The man whose child porn empire included the site which got Peter Townshend of the Who in trouble for merely researching it kept a "secret" diary?that was published online and is still reported there, according to a British television documentary.
Meet Thomas Reedy – who was sentenced to 1,335 years in prison, and whose child porn empire attracted a reported a quarter of a million customers around the world. And it never occurred to Reedy that he was doing anything wrong, not even running classified ads which featured parents offering to swap their children for sex, the report says.
One entry in the diary pretty much said it all: "The main thought running through my head is that I will finally be able to defend my company as we have done nothing wrong."
The diary was discovered "only recently" by those who made Crash of an Internet Porn King, according to the BBC, which plans to air the program May 20 and says they received correspondence from Reedy himself from prison. Reedy's sentence was reduced recently?but he'll have to live to be 200 to walk out alive.
The BBC says Reedy believed his customers would pay to read the diary and help his legal defense costs, but not many did. He began keeping the diary in September 1999, on the day his business was first raided, though he wasn't arrested until later on. His first entry: "Over 50 agents - more than in the initial Waco Raid - were in attendance, seizing documents and business records. Also seized was $1,000,000 in receivables waiting for processing."
A former male nurse, Reedy ran his operation with his wife and "a handful of old school chums," the BBC says. He began by selling adult porn in 1996, but discovering the competition too strong even then, he began working with child porn?and was "swamped" with business, the BBC adds. One of his sites – which were mostly based in Indonesia, Russia, and Eastern Europe – showed 1,277 signups compared to only one for one of his adult sites in the same month.
The diary entries stopped in April 2000, just before Reedy's arrest. "Once the jury had seen the horrific images Reedy was peddling, there could be only one outcome," the BBC says.
