in
Germany. After the program was set up by the Charité hospital, someone regularly graffitied
‘Hang the Paedophiles!’ just outside. Already feeling stigmatized and afraid, any paedophile
looking to get help would have to walk past this message on their trips to and from therapy.

I’d found my time with Maximillian fascinating. He’d helped to open my mind a little to the
struggles people with attraction to minors go through to get help. His online PR stunts were
a fascinating insight into the ways of catching paedophiles (hopefully) before they abuse
children. I suppose I was starting to have some sympathy for the cause and could
understand why the program didn’t report its patients; because nobody would turn up for
therapy if that were the case. I was feeling more patient in my outlook towards paedophiles
and understood that it might be better not to stigmatise them for attractions they were
powerless to change.

And yet, I couldn’t shake that image of Max at the swimming pool with the three little girls. I
mean, babysitting a friend’s kids and taking them swimming just seemed too suspicious. As
a man of around the same age as Max, I hadn’t found myself invited to babysit kids outside
of my own family. I’d never brought little girls to a swimming pool. I suppose there’d be
nothing inherently wrong with it, but the opportunity had just never presented itself.

What I mean by that is that it felt like something Max could have avoided, had he wanted
to. I wouldn’t want to tell Max he could no longer walk past schools and parks, as this would
have a huge effect on his ability to live a normal life. But how hard is it to avoid taking little
girls who happen to fit your sexual attraction out to a pool?

Their excursion just didn’t seem necessary. But then, if he wasn’t abusing anyone, then you
could argue he had every right to live a life full of unnecessary whims. As Stephen Fry said,
‘It’s not necessary to have coloured socks. It’s not necessary for this cushion to be
here…things not being necessary is what makes life interesting.’

But Fry was defending the right to use curse words, not the right to take girls swimming.

I couldn’t stop turning this around in my head, partially alarmed that no one else seemed to
care, while also wondering if I was prejudiced against people with a sexual attraction they
couldn’t control.

I needed to find out whether Max was telling the truth about the kids’ parents knowing he
was a paedophile. And I wanted to speak to a therapist outside of the Don’t Offend
program. Someone with no skin in the game, who could give me an honest opinion about
what I’d experienced.
 4
The Secret Airport
During my first few months in Berlin, I attended a German evening class a couple of times a
week. Shortly after meeting with Maximilian, our teacher asked us to prepare reports in
German about why we were in the country and what we did for work or studies.

Most of my peers were exchange students in their early 20s, so they got up and talked a
little about their home country and how they’d been settling into life in Berlin. So it caused
a bit of a stir when I stood up and talked at length about the Don’t Offend project and how
I’d been practicing German with paedophiles from the area.

There was a mixed reaction. Some went deadly quiet, while a few others were intrigued, not
least my teacher, Heike, a really colourful and bohemian character. When class finished (I
feel like I’m describing secondary school now), she asked me to stay behind to tell me about
a sex therapist she knew called Ben.

As it turned out, he was exactly what I was looking for. He had worked freelance as a
researcher for the Don’t Offend project and knew the ins and outs. But as he was
independent, I thought he could offer me a more neutral view on Max and the girls. Unlike
Maximilian, Ben had no brand to protect. My teacher told me he’d get in touch on another
messaging app I’d never heard of, called Signal.

While waiting to hear from him, I continued to message Max. Sometimes, he would respond
right away, while other times he’d take hours or even days to reply. I wanted to build up to
asking him to let me into the paedophile forum he administered and, eventually, to allow
me to meet the parents of the girls he was with, which I thought was unlikely.

During the quiet moments, when I hadn’t heard from Max, I became increasingly paranoid.
From his beard and geeky demeanour, I had a vague impression he worked in something to
do with computers and, given the weird security-obsessed app he was using, I figured he
might be great at hacking and other computer stuff. I imagined him watching me through
my laptop camera, listening in to my conversations and reading my notes for the book. If so,
he already knew I was suspicious of him.

I attached some tape to my laptop camera, after reading that Mark Zuckerberg does the
same.

My girlfriend and family didn’t like the idea of me meeting Max again and worried that, if he
were a hacker and, as I earlier speculated– a psychopath – it wouldn’t be too hard for him to
find out where we lived. So I was cautious about my next move.

And then Ben messaged, saying he’d love to meet me.

He wrote that he had worked as a freelancer for Don’t Offend and was willing to spill the
beans and give me an update on the latest findings in the paedophilic mind.

He suggested we meet in the park by the mysterious Tempelhof Airport. Somewhat fittingly,
I’d just moved onto the second Harry Potter book, the Chamber of Secrets, as I continued
down a journey darker than anything Lord Voldemort could conjure up.

I arrived at the park on a crisp and windy afternoon. Flanking one side of the grounds is the
abandoned Tempelhof Airport that played a key role in the Second World War and the Cold
War. Built by the Nazis, it used to hold World War II prisoners and, more recently, refugees.
It also served as an air raid shelter, its interior walls still decorated with fairy-tale murals
that were intended to distract kids in times of peril.

A sense of history permeates the park, as it does all of Berlin. I sat on the grass by some
disused railway tracks and watched people go by, while waiting for Ben to arrive. After an
hour, he called.

‘Andrew? Yes, I am going to be late,’ he explained.

‘Right. I’ve been waiting an hour, but that’s ok. Are you near?’ I asked, struggling to hide my
annoyance.

‘OK, so you go see my friends. I come soon.’

I was surprised to hear his friends were also in the park, but he directed me on the phone to
a picnic table, where three men in their 30s sat, swigging beers. I asked if they were Ben’s
friends, and they nodded grimly. It turned out they were here to celebrate Ben’s birthday,
though you wouldn’t know if from their dour expressions. I wished I’d known, as I’d arrived
without a present and also felt a little awkward knowing I’d have to broach the p-word at
his birthday lunch.

I chatted in terrible German to these guys, who offered me a beer. When I finished it, I
misinterpreted a fist bump one guy was trying to give me for an offer of another beer that
was in his hand. From the dejected look in his eyes, I realised my error immediately upon
taking it and offered it back. He then insisted I take it, but it was really clear he was a bit put
out.

‘This English guy turning up out the blue empty-handed and taking all our beers!’ I imagined
he was thinking.

We made small talk, covering everything from the weather and the unusual former airport
to football and beer. And over the next half an hour, Ben’s wife with toddler, his parents
and his grandparents arrived and joined us at the table in the middle of this vast, flat park;
but no Ben. His friends and family all assumed I was great mates with Ben. But when his
grandmother asked how I knew him, I felt I should be honest.

‘I don’t really know him but I want to ask him about his work with paedophiles at the
Charité Hospital,’ I said, in broken German. She nodded politely…granny refrained from
asking any follow-up questions.

I was also worried I was giving too much away. What if Ben didn’t want his family knowing
about his work? Was I inadvertently revealing his secret other life to his family, outing him
as a person who works with paedophiles? On his birthday, no less!

After hanging around with Ben’s nearest and dearest for another half hour, the day’s
protagonist finally arrived, grumbling about the traffic. I joked about how unusual it was for
a German to be late. He smiled, before correcting me, ‘This is Berlin, not Germany.’

He proceeded to greet his family members and receive his presents. One such gift was a
huge piece of fabric with his wife’s face on. His somewhat solemn elderly relatives and I
gathered around the contraption and spread it out. Apparently, it had something to do with
a modelling campaign with which she’d been involved.

By German standards, it was an absolute riot and the birthday party was going well. There
were some grunts and something that almost looked like a smile.

The tone was rather odd for me and I was a few beers in (receiving further dismayed glances
from the bringers of said beer) when Ben called me aside for a chat. He explained to his
family, ‘I must now speak with this man alone.’ They seemed to exchange knowing glances.
They’re a very stoic people, these Berliners.

We walked a few feet away from the others and sat on the grass. Ben broke the ice by
describing his previous job. Before working as a therapist for people with attraction to
minors, he worked in online SEO marketing for porn websites. I wondered if his constant
proximity to graphic sexual images during that time stoked his interest in wanting to
understand – and curb – sex offenders.

To me, he was a bit of a computer nerd, not too dissimilar to Max; bearded and a tad geeky,
with a thick German accent and an extensive knowledge of tech and pop culture. Perhaps
he was who Max could have been in another life.
A little tipsy, we laughed about the bizarre and erotic search terms that consumed his
working life in his early porn SEO days. He told a couple of naughty – and quite terrible –
jokes. One such one-liner was, ‘Eine frau kommt bei ein Arzt.’

He had to explain it about 10 times, but it translates literally as, ‘A woman comes by a
doctor.’ It’s a play on the old routine whereby someone goes to the doctor and explains
their symptoms and the doctor says something inappropriate. But Ben’s joke ends abruptly
on the first line, playing on the pun that suggests the woman has come to see a doctor,
while also having been brought to sexual climax by him (or her).

‘This, Ben, is why German humour has such a bad rep,’ I said, smiling weakly.

‘People think that?’ he asked, a little hurt and surprised. I nodded and he asked me to tell
him a typical English joke. I racked my brains, but was ashamed to admit I didn’t know any. I
thought for a while and then wondered aloud whether perhaps ‘jokes’ were the issue. Jokes
in themselves are a little old-hat and are rarely funny. But Ben was a little disappointed I
didn’t have any English jokes to share.

Besides outmoded one-liners, another thing that Ben found funny was that I was Jewish.
Noting that I had (very slightly) darker features than him and was less likely to burn in the
sun, he asked what my heritage was. I told him I was Jewish, but only by ethnicity. Maybe
it’s due to the history, but it’s always a little unnerving to reveal you’re Jewish to a strongly-
accented German. And as soon as I told him, I regretted it. Throughout the rest of the day,
he made a point of telling everyone we bumped into that I was Jewish. Constant jokes were
made about money and power and so on. Everyone laughed.

I’ve been racially Jewish for three decades, so I was used to this and tried to brush it off, as
annoying as it is. These people aren’t racists, they’re perhaps just uncomfortable, given the
history, so they make jokes.

Ben started to tell me about his role in Don’t Offend and the ground-breaking discoveries
they had made recently.

First, he passionately explained his understanding of what makes a paedophile. He now had
his game face on; no more one-liners, ‘This issue is clear. Look, paedophiles have normal
sexual development but they’re stucked (sic) at a special age. Imagine two friends running
around when they’re 5 years old. The boy thinks, “OK, 5-year-old girls are pretty cool.” Or
maybe they hate girls; you know how kids are. Then they’re one year older and they like 6
or 7 year olds, and so on. But a paedophile gets stucked, often at around 8.’

Since I hadn’t corrected him about stucked the first time, it was now awkward to do so. I
would have to continue the conversation using his version of the conjugation.

His explanation made me think of Jimmy Savile. For the unaware, Savile was an extremely
popular English TV presenter. Upon his death in 2011, it emerged he had abused more than
500 people, most of whom were young girls.
A brief glance at descriptions of his childhood reveal how stunted it was. He’d nearly died
from pneumonia at 2 years old, before growing up as 1 of 7 siblings in abject poverty during
the Great Depression. He also appeared to have had a smothering and unusual relationship
with his mother, as shown in a documentary by Louis Theroux. Had these circumstances and
unusual relationships arrested his sexual development?

The theory also made some sense to me with regards to Michael Jackson. He had also been
‘stucked’ as a kid, having apparently missed out on a real childhood himself. I raised the MJ
theory with Ben.

He swallowed a swig of beer and replied, ‘Yes…but it seems Michael Jackson had some
other problems too. Although I don’t want to make a diagnosis from afar. But yes, a
paedophile is someone who had a normal development up to a point and then got stucked.
He is not a monster or a bad person…it’s a disturbance in development, a little like autism
and other issues.’

Narcissistically, the first thing I felt upon hearing Ben’s stucked theory was a profound sense
of relief that I hadn’t become stucked at that age. I’ve always been quite a paranoid person.
Perhaps a little solipsistic too, particularly as a kid (I think kids tend to be a tad more
egocentric anyway). So, I believed that anything bad would inevitably happen to me. I’m
also told this is a symptom of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, from which I suffered quite
badly as a teenager.

I used to assume that if anyone got cancer or appendicitis (that one really scared me), it’d
be me. My youth was dominated by phantom appendix-burst pains, and my dad would
always say, ‘If you had appendicitis, you’d be on the floor writhing in agony.’

And I’d reply, ‘Yes, but it has to start somewhere. It’s starting softly now and is about to get
a whole lot worse, so best I be near a hospital when it really kicks off.’

By the same token, I was convinced I’d be the one out of my friends who ended up being
gay – as a little kid at school in the 90s, that was unfortunately not an easy position to be in.
And as I learned about paedophilia and my schoolmates all began labelling certain teachers
as child molesters (some with good reason and others without), I was sure that that’d
happen to me.

I thought, ‘I’m 13 and I fancy 13 year old girls. I definitely cannot see that changing, because
13 year old girls are great and older girls are icky and intimidating.’ At the time, older
women weren’t really on any of our radars…with the exception of certain school mums. But
I was relieved that, with my advancing years, my attractions began to mature, just as Ben
had explained.

