Gerard Jones Arrested on Charges of Child Pornography

David Welsh
9/12/20

The comics world was rocked on December 29, 2016 when popular media and comics historian Gerard Jones was arrested for possession of child pornography.

He had uploaded an illegal video to a private Youtube channel, showing a 12-year-old girl performing sexual acts on an adult male and female, and repeatedly sodomized by them.

Google, the owners of Youtube, alerted the police, who began an investigation and obtained a search warrant for Jones' premises.

Jones was born in Cut Bank, Montana on July 10, 1957 and grew up in Los Gatos and Gilroy, California. He wrote for National Lampoon along with his friend Will Jacobs from 1983-88. Together, they wrote a book parodying the TV show Leave It to Beaver, titled The Beaver Papers: The Story of the Last Season [1983]. They also wrote comics together, creating The Trouble with Girls.

In a solo comics writing career, Jones also created Prime, a take on Captain Marvel where a 13-year-old boy is given superpowers by an evil alien, and the DC character El Diablo.

For DC, he also wrote Green Lantern, especially the noted series Green Lantern: Emerald Dawn, and Justice League and The Shadow. For Marvel, he wrote Wonder Man. Perhaps the greatest financial success was for manga company Viz, adapting English translations of the popular series Dragon Ball, and Ranma ½.

In 1994, he had a conflict with DC editor Kevin Dooley and left comics to focus on non-fiction books of popular media criticism and comics history.

These books are Honey, I'm Home: Sitcoms, Selling the American Dream [1992], The Comic Book Heroes: The First History of Modern Comic Books - From the Silver Age to the Present (with Will Jacobs) [1996], Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Superheroes and Make-Believe Violence [2003], and Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book [2004].

He was working on another book, to be titled Nation of Faith and Flesh: The Moral War That Shaped America, but all the work was on computers that were seized by police.

December 29, 2016 they executed the search warrant for his home on Long Bridge Street in San Francisco's Mission Bay neighborhood, and found tens of thousands of images of child pornography on various electronic devices, and hundreds of such videos showing adults sexually abusing children as young as one year old.

He was arrested the same day at a coffee shop a few blocks away, and admitted to police that he downloaded and possessed the material, had uploaded it by accident and tried to stop the transmission, and that he liked to look at pornography with children from 9 to 12 years old.

DC immediately canceled planned reprints of several of his comics.

In January 5, 2017 Jones was formally charged with possession of child pornography, production of child pornography, sending harmful material to a minor, and distribution of child pornography. He pleaded not guilty.

Jones was released on a $250,000 bond with an ankle bracelet and a home monitored curfew between 6 p.m. and 7 a.m., with a single exception when he attended the funeral of a friend.

He told his friends he was innocent, and that hackers had broken into his system and used it as a server without his knowledge. His Facebook message to fans read, "Thank you to all who have offered emotional and spiritual support. More will be revealed with time. I'll be okay. I'm still me. Take care of yourselves."

Jones's long-time colleagues in the comics industry had known him for decades and had never seen that side of him, so some didn't believe he was a pedophile. When he asked for letters as character witness statements, several provided them including Mark Badger, Mike W. Barr, James Hudnall, and his writing partner Will Jacobs.

Homeland Security also investigated the case, to find whether Jones had traveled to London, England for purposes of sexual activity with a minor. He had met an English girl online when she was 15 and started a cyber-relationship. He sent her sexual images, and traveled to meet her when she was 17, and they had sexual intercourse when she was 18.

The trial was to begin March 12, 2018, but after a year of maintaining his innocence, Jones changed his plea to guilty. On March 18th the trial date was vacated due to the change of plea, and a hearing on the matter was scheduled for April 2. The prosecutor filed a Motion for Mandatory Remand, wherein following the plea the defendant would be placed in custody pending sentencing. They said the collection of child pornography was "extensive and horrific." Having more than 600 such images is punishable by California by five years or more in prison, and this was in the tens of thousands.

The defense countered that Jones had no prior offenses, and was seen as a low risk of recidivism or abscondment. They told the judge that Jones had participated in weekly individual therapy since January 17, 2017 without missing any sessions, and that he attended 12-step program called Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. A psychologist described him as "overwhelmed with shame"
They added that "his arrest for the controlling offense has caused him to lose many job contracts that he had in place and he is experiencing financial hardship. He also indicated that while his wife has stayed with him after his arrest for the controlling offenses, the circumstances surrounding his arrest have devastated her and their relationship is distant at this point in time" and showed that psychiatrist concluded that Jones does not meet the diagnostic criteria for Pedophilic Disorder, and that they found he "does not present a danger to the community." The defense submitted the character witness statements to help convince the judge to give him bail before sentencing. In an unusual move for such a case, Judge Chhabria granted bail.

Gerard Jones pleaded guilty to two felony counts of violating 18 U.S.C. Section 2252, possession and distribution of child pornography. He was sentenced to six years in federal prison on August 14, 2018, and ordered to pay an assessment of $10,200, with another hearing to determine an amount of restitution.

He had kept a blog before he was arrested, and started another while in jail. He has no computer access, so writes on paper, and has friends transcribe and upload them to "The Porn Prison, from Addiction to Freedom, From Exploitation to Love."

This is done with the encouragement of his wife and his psychiatrist, seeking redemption through helping others with their own addictions to pornography, whether child or otherwise. If viewing such material negatively affects marital, family, or business relations, or desensitizes a person to other stimuli, it can be said to be an addiction.

Jones acknowledges his guilt, and says that he was not really interested in sex with children, just the thrill of finding more and more extreme things to view.

Samples from his prison blog include: "I didn't commit my crimes out of any lust for children. I got myself hooked on a cocktail of prescription stimulants and ordinary internet porn, and from there I followed the ruthless logic of addiction, of increasing tolerance and increasing hits. With the drugs I could do more pills. With the porn, a fiercer hit meant more shock, more taboo, more ugliness."

"There’s also another, simpler way I hurt the children in those images: I got myself caught, and that means the courts notified the victims. The awareness of countless strangers looking at pictures of their childhood abuse isn’t abstract to those victims; every time someone like me is indicted they are told who did it and where and when. So far at least nineteen people know that I, personally, owned photos or videos of them being violated as children. I hurt all of those people—not in concept but directly, individually, for real."

"I committed my crimes through my own volition. I victimized the people in those photographs. I participated in a process of exploitation that could lead to more people being victimized. In the process, I betrayed my loved ones and my colleagues. I did that. And I’m very sorry. I want to make amends."