I also didn’t turn out homosexual. If sexuality is a spectrum, I sometimes wonder if I’d be
more open to other men if I’d grown up in a more accepting society. Did my mind, from a
very young age, start to find the male form off-putting because I was so (mistakenly) sure it
was wrong? Like how Harry didn’t want to be in Slytherin, so the magic hat was like,
‘Whatever, you do Gryffindor then’. I should clarify I’m aware that gay is not a choice. But
it’s possible I could have repressed some of those feelings when I entrenched myself so
fervently on the straight end of the spectrum.

My mum often said they were all convinced I would be gay when I was very little, because I
had certain characteristics that at the time were associated with campness…I hated getting
muddy and had certain traditionally feminine gestures. (We all realise now that those
attributes have little to do with sexuality, but it was the 90s). She assures me she’d have
loved me just as much if I’d been gay, and I’m lucky to know that’s true with my family. Had
I grown up to be a paedophile, however, I’m not so sure…

But it was through no doing of my own – no big achievement of mine – that I didn’t turn out
as someone attracted to children. And presumably aided by the placid and fairly
comfortable environment in which I grew up, I was now able to live a normal life with an
adult girlfriend. This is perhaps something that, say, 19 out of 20 of us take for granted. The
lucky 95%.

I invite the readers within those boundaries to take a huge sigh of relief and take stock of
the fact that a mix of luck – probably your upbringing and genes – has enabled you to live
without this terrible affliction.

If you worry that you are in that 5%, then I do indeed hope this book serves as comfort in
other ways and helps you to understand and not feel so alone. I’d like to think that it’d help
to know there are so many others like you and that therapy is available.

Ben continued, ‘These people have no need to hurt anyone. Like us, they want to be kind to
each other. But if you look at the statistics of the ones that hurt or kill children, these are
the sadistic ones.’

He went on to explain that many sexual offences against children are not necessarily made
by paedophiles. These are, instead, psychopaths and sadists. I wondered if Max been
playing sadistic games with me.

Ben added, ‘For those people, it’s just the object; the feeling of power.’

As I asked him more about paedophilia in this crowded park, Ben cut me off and asked,
‘Why are you whispering?’

‘I didn’t know I was. Was I?’ I replied.

‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘I’m a psychologist. I can read your mind.’

Coupled with my worries about Max hacking my system, finding out where I lived and
murdering me, this didn’t help with my increasing paranoia.

But his point about the offenders who are after power and sadistic pleasure got us onto
another vital factor in the making of sex offending paedophiles. In what was one of the first
comprehensive studies of its kind in the world, Ben’s lab at Don’t Offend looked into the
differences in empathy levels between those who have molested children and the so-called
virtuous paedophiles that have never physically touched kids (although they may have hurt
children indirectly through consuming child pornography, for example). It measured these
results against a control group.

The experiment had the patients identify the emotions of various adults and children in
photos they were shown, in order to get a sense of their cognitive empathy. That is simply
the ability to understand and put a name to other people’s emotions; to realise if someone
is angry, sad, happy etc. The study also found ways to measure their emotional empathy,
which is one’s capability to actually feel what others feel; to indulge in the joy of others and
to suffer alongside them.

‘The surprising thing,’ he explained, ‘is that the paedophiles who didn’t offend showed far
more empathy than the others.’

I replied, ‘That’s not surprising to me at all. It makes total sense that the ones who do
commit crimes would have less empathy than those who refrain.’

‘No, no, you don’t understand me,’ he said, shaking his head. He took out some graphs that
made little sense to me – full of abbreviations, bars and complex terminology – and went
about explaining. What the results actually found is that non-offending paedophiles felt
significantly higher levels of empathy – particularly emotional empathy – towards children
than the control group. In fact, even offending paedophiles in the study showed higher
levels of empathy than the control group, although lower than those who chose not to
offend.

This was an extraordinary discovery that shattered the conception of paedophiles as

monsters devoid of emotion. Max went on to tell me how the therapy helps these people
with minor attraction to feel less alone and to understand how any form of molestation can
affect a child’s entire life. ‘As a paedophile, you have no way of “coming out”. You keep it
with you…and for so long. It is so much pressure, so that it’s more likely you’ll one day
offend, as you are alone with your problem and don’t know what to do with it.’

So, if paedophiles – the ones who aren’t simply psychopaths – in general have a higher level
of empathy towards kids, why did so many molest them?

‘The paedophiles without sadism who still abuse have cognitive biases. The most common
one is to think the little child is in love with them. It’s an emotional component; not just
sexual,’ he explained. ‘They convince themselves to feel the way we might do about our
wives or husbands; but with children. It’s like a tactic to make you feel better because you
know it’s wrong to have these desires. Your brain tells you it’s pure love. They would really
say, “I love this kid.” And they mean it. Whereas a sadist would never say they love their
victim.’

From what I understood from my conversation with Ben, a large portion of paedophiles
never acted on their urges, as their empathy served as a barrier. Equally, a high percentage
of child molesters were not paedophiles, but rather people with psychopathic tendencies,
bereft of empathy, who got a rush from the power and domination over a smaller, weaker
being. And the third group – of empathetic paedophiles who did offend – used cognitive
dissonance to square it with themselves.

After the swimming pool event, I wondered which of the three groups Max fit into:
psychopath, offending paedophile with cognitive biases or an empathetic and self-aware
non-offending paedophile. The jury was still out, but it could have been any of the three. For
the sake of the little girls, I hoped he was a paedophile who had empathy and some
awareness of and control over his cognitive biases. But the far-fetched stories he’d told me
about meeting mothers and girlfriends on a website for paedophiles gave me reason to
doubt his cognitive faculties…and perhaps even his honesty.

I started telling Ben the story about Max and the indifferent response I’d had from
Maximilian von Heyden at Don’t Offend. He said he didn’t know Maximilian, but laughed at
how similar the name was to the band Van Halen and the Dracula character Van Helsing. I
assured Ben he was neither of those and that he seemed nice…and that he was now doing
work for Don’t Offend in India.

‘Oh wow, very interesting. Did you hear of the last story from India? Three, four, five guys
raped a 3-year-old girl and beheaded-…’

I cut him off, ‘Eugh. Ok..’

‘…yeah and they were like policemen. Maybe it’s more socially accepted. But this is sadistic,
this hate and this disrespect of women in the country; it has nothing to do with
paedophilia.’

‘You don’t think those 4 or 5 people are paedophiles.’

‘Yeah exactly, that’s what I would speculate.’

I continued my story and he came over all giggly when I said Max had suggested a public
swimming pool. As it happened, it was the pool right near the park we were in. I explained
how I thought it was a strange place to choose when trying to show a journalist that
paedophiles can be normal.

Ben said, ‘But it’s like saying depressed people don’t have the right to watch sad movies.’

‘But, it goes further. So, I was a little nervous to meet him and…’

Max interrupted, ‘You’re old enough, he’s not interested in you!’

‘I know, I know, but I was nervous. I’d never knowingly met a paedophile. And then he
arrived holding a little girl’s hand.’

‘Really?’
‘Yes a sweet girl. Not his daughter.’

‘Then these two other girls came over and…’

He interrupted again, ‘And they asked him for another ice cream or something, right?’

‘How did you know that?’ I asked.

‘It’s their strategy. It’s well known that the paedophiles are cognitively stucked to the age.
And they feel better in contact with low-aged people because they never criticise them. And
these guys really know – like psychopaths maybe – how to read and how to satisfy the
needs of this age.’

I asked, ‘Do you think it’s a sexual thing?’

‘It could be a contact thing…I don’t know about this guy. I would say that it’s strange, of
course, because part of the therapy would never be, “Ok, you have to handle a swimming
pool visit and walking around with young girls.” No, never.’

I said, ‘But he finished therapy a few years ago. He told me the girls were daughters of
friends of his. And the parents know all about his attraction to minors.’ I continued with the
story about how Max claimed to have met the kids’ parents in a forum for paedophiles.

He said, ‘OK, it could be true and that he is trying to be re-socialised. But when, for example,
a paedophile rents a flat in front of a school, I would say something is wrong. And I don’t
know, I’m splitted (sic) now.’

‘It sounds a bit bad, doesn’t it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘He knew I was writing a book about this. So why didn’t he do that pool stuff on a different
day; what is he trying to show me?’

‘Yeah, you never know, maybe he is also narcissistic and likes playing with it and feeling
good by saying he can handle being out with kids. I never saw the guy and I never make a
diagnosis without seeing the people. It could be a good sign that this guy can really handle
this kind of situation. But it’s like making a documentary about alcoholics and meeting them
in a bar with a beer in their hand. “I’m not drinking it, it’s just in my hand.”’

I asked, ‘Why would he want to tempt himself?’

‘It could fulfil or satisfy the need he still has to have contact and feel connected to that
young age, without a sexual component…which would be ok.’

‘But presumably he’s going through changing rooms and stuff with them.’
‘But we don’t know. We don’t know that.’

I asked if I should do something about him or talk to the police.

‘OK, by law, if you now call the police and say you met a guy at a public pool holding a girl’s
hand, they’ll say, “OK. So?”. As a therapist, I can break my Hippocratic Oath when I hear
about a crime that will happen. You see. And you didn’t see that. Nothing happened.’

It seemed like Ben was as worried as I was about Max. But he was far more used to this kind
of thing and knew there wasn’t much use taking it to the police. Having exhausted my only
options, in Ben and Maximilian – and with the police off limits for now – my only hope of
finding out more was through Max himself. I would have to try to meet the kids’ parents.

Ben had to get back to his family to celebrate the rest of his birthday. We were both a little
tipsy. My final question was, ‘Having worked closely with this subject for so long…what do
you want this book to say about paedophiles? What would interest you?’

‘What I would want to read is what paedophilia is,’ he said with rising passion. ‘Not
assuming that it’s always a horrible man touching a kid. But a stunted development that
most never act on.’

‘It does seem complicated…’ I hesitated.

‘Yeah. The problem is, you’d be attacked by a lot of persons if you wrote that angle.’

‘I’m getting used to that from my films about priests and abortion,’ I said, with an affected
confidence belying my paranoid and fearful inner turmoil.

‘Because the people don’t want to hear the truth. They want to hear that they’re all
monsters and we should cut their dicks off and yeah…’ said Ben, crunching in his hand what
was his third can of beer since the beginning of our interview.

He opened another and took a sip. As he stood up to head back to his party, he looked me
in the eyes – a tad melodramatic for my tastes, but I went with it – and said, ‘If you do
this…and report the truth…this’ll be the first time it’s ever been done.’

He let that weigh on me, before going to his family with a jolly demeanour that suggested
we’d merely been chatting about our favourite magic shops on Diagon Alley (Yes, I’m still
reading Harry Potter nightly, even as I write this.)

I stayed and practiced my German with Ben’s family, trying to forget for now the burden
Ben had placed on my shoulders – to write something no one had ever done before (even if
that wasn’t strictly true!).

I must say, I was delighted when his friends announced they were leaving not much later, as
I had felt guilty about drinking so many of their beers without bringing my own. I hadn’t
been able to look them in the eyes for the past hour and felt more at ease once they were
out of sight. The sun began to creep beyond the horizon, bathing the phantom airport and
its glassy façade in an orange sheen.

As twilight settled, the park was almost empty. On our patch of grass, it was just Ben, his
wife and I chatting about the things that annoyed us about our own countries, while their
toddler crawled along the disused railway tracks.

In no time, we were complaining about our respective governments. I had plenty of

ammunition, as this was in the middle of Brexit.

‘You should write a book about those guys, man!’ laughed Ben drunkenly. ‘They’re far
crazier than most paedophiles.’

‘I don’t know…man,’ I said, placing a hand on his shoulder in a presumption of drunken

kinship, ‘it’s not quite as out-there as child molesters.’

He placed his hand on my shoulder, so that we were almost in an embrace. It felt like a little
circle of trust. He slurred, ‘Politics and paedophilia are more related than you think in
Germany.’

At that, he passed me the name of an investigator who was trying to blow the lid off the
most sickening case of state-sponsored child abuse imaginable.
 5

The Odd-Couple Twist

‘There were people saying stop, or who criticised him, but they had no chance…’ Dr. Teresa
Nentwig laughed almost violently, ‘…a lot of people defended him. He couldn’t be stopped.
And at the end, he died in 2008 to very positive obituaries.’

Sat across from me was Dr. Nentwig, a postgrad researcher with a PHD in political sciences.
She had a geek-chic vibe, with glasses and something of a mousy smile.

Forming a dramatic backdrop were the snow-capped mountains of the Harz region, where
she lived and studied at Göttingen University. This was the place where German fairy tales
like the Brothers Grimm were set. It’s a region whose hills are crowned by Disney-esque
castles and in whose valleys sit quaint settlements. Historic town plazas are lined with semi-
timbered gabled cottages and old clocks showcasing medieval figurines that dance and
move, if you arrive at the right time.

And between these towns lies an enormous expanse of dark woods that you can get
completely lost in. It felt somehow apt that we were talking in this picturesque yet ominous
setting.

Except we weren’t really. I’d actually been there for holidays just a couple of weeks earlier.
And at the time of this interview, I had only just shown the preceding chapters for the first
time to my publishing agent. Returning there so soon was unfeasible for now.

Having so recently been there, I really wanted to begin this chapter with that distinctive,
enchanting setting. The physical description of Dr. Nentwig came from photos I found of her
on Google. I actually called her on the phone…ok, that’s not accurate either; I got her to call
me because I was always running out of credit, while trying to figure out all the different
phone contracts and deals; a little embarrassing for a so-called journalist. But as soon as I
picked up, I was able to get a picture of her from her voice alone.
Since moving to Berlin, I’d become accustomed to hearing annoyed or worn-out German
voices on the phone. But Dr. Nentwig was instantly, chirpy, likeable and…warm. It caught
me off guard, but made for a nice change. As it turned out, she was actually Swiss. So, make
of that what you will.

She’d been studying political sciences in the 2010s, when she was part of a group of
researchers who came across a true story that would shake Germany to its core. What she
went on to tell me is probably the worst thing I’ve ever heard. But to understand some of
the liberal attitudes towards paedophilia in Germany, it helps to start here.

But first, some background. The previous chapters have served as a little introduction to
paedophilia. They’ve featured human stories and a tiny sprinkling of the science, which I’ll
dig into in more detail later on. But since I’m investigating this subject in Germany, it’d be
appropriate to zoom in a little on the country itself and its tumultuous relationship with
paedophilia.

That’s not to say that the rest of the world is immune from child abuse. Just that…I suppose
what happened in this country really does resemble some of the most twisted, immoral
German fairy tales, in that absolutely atrocious things seem to have happened to kids for no
fathomable reason. There’s little to learn from some of these tales, except that horrible shit
happens to children and adults do nothing about it.

In the 1960s, Germany – and Berlin in particular – was one of the key proponents of the
wave of free love. The country is still known today the world over for its nudist colonies,
naked spas and sex clubs. And you won’t get past the bouncers at the hippest Berlin clubs
unless you’re clad head to toe in leather. But by the beginning of the 70s, that free love was
beginning to dip its toes into some deep and murky waters.

Many of the country’s Left-wingers – especially those linked to the Green Party – had
started campaigning to legalize adult-child sex. It seems preposterous now to imagine that
an environment had been fostered in which this was even up for discussion. But for many
years, the political party pushed for legal paedophilia; before inevitably failing.

This dark history is still used today to discredit the Greens and has scarred their party
beyond repair. Which is a shame because they have a lot of nice ideas about the
environment and no longer wish to legalise adult-child sex.

Strongly linked to the party was a sex researcher called Helmut Kentler, whose name only
recently (and posthumously) re-emerged to strike fear into the heart of Germans. And this is
where Dr. Nentwig’s story begins.

Helmut Kentler was a hebephile; that is, he was attracted to young teens. In the study of
sexualities, an important distinction is made between hebephiles and paedophiles, the
latter being attracted only to pre-pubescent children. Of course, both are illegal and, it goes
without saying, immoral.
In West Berlin in the 1970s, the city had a huge homeless population. It seemed that
everywhere you looked, you’d see kids sleeping on benches, lying beneath bridges and
begging for money. Many even became underage sex workers. While working on research
into paedophilia, Kentler observed the homeless issue and thought about how he could
solve both these issues with one foul swoop, killing two birds with one stone.

In what other psychologists described as ‘a monstrous process’, he started a program –

sponsored by the Berlin Senate – to place homeless boys aged 13-15 with known
paedophile offenders. This way, he maintained, the child would get a warm bed, three
square meals and an adult to take care of them and wash their clothes. And the paedophile
would have his needs seen to as well.

According to the project, the molester had to keep up his side of the bargain, by ensuring
the child was well-fed and physically healthy. And the child was expected to maintain his
own unspeakable part of the deal. ‘These carers only put up with these weak-minded boys
because they fell in love with them, were infatuated with them and went crazy for them,’
Kentler concluded, with the most twisted literary tricolon of all time.

The project came into being after he found out about three male janitors who had become
friends, while serving sentences in Tegel Prison for sexual contact with underage boys.
Three homeless kids had been hanging out in the basements of the men’s apartments in
exchange for sexual favours.

Kentler observed, ‘Here they found a place to sleep. Even if they didn’t want to “pimp” with
the man, they got something to eat and could wash their clothes. They knew these men as
“mother”; “I’ll go to mother (and the surname followed).” I came to tell myself, if the kids
call this man “mother”, he can’t be bad.’

This (insanely naïve and potentially disingenuous) interpretation of his experience

encouraged him to launch his own experiment, toying with the lives of young adolescents
on the streets of Berlin. He enlisted the three janitors to set up care homes and found boys
ready to move in. Kentler made sure to visit each foster home twice a week to speak to both
the abuser and the child separately and check up on them. I have no idea what he was
checking for.

Dr. Nentwig has been working on this case for years. She sent me her report on Kentler and
his experiment, which comprises 164 pages of extremely dense and academic writing in
German. Not exactly a page turner. Once I’d finally gotten through it, one of the things that
stood out to me in the report was Kentler’s constant contradictions relating to time frames
and the amount of people involved in the experiment.

This is important when considering whether the doctor acted out of a misguided but honest
belief in his experiment or from his own perverse desires. Kentler was one of the most
prominent doctors in his area and it is highly unusual for someone of his status to make so
many factual discrepancies; if we are to believe that Kentler was acting with a clear
conscience, then why don’t the facts and numbers add up?
One such inconsistency involves the first time he became aware of the boys who were
hanging out in the janitors’ basements. In one essay, he claims he first met the homeless
kids at a socio-educational initiative, while in another, he says one of the boys initially
turned up at his apartment.

To me, this mix-up suggest that either he’s withholding some truth about his own actions
with the boys or has simply dreamed up various scenarios. I mean, that’s not the kind of
thing you forget, is it? The first time you met a child sex worker.

Another discrepancy was the ages of the boys he placed with foster paedophiles. One report
claimed they were 15-17 years old, while another admits they were just 13.

Dr. Nentwig said, ‘He thought it would help the children, but in reality it was very bad for
them because the sexuality of kids is completely different to adults. The idea of the child
sleeping with the man…’ she trailed off and shook her head (I imagined, on the other side of
the phone).

Directed by Kentler, it was the Berlin Senate Department for Family, Youth and Sport who
actually placed these kids in the foster care of convicted paedophiles. That very department
would later, in 1991, support a campaign for the ‘liberation of gays, lesbians and
paedophiles’.

It seems horrific now to group homosexuality in with paedophilia, but just decades ago, this
wasn’t met with much opposition. And in the 1970s and 80s, there was apparently no
outcry and no resistance from anyone in government to Kentler’s experiment.

A popular figure in the sciences, he was considered one of the leading authorities on
sexuality and regularly appearing on television and radio programs. He was a complicated
person, who was also responsible for what we’d consider to be really positive campaigns,
including advocating for the decriminalization of homosexuality. He was one of the first
leading figures in Germany to discuss it as a normal sexual form. Perhaps, due to his
otherwise progressive and liberal values, nobody wanted to challenge his acceptance of
what he termed ‘non-violent sexual contact between children and adults’.

In fact, it wasn’t until newspapers began taking up the story in 2014-16 that the
aforementioned department asked Dr. Nentwig and her team at the Göttingen Institute for
Democracy Research to start an investigation into what really happened and how it was
allowed to have come to pass.

Many of the details have been lost in the last few decades. And Dr. Nentwig believes parts
of the Berlin government are continuing to withhold much of the information from her and
other researchers. As such, most of what is known about the experiment comes from the
papers found in Kentler’s house after his death.

I asked Dr. Nentwig why she believed the government were continuing to block information.
‘That is hard to say,’ she said, a little crestfallen. ‘I am so disappointed because it could help
the victims. The Berlin Administration’s handling of this made me so angry. It says a lot
about their readiness to deal with their own past.’

One thing she didn’t say – or need to say – was that there were still presumably some
people in government who may have been involved in the experiment, given it only took
place a few decades ago. If that were the case, those high-profile officials certainly wouldn’t
want their reputations being tainted by a connection to this twisted experiment.

To piece together the story, Dr. Nentwig had to speak with old friends and colleagues of
Kentler. ‘I was even able to speak to two young men who I believe to have been the last
victims of the Kentler experiment.’

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how Dr. Nentwig has become a pariah herself in
the field of sexual research, as old colleagues of Kentler’s gather to discredit her writings.

‘I’m an outsider,’ she told me, ‘they don’t like someone like me coming into their subject.’
She meant that, as a doctor of political sciences, many in sex research didn’t take kindly to
what they perceived as her interference in a sexual domain. I wondered if I’d receive similar
attacks upon the publication of this book, since I wasn’t a doctor of anything.

I remembered how Jon Ronson was criticised by the psychopath industry for writing about
psychology in what I considered a personal and accessible way. He didn’t seem to mind,
though. And I think he did a great job; he served as a proxy for the reader and never claimed
to be an expert. I mean, he sort of did; but he was being facetious, which the doctors didn’t
seem to grasp.

One of the things that frustrated rival doctors about Dr. Nentwig was her refusal to separate
Kentler’s experiment from his own sexuality. Most notably, Professor Elisabeth Tuider from
the Kassel University presented lectures to students denouncing Dr. Nentwig’s conflation of
Kentler’s private life (his hebephiliac sexuality) and his work. Professor Tuider was also one
of the colleagues who wrote glowing obituaries about Kentler.

Dr. Nentwig’s point seemed reasonable to me. How could you separate the fact that Kentler
was attracted to underaged kids from the program he decided to inflict upon them? I
guessed the two had to be related.

I could only imagine he got a perverse kick out of the whole thing. But then, I’m certainly no
expert. When I asked Dr. Nentwig if she thought he was a bad person, she refused to go so
far, saying, ‘No, I don’t think so. I think he was convinced it was right to do what he did. It
was his concept; he was the social researcher in charge and was convinced by his theories.’

At this, I began to notice that Dr. Nentwig had kept up her upbeat demeanour and high-
pitched laugh throughout our conversation, no matter how dark the topic got. She seemed
either stoic, pensive or happy when discussing him. As a journalist, I had been trained to
listen out for moving soundbites and emotional tones from her speech for my book that
were just were not forthcoming.
I did detect a nervousness in her laugh, but I put that down to her being embarrassed about
her spoken English. I even pushed for emotional responses, asking loaded questions,
including, ‘How did it make you feel to hear about what was happening to these little kids?’

She paused for a while. Again, I wasn’t sure if this was due to her emotion or word-finding-
difficulties. ‘Hmm. I like biographies, so I was curious and looking forward to a new project.’
Almost as an afterthought, she added, ‘But I was shocked by his publications. I found out
he’d been involved in several organisations that fought to legalize contact between adults
and children.’

I kept probing: ‘But were you sad to hear about these things?’

She replied, ‘I was shocked about his engagement…in my work I try to differentiate all the
sides and aspects of his life.’

I think that was her way of saying that, as a professional, she has to be objective about
these things; a little removed. I was learning now about the people on another side of
paedophilia from the abusers and victims; the professors, scientists and researchers. And
they did tend to speak a little ‘clinically’ about the horrors, as if immune to them.

The reason this interested me is that I was starting to wonder about my own feelings about
writing this and encountering such dreadful stories. If Dr. Nentwig had asked me how I’d felt
upon hearing about the Kentler experiment, I could truthfully say that I felt a bit sick and
sad…and angry at the injustice, angry that this could have taken place and that this man was
never held to account before he died.

Similarly, my experience around that same time with Max and the little girls knocked me for
six. I wondered if I would become de-sensitised to the whole thing, as I continued
researching. Or would the opposite be true? Perhaps the dreadfulness of the topic would
begin to have an extreme impact on my mental health, as I continued writing this book.

Neither option was appealing. I didn’t like the idea of coming out at the end of this with
nightmares. But I also didn’t want to ever reach a point where I felt that a case of sexual
abuse was just ‘another day of work’. I thought it was right that it should sting every time I
encountered something like the cases of Max or Dr. Kentler.
 6

The Catcher in the Rye

This whole investigation had all come a little thick and fast and I was beginning to feel the
strain. I decided to take a week off from the stress of this book, since I was heading back to
London anyway for some unrelated filming projects.

I woke at 6am on the day of my flight and, upon checking the news on my laptop, was
immediately confronted by photos of paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. It was a story all about
child sex rings and the people who provided him with his victims.

It’s bad enough when a paedophile uses cognitive biases to convince himself the kids are in
love with them. But who are these people procuring children for celebrities in exchange for
money? What goes through someone’s mind, when they organise this kind of thing? I
snapped the laptop shut and tried to get through the rest of my day without thinking about
anything related to this book.

In advance of the plane journey, I downloaded the safest option I could think of for my
entertainment: the latest episode of one of my favourite podcasts, The Adam Buxton Show.
I was revelling in the prospect of transporting my mind away from this dark topic for the
duration of the flight.

Adam Buxton has made hundreds of podcasts and I don’t think any have covered sex with
children. But as it happened, this was a special ‘book club’ episode, in which he chatted to
comedians and writers Richard Ayoade and Sara Pascoe about the novel The Catcher in the
Rye.

I must say, I was really enjoying the episode, as it helped me remember my own teenage
angst and my connection with a book I’d half forgotten.

For the unacquainted, the novel is about a teenager going through some kind of breakdown
or depression, linked both to the death of his sibling and his fixation on what he called
‘phonies’. The book gathered cult status, in part due to the reclusive behaviour of its writer,
J.D. Salinger, who never wrote another book of such magnitude. And in part because some
people obsessed over the themes of phoniness and alienation, finding disturbing meaning in
the text that wasn’t really there.

Had Catcher in the Rye not been written, it’s likely John Lennon would still be alive. His
killer, Mark Chapman, cited the book as inspiration; he came to believe Lennon had
somehow sold out and was a phony. The book has also been linked to the murder of model
and actress Rebecca Shaeffer and an attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan.

I felt relaxed on the plane, enjoying being taken back to my own school years, when I’d read
the book. But seemingly out of nowhere, paedophilia reared its ugly head once more. (I
think it’s that Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. We notice things a lot more when we’ve
already been thinking about them. Now I see paedophilia everywhere.)

I hadn’t realised, but J.D. Salinger was apparently a hebephile, attracted to young teenagers.
In fact, listening to the podcast, I was reminded of how the book itself dips into hints of
hebephilia, involving an incident between the protagonist and a male teacher. Like with
Kentler in the previous chapter, I wondered if we can separate his sexuality from his work,
when the two are so clearly linked. So much for the Death of the Author.

The reason I mention Catcher in the Rye – and its first-person protagonist, Holden Caulfield
– is because the paedophiles I was beginning to interact with were beginning to remind me
of him. The character of Holden is said to reflect the personality of the author; so much so
that it’s believed Salinger refused to sell the rights to a movie, as he believed only he could
play the title role, so entwined was he with his fictional creation.

On the Adam Buxton Podcast, Sara Pascoe made this great point about a feeling of
entitlement that many teenage boys feel and how frustrating it can be to see the girls they
desire going off with older or perceivably cooler guys. She says, ‘These boys think, “I am one
of the good guys, why do you continue to reject me for all these horrible men? Why do girls
like bad guys?” And actually they don’t really, it’s one of those myths…and guys who aren’t
very nice tell themselves they are not getting things because they’re too great. Which is a
wonderful narrative, but that’s what they’ve told themselves.’

I could relate to what Pascoe was saying, because I remember feeling that way; just about
the time when I was reading The Catcher in the Rye. I vividly recall considering myself ‘nicer’
than some of the other boys my age who had been more popular with the girls, even though
I had nothing to back up my self-assessment of ‘nice’. It was, as Pascoe said, an
‘entitlement’; one I think comes from inexperience and an inability to properly understand
the people around me. I couldn’t grasp that the ‘bad boys’ were not better or worse than
me; just perhaps better looking, a little cooler or just less entitled.

I still know plenty of grown adults who think that way. For them, their rejection is always
the girl’s mistake, as though he knows what is best for her. I think if you hear a guy think or
talk that way, that’s a huge red flag, not to mention a massive turn off for the person
they’re courting.
In the podcast, host Adam Buxton was playing devil’s advocate, ‘But when you’re a teenage
boy, and you’re seeing the most beautiful girl in the school is definitely not ever going to
give you the time of day and is going out with someone five years older with a car, it’s hard
not to make those assumptions that that’s the way the world works.’

Sara replied, ‘What I should have stressed is that I really understand that frustration in its
beginning. The frustration of it and the unfairness of the world.’

And I think that what she’s saying sums up not only the thoughts of the protagonist Holden,
but of my own teenage mind and the minds of so many others who became huge fans of
this tale of alienation and rejection. We just weren’t able to read it with the author’s hidden
irony. So when you read it at 15, you feel angry at the injustice he faces.

But when you read the book as an adult, it’s hard not to feel sorry for Holden, with all his
problems that stem from his limited understanding of the world around him. As is typical
with an unreliable narrator, you can derive meaning from reactions of those around him
rather than take his own first-person account at face value.

In many ways, he is able to grasp so much – beyond his years – but misses some key
elements. He seems to think he’s the only person who feels the way he does; which, as Sara
Pascoe points out in the podcast, is a sign of immaturity. It’s how many of us feel in our
teenage years, as though we’re alone with our thoughts, as if no one else can think as
deeply as us. And as we get older, we start to realise that most people are likely just as
complex, as intelligent and as thoughtful as we are.

This led me back to what the therapist, Ben, had told me about how paedophiles get
‘stucked’ at a certain age and how they enjoy being around children, even if it’s not sexual.
All the paedophiles I’d dealt with so far – which included not only Max from the swimming
pool, but also a few others I’d been interacting with via email – reminded me of Holden
Caulfield.

There seemed to be something childish about them. At first, I put what I perceived to be
their rude or stunted interactions down to defensiveness or fear. They had to be wary of
outsiders; I understood that. But soon, I started to wonder if it was more than that.
Cropping up time and again was an ostensible arrogance and a ‘nobody understands me’
adolescent undertone in these people’s communications that was so well captured by
Catcher in the Rye.

For example, one British paedophile called Ed Chambers – who featured on Channel 4’s The
Paedophile Next Door and Canadian film I, Pedophile – wrote me lengthy emails
criticising…well, pretty much everyone. He’d actually moved out to Berlin for almost a year,
while trying to get onto the Don’t Offend course; but wasn’t able to take part in the therapy
for reasons related to finances and health insurance.
From what he knew, he remarked, ‘Therapy is quite oppressive there, with many pedos
leaving therapy with lower self-esteem and depression issues. But it’s far better than
anything else on offer in the world for one good reason: no mandatory reporting laws.’

About the documentaries he’d appeared in, he said, ‘The Paedophile Next Door was a huge
disappointment to me. We had discussed my plan of being in Berlin for therapy…but not a
mention was made in the program.’

That was a little red flag for me already, as he seemed to think the documentary should
have been made to serve and promote his own causes, ones he believed more suited to the
film than the director’s choices.

As his email continues, he starts to seem a little more like Holden Caulfield in his
descriptions of ‘narcissistic self-serving politicians’ who don’t pay attention to the
paedophiles. Then, he seems to start feeling sorry for himself, claiming, ‘People in the
community know how badly I’ve been treated and the lengths to which I’ve gone for
therapy.’

But just a few lines down from the pity section, he suddenly strikes a tone of world
domination: ‘I found that the best thing a pedo can do…is stick to TOR (an encrypted
browser), stay anonymous and keep the community strong. And we are stronger than
people would ever like to contemplate. Until we are given something by society, a
recognition of some sort…we will not give up what we have created.’

This sounded to me exactly like the teenage boy who thinks he knows what’s best for a girl,
while also considering himself the nice guy. I mean, Ed was smirking about some sort of
unstoppable paedophilic revolution just a few lines after what seemed like a plea for pity
and understanding. And like the entitled adolescent, he couldn’t quite get why
understanding from others was not so forthcoming.

Another paedophile called Adam was a little ambivalent about his ‘outing’, so I have left out
his surname. He emailed me slating a child sexual abuse prevention organization called Stop
It Now, because he considered it too restrictive:

‘Stop It Now is a disgusting organization that seeks to justify hatred on minor attracted
persons. It’s vile and anyone who works there has to be schizophrenic,’ he said. Once again,
I felt that the difficulty in holding back emotions, the black-and-white world view and the
blaming of everything on phonies (whether schizophrenics or, in Ed’s case, self-serving
politicians) was very Holden-esque.

Obviously, I don’t mean to suggest that all people with attraction to minors are…dickheads.
But I definitely stumbled upon a high percentage whose mannerisms and interactions
seemed – much like their sexuality – to be stuck in their adolescent years.
One person I spoke to who didn’t seem as childish at first glance was former member of
Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, Tom O’Carroll. After The Times ran a piece exposing his belief
that adults and kids can be together, he was expelled from the party in 2016.

Tom and I exchanged a few emails in 2018 and the impression he gave me was actually
more like Hannibal Lecter than Holden Caulfield. For example, he’d often throw me off
guard with over-the-top compliments. In response to my first email to him, he wrote, ‘I take
it you are this Andrew Gold?’ linking to my online show reel. ‘You are clearly young, very
good-looking, and apparently speak fluent Spanish. I imagine you go down a storm on BBC
3.’

I didn’t know what to make of this. He seemed to be playing with me in the opening lines of
the email, much the way Hannibal Lecter does when he meets Clarice. Was his comment
about BBC 3 in some way a backhanded compliment, as though my documentary-making
was for younger, less discerning viewers? Were his comments about my looks aimed at
reducing me to a young sexual object; maybe suggesting my physical appearance alone had
gotten me onto the BBC? Or was he – a much older man – getting off on sexualising me and
being so brazen about it?

I’d told him I’d like to ‘make an open-minded film about paedophilia’ (this was back before
deciding to explore the topic as a book). This is his response after watching my exorcist
documentary, imagine it in the voice of Hannibal Lecter:

‘Fine by me. However, what had you told the Padre in your exorcism film? That you wanted
to make “an open-minded documentary about exorcism?

‘Just like the Padre, my role in your documentary would inevitably be the Aunt Sally,’ he
continued, ‘any hint of a remotely humanising line would send the more rabid punters into
paroxysms of fury.’

His emails were long and high-brow and took at least 1-2 days to compose (and almost as
long to read). To me, it was almost as if he were lifting lines straight from the Hannibal
movies, as certain turns of phrases felt so right for the character. I remain convinced that
Hannibal also references Aunt Sally, but I haven’t been able to find the quote in the movies.
Not that I knew what Aunt Sally actually referred to (a traditional British game where
players chuck stuff at a wooden dummy).

Whether he was aware of his Hannibal-esque style or not, it suggested to me ‘illusions of

grandeur’, which I’d read can sometimes also be a sign of a psychopath; again, issues with
empathy were cropping up.

When I looked over his emails again at the time of writing, I was also able detect traces of
Holden Caulfield. There was still this sense of conspiracy and the world being against him,
when he said, ‘You might be open-minded, Andrew, but your documentary cannot be. The
corporate gate-keepers of the BBC are there to make sure of that.’
This is compounded by what he deemed as ‘proof’ of the other phonies in the Labour Party:
‘I might note a certain irony in connection with my expulsion. Barrow MP John Woodcock,
the guy who got me kicked out, has since been accused of sexual harassment and has
himself resigned from the party!’ Here, he reads more like Holden than Hannibal.

At one point, I was in an email chain with all three of the aforementioned paedophiles,
eavesdropping, as they spoke about whether or not to trust me.

Ed wrote, ‘Andrew has good intentions, although with what I believe to be no prior
experience into this kind of world, he will have little idea of what it’s like in our shoes […] Do
not trust the BBC or any other media outlet without a signed guarantee that we as a
demographic would get a fair and balanced airing that wouldn’t cater to the haters, the
hysteria and general bigotry.’ He forgot the phonies!

He continued by criticising me for getting in touch with the other members in the email
chain, as if they had been off limits: ‘Although it is well within his rights to do as he has done
and find the email addresses of Tom and Frans off his own back, I can’t help but let the
thought pass through my mind that Andrew may well have thought “Fuck him, I’ll do as I
please”…Perhaps he is as untrustworthy as the BBC...the finger of blame could easily be
pointed at me for beginning this process of communication.’

He finished with, ‘Alas, I fear that the Beeb and Andrew are probably thinking, “These
people are paedophiles, fuck them, we just want to make a TV program. Maybe one day
society will wake the fuck up and listen to what we, who know what it is like to be child
lovers, are saying.’ I felt like I was really trying hard to listen to what Ed and the paedophiles
were saying, but their tone shifted so dramatically from one line to the next that it was
tough to make sense of what they actually meant or wanted.

In the space of one email, Ed went from writing about my good intentions to being
convinced I was in cahoots with the BBC in a devious plan to bring them down. Again, this
email seemed to shine a light on a type of behaviour I was beginning to associate with
paedophiles. I found it really odd and somehow unfeeling, the way they talked about me,
fully aware I was in the email chain. And it came out of nowhere, because I felt I’d been
nothing but polite and agreeable.

With the paranoia of Holden Caulfield, he’d picked me out as a phony and accused me of
going behind his back to email other paedophiles (and the BBC, who had nothing to do with
this investigation). I also think their emails speak to a high level of narcissism. In reality, Ed
was just one of the many people with attraction to minors that I had contacted, but he was
assuming that my other contacts had all come through him; he placed himself in the middle
of it all, believing he was the Paedophile Zero and taking responsibility for my interactions
with the others (who seemed happy to talk with me). To me, this version of Ed’s illusion of
grandeur is absolutely a blend of Hannibal and Holden.

And while we’re on the topic of illusions of grandeur, I’d like to just re-affirm that I in no
way consider myself qualified to make these sweeping statements about the attitudes of
paedophiles. It just seemed to make sense to me that, since paedophiles had a stunted
sexuality and were stucked in their childhood, they might also have other traits associated
with the teenage mind, just as I had initially wondered about Michael Jackson and Jimmy
Savile. This might be off the mark; but at the very least, my observations help to present a
picture of the kind of conversations I’ve been having with the most-hated community on
earth.

And these musings were also helping me with my expectations in dealing with Max, who I’d
been pushing to let me into the GSA message board for child lovers. He was one of the
admins and they’d been hesitant to let me in for months.

Max had been really tricky to get hold of since our swimming pool meeting. When he finally
replied to my request on Threema for access to the forum, he said the other admins wanted
to see my press card first.

I told him I didn’t have one and asked how else I could prove my worth.

He replied, ‘May I ask why you don’t have a press card while you describe yourself as a
journalist? I think it is impossible to effectively work as [a journalist] without one.’

Despite being a little more used to it now, I was still a little taken aback by his abrupt
rudeness. I felt that a more emotionally mature person could have asked me why I didn’t
have a press pass, without following up with such passive aggressive accusations. Where he
writes, ‘While you describe yourself as a journalist,’ he seems to be suggesting I lied and am
not indeed a journalist; just a fraud; a phony. Which is mad, because I’ve sent him links to
my documentaries. He can just look me up at any time.

We’d already met in person at the swimming pool, so he knew he didn’t have to fear me
and that I wasn’t pretending to be anyone I wasn’t. My face matched the guy with my name
in the videos; what more was there to be paranoid about? It seemed like his obsession with
phoniness and liars superseded his grip on reality. I sensed that he knew full well I was a
journalist, but was desperate to out me as a phony.

Then, in his second sentence, he was presuming to tell me about my own job. Either under
the impression that I was lying about my profession (which he already knew I wasn’t) or
believing me to be particularly amateur or disorganised in my work. Which, to be fair, is not
far from the truth, but he had no way of knowing that! I believed he may have wanted to
embarrass me, aware of the inevitable imbalance that comes from a conversation between
a journalist living a ‘normal life’ and a paedophile struggling with unspeakable urges. Maybe
he wanted to level the playing field by degrading my professional qualifications.

With all these ups and downs, I’m constantly treading a very thin line in my communications
with Max, having to grovel, backtrack and carefully explain myself, braced for his withdrawal
or stinging attacks at any moment. In response to his questioning, I wrote him a long
paragraph thanking him for asking and telling him I totally understood why he asked. I
explained how press cards were a little old fashioned for many modern-day journalists,
unless they had to cover a music concert, a sports event or something like that…and that he
had been the first person in my 8-year career to request one.
He didn’t reply to that.

I would have to keep pushing.

 7

The Forum and Zidane

While in the UK, I continued to communicate with Max through Threema and felt I was
finally beginning to earn his trust. To my surprise, he even relented to my desire to meet the
parents of the girls he was with in the park. I never expected him to say yes to that, because
I didn’t think he had been honest with me about informing them about his paedophilia. He
said they were currently on holiday, but that I could meet them the following week.

But for the time being, he finally granted me permission to enter the GSA forum for
paedophiles in Germany. So I went to the website, signed up with my real name and a
password and started leafing through the posts.

I wanted to see how Max and his fellow paedophiles were dealing with their various
conditions and sexualities. A welcome message pops up when you first reach the website:
‘This forum is open to the public and accessible to anyone over 14 who wants to – or is
forced to – be involved in paedophilia.’

The message goes on to explain that the forum is intended to help people with those urges
to feel less alone and to be able to learn from one another’s experiences. Then, it states:
‘The most important thing is the conviction that sexual activities between adults and
children should never take place!...Efforts to change laws on sexual activities with children
are not welcome here.’

Also banned (and removed by moderators) are any ‘undesirable’ links or images. In addition,
the website’s memory of IP addresses is regularly deleted to protect the anonymity of its
users (in case paedophile hunters tried to hack the forum).

Once inside and signed up, I was presented with a very basic message board; so stripped
back that it looked like a lost page from the 90s that people had forgotten about. Maybe
that was the idea. It had a section for help and rules, another for general issues and an area
for The Golden Paedo – a semi-serious annual prize for what members believed to be the
worst coverage of paedophilia by the media. By worst, they’re talking about what they
perceived to be anti-paedophile rhetoric that paints them as monsters and criminals.

In the 2018 category, the official nominees included these articles:

‘Paedophiles Rarely Seek Help’ – Wiler

‘Police Powerless to Stop Paedophiles’ – Bild
‘The Dachau of Ecclesiastical Paedophilia’ – Catholic.info

Often, the issue the members take with the articles is the blurring of the definitions
between paedophiles and offenders. To be fair, that’s something I struggled with myself
since embarking on this project. When we hear the word paedophile, we do tend to imagine
a snarling old man masturbating in the bushes by children’s playgrounds. But I can imagine
it must be really frustrating to be tarred with that brush if you see yourself as something
completely different.

I wondered if my book would ever make the list for the Golden Paedo. I figured it was more
likely than a Pulitzer.

As I scrolled down the list of anti-paedo articles, I saw the words ‘disgusting’ and ‘vicious’
written by paedophiles time and time again; members saw the press as the enemy, so I
could understand how it’d taken so long for me to gain access to their forum.

Elsewhere on the website, I found a list to paedophile forums across the world. These
ranged from Boymoments and Boychat to Christian Paedophiles and Visions of Alice. I didn’t
click on any of these, for fear of what might pop up. Given the warning sign on the GSA
forum, I felt safe where I was for now.

A comment on this post full of links informed me that many of these accounts and pages
had been shut down or moved. This was enough for me to surmise that they were sharing
images of child sexual abuse.

The aforementioned message board topics are also open to non-registered people who visit
the website. But once on the inside, I was able to see more secretive topics about friends
and family, therapy experiences and a place for new members to introduce themselves.

One part was called Reasons for Leaving and mostly consisted of desperate and resigned
people criticising the forum and asking for their profiles to be deleted. Others responded by
reaching out to them and offering their advice.

Some talked of how they were almost cured of their paedophile and currently enjoying a
normal and healthy life with an adult partner; they now saw this forum as an inappropriate
place to be spending their online lives, but thanked the other members of the forum for
their help. I imagined how envious and pissed off I’d feel reading that kind of thing if I were
another member continuing to struggle with my desires. It was pretty smug and, in my
opinion, disingenuous. You can’t just get rid of your paedophilia.
I found a few who wrote about what they perceived to be the hypocrisy of a community for
paedophiles: people who wanted to touch kids who congregated online to speak about not
doing the one thing they all wanted to do. A user call Tom wrote that he was defecting to
Krumme 13, the blog of Dieter Gieseking, the renowned former cop and advocate of adult-
child relationships who’d first brought me to the topic of paedophilia in Germany.

Some replied saying things like ‘good riddance’, while others begged him to stay and
reconsider his choices. ‘Don’t do something you’ll regret,’ one user told him. Tom replied to
these messages, ranting about how society preventing him from being with kids was just
like what we did to homosexuals just decades ago. A man known as Zidane stood up to him,
trying to ‘convert’ him to his own feeling that adults and kids cannot be together.

Zidane was the first to reply when I posted my first message on the forum. I wrote a long
piece in English, explaining that I was writing a book and wanted to meet any paedophiles
with fascinating stories to tell. I told them I’d met Max, the admin, and that I had cleared
myself with him.

Zidane replied in broken English, ‘Welcome. I speak’nt Englisch. Sorry.’

Max was next to respond, ‘Yes, I can confirm that we met. I am very excited about your
project and hope you will stay in close contact with us as far as it goes.’

I thanked him and explained a little more about my project. Then Zidane got onto it again, ‘I
became a criminal and still work as an educator. I am also father and grandpa.

‘Although I do not speak English, I would like to make myself available to the project.’

I was surprised at how readily Zidane trusted me with his address and access to his home. In
his position, I’d constantly be worried the journalist would turn up with the police and bust
down the door. Maybe deep down, that’s what he wanted. Maybe he was tired of living a
shadow of a life.

When I arrived at his apartment complex, a couple of small kids were playing with little
tricycles in the portico. I pushed the bell for his apartment and he buzzed me in. He was
waiting with the door open, a weak smile on his face. He looked far older than I had
expected, almost shockingly so (even though he was only 55, he later told me).

There was something very strange about his appearance; he reminded me of a cross
between a Vietnam war veteran and a hippy. Somehow bohemian and grim, a face besieged
by loss. He looked fucking sad.

We shook hands and he beckoned me into a small and dirty apartment. At this point, I knew
very little about him, but the first thing I noticed were the children’s toys and little toddler
mattress in one corner. Spread across the walls were photos of children, perhaps his own.
He took me through to the kitchen, which would be just large enough for me to take one
large step in. The window looked out over a drab set of highways and 1970s tower blocks,
beneath a grey, rumbling afternoon sky.

His eyes fixed to the ground, he muttered apologies in German about the lack of food
options. I declined a glass of water, in case he’d drugged it. This seemed incredibly unlikely
at the time, but I didn’t know him yet and I’ve always been paranoid.

We sat opposite each other, either side of a stool that was used as a table. I looked into his
sad eyes and could tell he was desperate to tell his story to someone. He reminded me of
the protagonist in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, whose punishment (or curse) for
shooting an albatross while at sea is to wander the earth, telling his story over and over to
anyone he meets.

Better let him get on with it then, I thought.

‘Do you speak English at all?’ I asked.

‘No, sorry.’

‘That’s OK. This will be my first full conversation in German, then!’ I told him.

When Zidane feels bad, he seems to physically deflate. His shoulders hunched, as he said,
‘Most people here do speak English. My disadvantage is that I can’t. I did learn a bit of
Russian in the DDR (East Germany).’

I recited a couple of basic phrases in Russian and he looked flummoxed. ‘That was a long
time ago,’ he said, ‘I soon moved to West Berlin and there was no school there that taught
Russian.’ I’d only meant to say something in Russian jovially, to make him feel at home; but I
think he felt even worse, as if I’d caught him out for lying about his language skills. It was an
awkward start.

He told me he suffered from depression. I wasn’t surprised. He said, ‘Oh yeah, very heavy
depression. I suspect it started when I was in my 20s.’

‘How was your childhood,’ I asked, looking for a subtle way of getting into his paedophilia.

He seemed to perk up at first and said, ‘My childhood itself was…’ he paused and his face
sunk into itself again. ‘Bad, really bad. Full of fear and loneliness. A lot of loneliness.’

He described himself as his family’s ‘oldest living son’, because several other siblings had
died before he was born. He spent much of his infancy in a hospital, while they tried to find
out if there was any reason the other children had died. It was an inauspicious beginning to
life.

His father couldn’t read or write. He suffered from heart and lung problems, as well as an
intense form of asthma and was eventually forced to stay at home. ‘It was hard. He wanted
everything for me that he could no longer do. He wanted me to learn and was of the
opinion that he should einprügeln me.’

I didn’t know that German word and asked what it meant. He thought for a while and said in
English, ‘Um. Spanking?’ I wondered where he’d picked up what was a fairly obscure English
word for someone who didn’t speak any English.

‘He would call me into the kitchen when I was very young and tell me I was being punished.
I would have to go out and cut the roots from a willow tree. Then I had to come into the
kitchen and carve them down into whips. Then, I had sit and bend forward and pull my
trousers down on a stool in the middle of the kitchen. And he started to spank my bottom
with it,’ he explained. It got so bad that he couldn’t even remember most of it.

Then, he’d have to stand up and explain why he was being punished. After that, his father
would continue a little longer. ‘And it was so bad,’ he said, holding back tears. ‘One time, I’d
accidentally stepped on a cucumber in the garden. Up in the kitchen, you go. And this time,
my sister had to administer the punishment. It was so bad. That was my father. I had
moments…but a real childhood, I never had.’

This chimed with what Ben, the therapist I’d met at the abandoned airport, had said about
becoming stucked. I suppose – and this is not very scientific, but just my opinion – when you
miss out on a childhood, you seek to replace it the rest of your life, like MJ.

For 20 minutes, he continued to tell me about the different ways his father – and mother –
tortured and punished him. He felt like an außenseiter (outsider) in his family life and at
school. ‘Nobody wanted to have anything to do with me. I couldn’t talk to anyone. I was so
lonely.’

He left when he was 14 to live with an uncle in West Berlin. Although he still felt like an
outsider at his new school, as an East Berliner. ‘I was a stranger; a weirdo.’ I didn’t ask if he
was aware of the early works of Radiohead.

He first realised he was gay a year later, falling in love with a classmate of the same age. ‘He
was a beautiful boy,’ he said, through wet eyes. ‘He was a dream from a fairy-tale. Blond,
curly-haired, blue-eyed. I couldn’t hide it; but being gay wasn’t OK. It was considered sick.’

He was finally free from his parents. And then, ‘Suddenly a propensity for those that no one
may touch. There was no one to talk to either, this was the 80s.’

I replied, ‘So no GSA forum then.’

He laughed, ‘Absolutely not!’ It was clear how important that forum had become to him.

After he left school, in order to remain in contact with children, he found a job as a teacher
in a school. I said, ‘If I were in your place, I think I would try to stay away from a job like that,
because it would just be so tempting, like torture for you to be around so many kids.’
‘But I needed that contact. I grew up around kids and this was my desire to make up for my
lost childhood.’

Mirroring his own upbringing, he had also developed a fantasy for violence; particularly for
spanking. (This was how he knew the word.) Even thinking back to his own spankings, he no
longer reflected upon them through fear; it had become source of arousal to him. But he
didn’t trust himself around the children; constantly fearing he’d lose control and abuse
them.

He didn’t want that, but he really did want to work as an educator. So he went to see a
therapist, who told him to continue and come back in a year if he still had these problems.
Basically, it came down to a question of his insurance; and they didn’t believe he was
serious about being a paedophile; just a phase. He never went back. This was in the 80s still.
I believe that having the GSA forum and the Don’t Offend program back then would have
helped him.

He continued in his job as a teacher, absolutely loving being in contact with kids. He tells me
that nothing ever happened there, but that he would go home at night and the fantasies hit
him hard.

He often asked himself, ‘Is it right that I work as a teacher?’

He said, ‘God, it really frightened me. Gay was so difficult…but being attracted to little
boys…’ At 25, he went back to East Berlin to consider his options, while living with his uncle.
There, he became close with his 12-year-old cousin.

‘I had found kids so alluring. I’d found them so sexy and wanted to keep them near. But I’d
never fallen in love…when I saw him, it was love. I’m still in love with him,’ he paused,
finding it hard to continue. ‘I just had to glance at him once and it was enough. I can’t even
describe it.’

He suggested he take his little cousin away to Italy for a few weeks in the summer holidays.
‘My uncle was delighted. Why wouldn’t he be? The first people in the family after the wall
came down to go abroad. The first to see Italy!’

‘This is really like the book, Lolita,’ I said. He’d never heard of it. I wondered what it would
feel like for Zidane to read that book now, given the memories it’d almost certainly bring
back for him. Would it be cathartic? Or a kind of child porn? ‘It’s about a man who kidnaps a
little girl and travels around the U.S. with her. I think you’d like it.’

‘No, because it’s about a girl,’ he said, smiling. Fair point.

It turned out Zidane was able to spend 8 weeks alone with his little cousin.

‘Was he in love with you too,’ I asked, interested in how he’d answer.
‘That, I can’t exactly say. I was older, I had a car, I could take him to Italy. He was happy! I
don’t know if he loved me.’

The first week they spent together was totally normal – or at least Zidane’s take on normal –
nothing overtly sexual happened. ‘Of course, I did everything to get in physical contact with
him; like having him sit on my knee. But never going too far.’

They played football together and Zidane helped to train him. He said they became close, ‘It
was a really great friendship. But nothing happened that first week,’ he said.

Then, they started sleeping side by side and Zidane started to touch him. He couldn’t help
himself. ‘He was lying there right next to me, just in his underwear. It was warm. And I
reached across to feel him. His stomach, his back, his legs. He let me do it. I couldn’t hold
myself back. I had started to abuse him,’ he said through a long, deep inhalation, holding
back tears. ‘I told myself that if he ever showed he didn’t like it, I would stop.

‘He didn’t exactly say, “You may do it,” he just didn’t say “no”.’ They performed oral sex on
each other a few times, but the boy did say he didn’t want to do that anymore. But Zidane
continued to do these things to him. ‘We never did anal. I was too scared of hurting
him…looking back, I really think I manipulated him.’

This was his albatross. And it was why he was so forthcoming and desperate to share his
story. He explained about his cousin, ‘It was like his way of thanking me for doing all the
cool things I’d done for him.’

Zidane hadn’t seen him in over 20 years. His uncle soon became suspicious, after finding the
pair snuggled up in the boy’s bed several times back in East Berlin. He banished Zidane from
his house and he never saw the boy again. He cried, as he told me that he was still in love
with the boy. His cousin was, is and always will be the love of his life.

He tried to get in touch with the boy more recently through Facebook, writing in a message
that he’d really like to speak to him. But the boy – now a man in his late 30s – never replied.
From the photos, Zidane could see he was now married, with his own kids.

‘What did you want to say to him?’ I asked.

‘I just wanted to know how he was.’

‘Do you feel bad about what happened?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, dejected. ‘But for me, the relationship never ended. I still feel so strongly for
him.’

‘For him or for the 12-year-old boy?’

‘The 12-year-old.’
‘He no longer exists.’

‘I know. What’s terrible is not knowing if I really caused him damage.’

Zidane went on to find a woman he liked enough to marry. ‘The sex was great and I felt like I
loved her for the first years. But it was different to the love I felt for my cousin. She became
pregnant and it was the first time in my life that I felt like a normal human. I had a wife; I
had sex with her; I enjoyed it. And I had no desire for…something else.’

Then, news came suddenly that his father had died, turning his world upside down once
again. It was a shame, because Zidane and his father had just established contact again. His
father had softened with age and told him he wanted to talk about his upbringing. ‘I was so
excited. It was going to be my first ever father-son talk.’

He died, before they could have that conversation. It was such a shock to Zidane’s system,
that his entire faux-happy-families bubble collapsed and he went into a depression, leading
to the breakdown in his marriage. Even now, he found this hard to talk about, constantly
knocking the tiny table with his knuckles, as if salvation could be mined from the wood.

Gradually, he managed to get the story out to me. His father had died of his fifth heart
attack, just 3 days after Zidane’s wife found out she was pregnant. It was to be a little girl.
Realising it wouldn’t be a little boy was a huge relief, as it meant he wouldn’t be attracted to
his own kid. Something most parents-to-be take for granted they don’t have to worry about.

He was down and his marriage ended. But his daughter was born healthy, becoming an
absolute daddy’s girl and spending every waking moment with him. They were incredibly
close, even after Zidane and her mother inevitably divorced.

He continued to work in education, bringing up sports teams and controlling his urges.
Mostly, he thought of his cousin. And then, while playing with his daughter and lightly
stroking her stomach one day when she was about 9, he was overcome with utter dread at
realising that those same old stirrings had come back. He was having fantasies about his
own daughter.

He had only been attracted to boys up to that point, but started to feel strong urges
towards his daughter. He explained, ‘Really, I suppose, it’s all kids. They look similar at that
age, boys and girls. From behind, they look the same. I didn’t want this. I really didn’t want
to do something to my daughter.’

In a panic, he rushed to his ex-wife’s house and dropped their daughter off. He vaguely
explained the situation to the mother…and totally disappeared from his daughter’s life with
no explanation, other than, ‘I’m ill’.

Sitting across the table from me, Zidane was a crumpled mess, as he recounted this part of
the story. Tears, snot, saliva, you name it. It had seemed a little extreme to walk out on his
daughter with no explanation; having heard that, I felt terrible for her, especially since she’d
been so close to him.
For a long time, he didn’t call her again and cried every day thinking of how his daughter
must hate him.

One day, the door rang. He opened it and saw his child’s face for the first time in 10 years.
She was now 19, but he recognised her instantly, despite not having seen any photos of her
since she was 9.

They met up again a few times and he finally explained the reasons behind his absence. To
his relief, she seemed to understand; and they have a relationship today, if a little strained.

But there was to be another twist in Zidane’s sad story. A couple of years later, he was
arrested and received a suspended sentence for viewing and downloading child abuse
images. He’d been in a forum where they shared those kinds of pictures and videos. And it
was on a German server; he’d forgotten to use a VPN. The police surprised him at his door,
the same door his daughter had surprised him at just a few years earlier.

Much to his distress, the police had a warrant to go through his stuff. His sister and mother
were in the apartment at the time with him. Imagine how embarrassing that must have
been for everyone involved. The police announced loud and clear, ‘We’re here because we
know child porn has been downloaded here.’

He was no longer allowed to work as a teacher or train children in any capacity. He was
blacklisted and wasn’t even allowed to play football himself.

His daughter reached her 30s and had her own children. And so that Zidane could spend
time with his grandchild without arousing suspicion, he was chemically castrated. This
means he took pills to limit his libido and prevent compulsive sexual thoughts.

It also may have explained why he looked a little unusual to me, as this was inhibiting his
testosterone. His physical appearance reminded me a little of certain cancer patients, who
are forced to take similar drugs that reduce testosterone, while fighting the disease.

Recently, he’d been able to continue working with teenagers in sports clubs. Looking at him,
I believed he was no threat; and I don’t imagine he had any sexuality left in him. His whole
body was somehow limp.

Part of me couldn’t really forgive him for his Lolita excursion with his little cousin. I spied his
laptop in the corner of his murky room, wondering if any child porn was presently on there.
I didn’t ask; it didn’t feel necessary. Maybe the chemical castration really halted his interest
in child sexual abuse images.

As I studied the photos of his daughter and grandchild on the walls before leaving, I did feel
a little bad for him. His sexual desires – perhaps influenced by a ‘stucked’ and severely
broken childhood – had shaped his life trajectory and defined him. One day, upon his death,
he’d be remembered by family members and old colleagues simply as: ‘paedophile’. A shell
of a person, he was destined to continue telling his story to anyone who would listen. But
the one person he’d never be able to reach was the only one who really mattered to him: a
12-year-old boy who no longer existed.
 8

The Mother
‘Good afternoon, my name is Andrew, a journalist who has been speaking with “Max” about
paedophilia. I believe he told you I would like to speak with you?

Thanks,
Andrew’

This was the first message I sent to the mother of the little girls who had been with Max at
the swimming pool. Max had passed me her Threema details – I was a little surprised that
the mother of these girls even had this ultra-secure app. Perhaps it was just what she used
to communicate with Max, the paedophilic babysitter of her children.

Or perhaps she wasn’t real? Maybe this was just another Threema account of Max’s or a
friend of his. I knew nothing about her, not even her name. And she didn’t reply. On a later
date, I tried again, this time in German:

‘Hello,

I’m sorry to disturb you, but I would really like to have the opportunity to speak with you
about my book. Would that be possible?

Thanks!
Andrew’

Nothing.

It had now been a few weeks since I’d met her little girls and I was feeling anxious and guilty
about not having done anything. If they were being abused and just one more incident took
place in the time that I had failed to get a meeting with their mother, then that was on me.
The rest of the day, I kept checking my phone to see if she’d responded. Phantom vibrations
were taking hold of my pockets, getting me to check for nothing.

I began to suspect Max had provided me with a fake account to keep me off the trail and
delay my investigation. Then, some hope. A little eye icon had appeared beside my
message, indicating it had been read. I now knew I was at least interacting with an active
Threema account; a real person.

The following day, a reply in German:

‘Hello, the time unfortunately ran away from me. We can absolutely meet and I also had a
similar idea but didn’t have the time for it. But have been thinking about a structure and
preliminary thoughts.

When would you like to talk?’

I was a little taken aback. I had wanted to speak to her about why she was letting her kids
run around with a paedophile…but her initial response suggested she was writing a book
about the topic herself. Were here kids the test subjects? I wondered how deep she’d
gotten into their world.

When I told her I was in Germany, she was surprised, ‘Ah, you live in Berlin? That means we
can meet in person.’

This was also a shock for me, because I’d imagined Max had told her more about me and
that I was in Berlin. But her message meant she didn’t even know I’d met her kids at the
pool with Max. What did she really know about Max?

On a hot Friday morning, a week after our initial messages, I hopped on a bus to meet her.
She’d invited me to her house. She lived about half an hour away from my place and, once
again, I provided my family and friends with everything I knew about her and Max. It was
not all that much, but at least they had the address I was going to.

I should probably provide this information to my family any time I go to a stranger’s house
for a journalistic pursuit. But I don’t tend to. I wonder if I was being overly-cautious because
of the paedophile theme. Why should I be? These people are not monsters; they just hold
uncontrollable attraction towards minors that are usually not acted upon. But I suppose the
stigmatization and secrecy surrounding the whole thing worried me. Someone might be
afraid that I’d give them up and plot to kill me. Max knew I wanted to meet the kids’ parents
now, so had he arranged for some heavies to meet me at this address?

These were the thoughts swirling through my head, as I walked towards her house from the
bus stop. She hadn’t replied again since our messages the week before. If she real, I hoped
she’d remember I was coming. When I arrived, it suddenly dawned on me that, although I
had her building address, she hadn’t told me her name or flat number.
I sent another message and waited. After a few minutes, I curled up in the portico. I often
do that; I hate standing up for a long time. Even as I write this, I’m lying in an awkward
position on the sofa…can’t be good for my posture.

After 10/15 minutes in the doorway, I still hadn’t received a reply, so I started fiddling with
the Threema app and found a way to call through it. A woman’s voice answered in German
and buzzed me in. ‘Zweite stock!’ she said. Second floor.

Does the ground floor count? I climbed up the stairs and saw her door was open. A woman
with long ginger hair and bundles of ginger freckles – I’m going to call her Lucy – was
walking around on the phone, busy. She acknowledged me with a nod and I stood there
awkwardly, staring at my feet while waiting for her to finish her phone call.

Beside my big clown-like feet were dozens of pairs of tiny shoes. I’d also worried that Max
would have found a patsy sympathetic to his cause to pretend she was the mother of the
children. But this seemed pretty legit. The apartment was clearly a family place, although
the kids weren’t there. It was school time.

When she got off the phone, we shook hands. I apologised for my sweaty hands and said I
was dying from the heat. At that, she offered to go and get me a glass of water. Typically in
these situations, I always decline, in case they poison it. But I was clearly thirsty and didn’t
want her to know I didn’t trust her, so I said yes.

As I sipped on the water the rest of the meeting, I kept imagining I was becoming dizzy or
faint. I was imagining my vision going cloudy, her twisted, smiling face the last thing I saw
before passing out.

She offered me a seat and we sat on opposite sides of a large, round table. To give you an
picture, she was about 40 years old, medium height and somewhat bohemian. She had a
very relaxed posture and attire, but a typically German stoicism behind it. And she really
was extremely ginger, pale and freckly; to the point that, I’m ashamed to say, I couldn’t help
thinking about it all the time. I wondered if she’d had to hide beneath umbrellas at all times
during her recent holiday.

Silence passed between us, before I asked, ‘What is your relationship in all of this? Are you a
journalist?’

‘No. Umm.’ She paused. ‘Actually, I have a question about what you are doing with the
book. Will you make one chapter about the crazy woman in Germany who runs educational
workshops on paedophilia? Or are you just taking some information from my knowledge
and putting it in the book? What do you want from me?’

I replied, ‘I guess a bit of both. I wanted to meet somebody from the Don’t Offend program
and they put me in touch with Max – you know him, right? And we went to a swimming
pool in Neukölln…’

‘Oh my!’ she said.

‘Are they your daughters?’

‘Yeah,’ she said, smiling sheepishly, somewhere between pride and embarrassment.

‘I was really surprised because this was the first time for me meeting a paedophile and…’

Imagining the scenario, she began to laugh hysterically at this point, ‘You probably didn’t
expect him to turn up with children!’

‘Especially in a public swimming pool.’ I added. She fell into a fit of laughter for half a
minute. I think part of that laugh came from her relief that my tone was curious and
interested rather than accusatory.

‘Yes, especially in a public swimming pool, where you have this paedo-criminal scene
lingering around…and with this man communicating with children!’

‘I was wondering if he was trying to prove something to me, to show me he was OK with
children and can be in the swimming pool…’

She smiled and explained, ‘No, no, it was just that I had a meeting and needed somebody to
look after the children. I had a job to do and I was just asking some friends if they could look
after the kids, because it was school holidays.’ Max’s story was beginning to check out,
which was probably a bigger surprise to me than if he’d been lying.

‘I thought he was maybe not telling the truth. Because I asked if he’d told the parents that
he’d had these desires and he confirmed that. He said that you insisted you look after the
children.’ I added. She nodded. ‘That’s true, then?’

‘Um. I mean, um…’ she began to think. ‘What do you mean with insisted?’

‘Well that you asked him to look after the children and he said no and you insisted.’

‘I mean, I did not really insist on it, it’s his choice. But what I saw is…I mean, it’s quite
interesting. I got to know him four years ago as somebody who had still a little bit fear of
himself,’ she said, in heavily accented yet fluent English. ‘And he was unsure of how would
he behave in contact with kids, because he never had a close contact with them.

‘And what I saw was someone who had a lot of self-reflection to a very high degree. And
was very critical about what he was doing and how he was behaving. Much more than any
other person that I know who is around children.

‘I think many people make mistakes with children, by being rude in front of them or
unfair…and they don’t even think about it. But Max was all the time thinking about his
actions, what is good and not and so on in front of them. So, for me, it was like,’ she burst
out laughing uncontrollably again for 10 seconds, ‘what am I afraid of?
‘And then I had a time when I was really looking for someone who could care for the
children and then I had in my head, “I could ask him. Or should I ask him? Or not? Or maybe
it’s too much for him or whatever.” And then I thought, “Why don’t I ask what he thinks and
he can decide.”’

I tried to understand her way of thinking but couldn’t help but find it curious for a mother to
get the paedophile’s opinion on whether he thought it was a good idea to look after her
kids. It was nice that she was concerned about his feelings, as she wondered whether it was
too much for him. But she didn’t once mention whether this was a fair and safe
environment in which to place her children. What about their feelings? And their safety? On
the one hand, I commended her trust and openness. But this also seemed like an
experiment, with her vulnerable children at the heart of it.

‘And then I asked him,’ she said.

‘Did he say yes straight away?’

‘Not really straight away. In the beginning he was like no. Actually, I can’t remember. I guess
the first steps were being outside with the children alone. And then maybe being here (at
the house), so he was slowly getting used to contact with children. Then, he learned about
himself that this is no problem. This is just the hysteria from society.’

I was reminded of the Netflix documentary Abducted in Plain Sight, in which the parents
somehow allow a guy they know to be a paedophile to go off on holidays with their
underage child. Even after they find that he has abused the child, they let the daughter go
and work and live with him for the summer another time. And the abuse continues; the
parents are flummoxed.

The guy in that documentary couldn’t believe his luck. In my own recent experience with
paedophiles, there was Zidane from the paedophile forum, who was allowed to take his
little cousin on holiday for weeks on end, without his uncle suspecting a thing. In those
cases, the parents would probably have responded to my questioning exactly as Lucy was
doing now in the house.

She continued, ‘Anyway, most people have a paedophilic inclination. And the cruellest thing
about the stigma is that people internalise it. To believe that, “I am the monster and I
cannot control myself.” And it’s not easy to step out of this.’

I said, ‘Yes, I get that, but also, it does actually happen sometimes. Abuse, I mean. Maybe
most paedophiles can control themselves, but there are also many who take advantage of
children and…trusting parents.’

‘Mmm.’

‘So were you not at all worried that that might happen with your girls?’
She paused for some time; she didn’t like what I was implying. ‘I guess there is also the
paedo-criminal sub scene. It exists; there are individuals but there are also networks. Small
networks, bigger networks. And I’ve discussed that with people in the forum and my
impression is that in all the other forums, you have a mixture. You have these criminal
networks in those forums, especially in the homo-paedophilic forums.’

She clearly trusted Max, as he was an administrator for the GSA forum that didn’t seem to
advocate or have a criminal network for child porn and abuse…and he was also involved in
the U.S.-based Virtuous Paedophiles forum that advised against touching kids.

‘Maybe it’s a German problem, that’s my hypothesis. I am observing this and we have this
history in Germany that the homo-paedophilic sub-scene in the 80s and 90s were alongside
the homosexual movement fighting to lower the age of consent.’

‘You mean like Kentler and the Green Party?’

‘Yes, but a lot of others too! And these people are still alive and influence others. And this
has existed since the internet existed, as well as in pubs and networks and meeting at the
swimming pool, that kind of thing.’

At this point, I was flabbergasted by her reference to the swimming pool as the most typical
place that an offending, criminal paedophile and its network would gather. I didn’t know
whether or not she was right to trust Max, but the way she was able to separate the horror
stories of real-life paedophiles at swimming pools from her own kids’ experience was
beginning to frighten me.

She then went on to explain that many people who joined the criminal paedo-networks
were abused as children, ‘There are also people who faced…I couldn’t call this sexual
violence because they tell me “I’m not violent” but who were as children in this sub-scene
and they become perpetrators.’

She was gradually revealing to me how deep she’d gotten into the paedophilic circles. I had
no doubt she was making an honest attempt at trying to understand a stigmatized group of
people. But their influence on her was total. I was willing to listen and try to empathise,
when she spoke about paedophiles who chose not to act and denounced any form of child-
adult sexual relationship. But if they were able to convince her that child abuse could no
longer be termed as ‘sexual violence’, then I thought she was too far gone and I worried
about her little girls.

She said, ‘If you are a paedophile, then society gives you no chance. You are standing
outside of society. Then, you either internalise the stigma or you turn it round and then
society needs to be wrong. So, then there is the tendency to read studies about why sex
with kids is no problem; they think the only problem is society. That society harms the
children with its reactions to child-sex abuse and its morality and so on. There are many
sexual studies that say that sex with children is no problem.’

‘And where do you stand on adult-child relationships?’

‘There’s no chance to do it without harming a child. I agree that the moral reaction of
society is not the best and it makes the problem bigger. Yes, definitely. This is also the same
for women who faced rape. I mean, you have this violation of yourself and then the reaction
of society makes you the victim and also blaming you and making you feel guilty yourself.
Whether you’re a child or a woman, it’s not nice to be a victim.’

I thought I knew what she was getting at. If something bad happens to me, I don’t want
others to know about it. That makes it worse. And when people react more dramatically to
the event than you’d expected, It has an effect on you too.

She thought for a while. Finally, she said, ‘But children definitely have their own sexuality.
Something different from an adult sexuality, so maybe children might be curious and
curiously exploring for example the bodies of other children. And if there are rules, like no
big difference in the age, no one dominating, then it can be OK.

‘But if you watch this behaviour, it’s just curiosity, they want to know, they want to touch.
Once or twice, but not daily. And adult sexuality is more about the orgasm, which children
are not…and then the adults want to establish it to be something that happens more often.
And children don’t want to.

‘And then there is more and more pressure and you have a big power difference and
children want to also give pleasure to the adults and be loved. There’s no independency for
children in these relationships and it should in no way happen. Probably, we agree on this,
right?’

I agreed that kids and adults shouldn’t be having sex with one another.

She continued, ‘When talking with paedophiles, I say, “Maybe the problem is not the first
time you touched the boy. The problem is that then you started to establish sex in the
relationship with the boy and then it came to situations where the boy didn’t want this but
felt he had to do it or he’d lose the one person who loves me, because my parents and
teachers are arseholes. When they do it against the child’s wishes, then the problems start.’

‘So you think it’s OK for a one-time thing?’

‘I think that not in any case will the first time cause a big damage in the child. Probably then,
the reaction of society makes it bigger than it would be. If there’s no violence; if there’s
consent. I can also imaging an 11 or 12-year-old is curious. I think boys are more curious
about sex; I can imagine there are situations – as the perpetrators often claim – where boys
are the ones who started it.’

I think she was torn about her real feelings, because despite absolving them of blame, she
still used the word ‘perpetrator’.
She continued, ‘The boys want them to show them what an orgasm is or whatever. I don’t
know. I wouldn’t be very strict on this (one-time abuse), but then the adult wants it again.
And this is the problem.’

It occurred to me at this point that I didn’t know much about Lucy’s family and her children.
I’d seen three girls at the pool, but didn’t know if there were any other siblings. ‘Do you
have any boys? How many children do you have?’ I asked.

‘I have two girls.’

‘Two girls? OK. Max was with three girls.’ I started to doubt my memory again. Were there
three?

‘Yeah, this was another friend’s daughter.’

‘A friend of yours? And does that friend know that Max is a paedophile?’ I asked. She
nodded. I continued, ‘And it’s fine?’

She nodded again.

I said, ‘I suppose…,’ I paused and thought about how to phrase this delicately. ‘This is all
very new to me and I’m trying to understand what you’re saying. But I also think that by
letting him take these young girls to a swimming pool, it’s like giving him too much
temptation. If I had his desires, I would try to stay away from those situations.’

She replied, ‘I know roughly 30 to 35 paedophiles personally. And for some of them, the
temptation would be too big. But for most, they say, “If I have contact with real children, it’s
something totally different. I don’t have this sexual feeling when I’m around real children.
Then, I see that they’re children. That they’re something totally different to my sexual
fantasies. That they want something different to what the children in my fantasies want.’

She told me about a study done at the University of Kiel, where they tried to find differences
in the brains of paedophiles and non-paedophiles. Apparently, the parts of the brain related
to sexuality show no differences. But the parts responsible for self-control – for people of
any sexual orientation – are what makes the difference between perpetrators and non-
offenders.

She says that the section of the brain for mothers who care for children is also surprisingly
present in the brains of male paedophiles. She was suggesting that paedophiles have a
motherly instinct. And this was enough to convince her that people like Max could be
trusted around her daughters.

‘That is the much bigger part: for many, this feeling of giving the kids protection, caring for
them and so on is much bigger than sexual fantasies. For others, the sexual feeling is bigger.
People of all sexual orientations; some have bigger sex drives and some have this romantic
attraction.
She continued, ‘Apparently for people with paedophilia, there is a third dimension – caring
for children. This could be a biological explanation for what I heard from many paedophiles
– they say when they’re with children, they don’t have sexual fantasies. It’s more wanting to
play with the child and wanting to give them some pleasure.’

I replied, ‘So what makes them a paedophile then?’

‘The Don’t Offend program would say it depends on what photos you use for masturbation
and around the orgasm. If it’s always children, then it’s a paedophile. But I don’t think
sexual fantasies determine what you are doing; for example, many women have fantasies of
violence, but that’s not something you want to experience in reality. So, I’m convinced that
a healthy paedophile person can also differentiate fantasy from reality.’

I could sort of follow the logic of the theories Lucy was espousing, but I still considered her a
little naïve and careless. It’s one thing to take risks based on such a radical ideology with
oneself, but not with one’s kids. Yes, we all have sexual fantasies that we didn’t want to act
out in real life. But not necessarily fantasies that took over our lives and forced us to go to
therapy. To try and disavow her of her notion, I reminded her that Max had admitted to
abusing a young girl when he was a teenager himself. And that was just what he was willing
to divulge; there could have been many more.

I said, ‘But Max said he had touched…abused a child.’

She replied, ‘Touched. Or wanted to?’

‘Hmm. He said he tried and then he couldn’t get an erection.’

Lucy looked pensive and perhaps a touch nervous, ‘Yep, yep, yep. I think this is…I mean, the
difference in age then was not that big. So he was 16…’

‘I don’t know how old the kid was he didn’t tell me.’

She said, ‘8 or 10 or something. But if you’re 16, you’re not an adult and you’re kind of
exploring your sexuality. Most sexual abuse of children and youth is done by children and
youth. And not all of them are paedophiles. You’re curious, you want to try out, you want to
see. As a young person, your morality isn’t fully formed and your self-control is a bit
weaker.’

At this point, a side door I hadn’t noticed in the living room slowly opened. A fairly scruffy-
looking man popped out. He’d been in the side room, presumably working, the whole time?
I hadn’t realised. I stood up and we shook hands without a word – just a subtle nod – and he
went out into the hallway and kitchen, closing the door behind me.

Lucy’s husband had also become friendly with Max over the years and trusted him
completely with their kids. She worked as an anti-discrimination trainer across several fields,
including racism, LGBT and gender topics. So her MO was understanding the other side to
stigmatized topics and working them through. She had huge levels of trust and empathy and
I respected her for that.

Part of me was jealous of her ability to ignore prejudices and take a person at their word, as
she had done with Max. Because, for all my doubting, my loaded lines of questioning and
my snarky remarks in this book, there was still a very good chance that she was right about
him. And if that was the case, then it was genuinely awful that I’d been so quick to judge.

So far, Max’s stories had checked out. He had been honest to me about the mother of these
children and that she had sort of insisted he babysit her kids. And, as it turned out, he had
been honest about her reasons for joining the paedophilic GSA forum, where they met, too.

She asked me not to write much about the story that brought her to the forum, so I’ll be
vague. But as Max had said, she had had a friend with sexual attraction to minors. This
friend attended the same dance club (I’ve changed the setting for her benefit) as her and
often fixated on the children in the vicinity. He’d mention a certain kid who often came to
watch them; a kid that Lucy hadn’t even noticed or remembered. She suspected him for a
while and eventually heard how he’d been caught abusing a young boy.

It’s an important story to bring up because, firstly, it verifies Max’s seemingly ludicrous
claims. There really did exist a woman – Lucy – who – because she suspected a friend –
registered on an online paedophile forum, befriended one of the admins and insisted he
begin babysitting her children. It’s also important because I believe it shaped Lucy’s belief in
her own ability to spot an offending paedophile.

That is, because she’d already suspected her old friend, it was no surprise when he was
caught in the act (even though he still to this day denies everything). Yet Max is far more
subtle, thoughtful and controlled. She sees the two as night and day; and that might be fair.

But my sceptical mind believes that the one with more discipline is also likely to have more
control with regards to his own image and how he appears around others. If an intelligent
man were interested in her children, he wouldn’t advertise it. He’d play the long game, like
in Lolita.

Lucy seemed to be determined to see the good in these people. As she explained more
about the man from her dance club, she went back on herself, attempting to justify and
minimise. ‘Actually, he touched a boy – just touched – the genitals. And umm…not naked.
But the boy didn’t feel comfortable. It was just a short situation.’

In just that one short description of the event, she had managed to reduce his crime twice
(just touched, not naked) and then put the emphasis on the boy. To her mind, what her
friend did wasn’t objectively wrong; the problem was just that the victim felt
uncomfortable. You get the sense that, had the underage child welcomed the attention,
Lucy would have advocated it.

I feel bad just for mentioning this story, as Lucy asked me not to. So I won’t go into further
detail and I hope he can’t be identified from what I’ve revealed. And just in case, I should
emphasise that her friend denies that he has those feelings. She said, ‘If he heard me saying
this, he would explode. I don’t want to destroy this friendship; I think he’d still call me his
friend. I’m waiting and am trying to be his moral conscience.’

But I thought about how she became suspicious of him. It was the way he always seemed to
find himself surrounded by kids and noticing particular little boys around them. I said, ‘That
reminds me of Max, because I arrived and he was there with three girls.’

Before I could even finish, she was shaking her head, ‘No, no, no, no. Not at all. He was just
doing me a favour with the children. He lives not in Berlin, but two hours away from here,
so it was just for practical reasons that he agreed to meet you with the girls when he was in
the city. Maybe he had the meeting planned with you and then took the children and
thought he could combine it.

‘But this is not…he’s absolutely not the person who wants to impress somebody or provoke
somebody. This is not Max.’ she added. She was trying to dissuade me of my theory that he
wanted to prove something to me by appearing with those kids.

I obliged, ‘He seemed quite nice. I was just shocked at finding him with three girls in
swimming costumes.’

‘Max is really…he’s also to such a degree a religious person.’

‘Is he? Christian?’ I asked.

She nodded. I didn’t have the heart to say that that didn’t make me trust him more. But I
now began to see Max as a truly tormented soul. I felt bad for him and imagined him
praying to a silent god, wishing away his immoral desires.

I also thought that it might not be helpful to have someone like Lucy around. On the one
hand, she must help him feel more normal around kids, helping to destigmatise his sexual
feelings. But if she repeats to him the stuff she told me about one-off touching episodes
having no lasting effects, then what could she expect him to do when the urges took hold
during one of his babysitting sessions with her kids?

‘I presume you don’t tell your children about Max’s attraction?’

‘They don’t know. For me, it is an open question about when I will tell them. But I think I
can’t until they’re really adults. Not because they wouldn’t understand or would be afraid. I
want to tell them, but nobody else could know; they’d have to keep this as a secret, because
otherwise, Max is really in danger. I think children are not good secret keepers. This is why
we both…the father of the children also knows why we keep this away from the children.’

Again, it seemed that they were putting Max’s feelings above those of the children. I agreed
that it wasn’t ideal to saddle the children with such a deep and unnerving topic. But if she
was serious about ‘keeping this away from the children’, there were plenty of other
babysitters to choose from.
‘Do you worry how they might react, when you do tell them?’ I asked, wondering how it’d
feel to be told your mother had knowingly assigned a paedophilic babysitter for you.
Revisiting childhood memories that would now be tarred with an ugly truth and re-
evaluating your every moment in his care. That time he brushed against you, that time his
stare lingered, that time something hard was in his pocket – more on that last one in a bit...

‘No. My feeling is that they will be similar to us (her and her husband). You never know,
sometimes a child grows up and has an opposite worldview to her parents.’

I said, ‘Yes. You’re very liberal.’

‘They might be more conservative. But as far as I see them now, no. They wanted to go to
the LGBT parade and my older daughter wanted all the stickers.’

I kept thinking about how a large part of their childhood was shared with an older man who
was undoubtedly attracted to them. I said, ‘So, he’s taking them through the changing
rooms to get changed…do you ever want to ask them if anything happened or if he touched
them in any way. Or is it 100% trust?’

‘Max? I 100% trust him. I knew him quite well before I asked him if he wanted to care for
the children. And he’s very, very self-aware. When the children go to the toilet in my home,
they often leave the door open. So he would never go out of this living room. And when
they go to change their clothes or something, he makes sure he’s not around.

‘If my younger daughter wants to sit in his arms, he always takes care about how he touches
her then.’

Remembering something, her eyes lit up and she began to laugh again. She beamed, ‘There
was one situation when she was climbing on his lap, I think she was 5. And she was sitting
on his thighs and she was feeling something hard in his trousers.’ She thumped the table
several times to indicate the hardness, before breaking into uncontrollable laughter.
Continuing to bang the table, almost a little deranged, she screamed, ‘And then my
daughter said, “Oh there’s something hard in his trousers, what is it!”’ She was now
struggling to breathe from hysterical laughter.

‘Wow,’ I said, muted, with an awkward smile.

‘And then, it was his mobile phone, so we were really laughing,’ she continued, gasping for
air. ‘But this is something that could happen to any man, just because of this physical
movement of a child – that you have an erection. And for people with this inclination this is
often a horror or a shock because they think it’s because of the child. But it can happen to
any other man in this situation just because of the touching. So I was talking about this very
openly with Max.

‘And in no situation have I had the feeling that he was after the children, wanting to look,
touch…so it was all very self-reflective.’
‘Right,’ I added. ‘But he was always aware that you were there. I’m just playing Devil’s
Advocate.’ I then explained what that English expression means. ‘When you’re just trying to
look at both sides a bit. I don’t want it to seem like I don’t trust Max, as he does seem very
nice. But all the behaviour that you saw was when he was being watched,’ I said. She
agreed. I added, ‘Watched by you. So there’s a chance he’ll act differently when you’re not
there, right?’

‘No, I don’t think so. He’s not this kind of person. I think I have a really good intuition. I work
with these people a lot. I wouldn’t trust somebody after I know him for just one week.’

I was very sceptical about the mobile phone excuse; he may well have had an erection.
Although by the sounds of it, Lucy wouldn’t have been put off by that either, as Max cradled
her little girl. The shocking imagery of the hard trousers left me wondering what motivated
Lucy in all this. I asked why she was signing up to paedophile forums, meeting regularly with
so many paedophiles and fighting for them.

‘My interest in the whole topic has grown. I’ve been working for 20 years as an anti-
discrimination trainer and for me, it was a shock. I was convinced that racism or
homophobia were are biggest problems. And then, to experience that there’s a group of
people I’d never thought about who face a much bigger stigmatization than any other.

‘So this was like, “Oh, there’s something left out.” It’s kind of this taboo topic and they have
no chance, because they can’t even show their face. So how can you fight for improvements
if you can’t be open or show yourself. I was really shocked by this and I got to know Max
and when they began with the forum, I got to know more and more really nice people. I was
shocked by their stories and the stigmatization and criminalization without a crime – just for
their thoughts or their coming out.’

She went on to talk about people who had lost their jobs, their social standings, friends and
families just for coming out as a paedophile. Other times, this has happened when
neighbours or colleagues have simply suspected them and told police. The whole topic was
incredibly complicated and I commended Lucy for taking this on. She kept almost convincing
me, and then going a little too far and appearing a little too trusting or naïve.

This was also true of her views on child pornography or, as I’d learned to call it, child sexual
abuse images. Lucy referred to them as ‘documentaries of sexual abuse’. She said, ‘For me,
it’s the biggest issue. It’s something really attractive for someone who can’t act on their
sexuality. And there’s a danger of addiction. Things like naked children playing in the Baltic
Sea and someone takes a photo of it. This is child porn to some people, for me it’s just a
photo from the beach.

‘I personally have no problem if people use these kinds of photos if they’re open in the
public or if they use Instagram photos that are just there, for masturbation. I’m fine with
this.’

I countered, ‘If it was of your children?’

‘Umm. Even if it was my children. I wouldn’t like it if people passed around the photos.
Actually, I don’t put photos of my children on Instagram.’

‘Probably for the best,’ I said, ‘given your social circle.’

‘But if they do it, pff. You know, I also have my sexual fantasies about people who I saw.
Pictures of men or whatever. So I think this is kind of a double standard. But if we talk about
documentaries of child abuse, this is something else, something I’m really strict about.

‘But people are attracted to it a lot. It can happen easily; you look for porn and then you
click on the next button, then it’s just more open and obvious, and you have this kind of
addiction if you’re attracted to children.’

Her husband walked wordlessly back through the room. Once he closed the side door
behind him, she said, ‘He trusts Max too.’

I considered how I felt and said, ‘Hmm, maybe I trust him too.’

‘Look, if someone dedicates his life to running the website, running the forum…he’s
moderating the Virtual Paedophiles forum in the United States. So he’s spending most of his
time doing this work…and offending a child would destroy everything that he’s done in life.’

Michael Jackson regularly wrote songs about protecting and saving children. And Jimmy
Savile could always be found in children’s hospitals. In fact, he even used them to meet
vulnerable children. I asked, ‘How would you feel if you found out he was abusing children.’

‘I would never find it out,’ she said, shaking her head. She then went on to tell me about
another paedophile she knew who did rape a child. It was a shock to her, ‘I would never
have thought before that he was the kind of person who could do this.’

She was admitting to having been fooled before, but she couldn’t see the potential parallels
with Max. And so it was. It had reached a point of absolute trust in the relationship between
Max and Lucy’s family. Lucy had gone so far with him on this journey, that to find out she
couldn’t trust Max now would kill her. So, it felt to me, she looked the other way. She didn’t
want to find out if he had an ulterior motive now.

As I thanked her for our meeting and her candour, she began suggesting I meet with several
other paedophiles she knew. Like a salesperson, she listed off alluring prospects to whet my
journalistic appetite: a female paedophile, an 18-year-old just realising he was attracted to
kids, a married couple of paedophiles and a teacher romantically in love with a pupil.

By the time I was walking down the stairs of her apartment building, my head was
swimming with a buffet of sexual oddities, my phone abuzz with the contacts she was
already sending on Threema. The paedophiles of Berlin trusted Lucy like a communal
mother. That was perhaps part of the attraction for her. And after a year of investigation, I
was beginning to penetrate the inner circle.
I decided I’d spend the next few months getting to know their stories and trying to separate
their desires from their actions, with as little prejudice as possible. All the while, I’d stay in
touch with Max and see if I could accompany him on another babysitting event.