Franics Rowe said: Here’s a time when I didn’t cry:
A long time friend of mine confessed that she was a paedophile. I felt intense pressure after that, because I had a lot of orders that month so I didn’t get round to reporting it immediately; I did post some samples of recordings that I’d made of our conversations, to immediately let everyone know I was no longer friends with her. This mattered, because she was at a low point in her life and may have confessed to more people; I did not want people to think I was covering for her in any way, and I wasn’t, so I needed to make the breakup unambiguous. I sent a lazy report to the FBI, but only actually bothered with a proper police report in her state about a month later. Nothing came of it, because the police did not have enough probable cause in spite of the confession, and she remained free. Oh well. Destroying her didn’t give me much of a kick, but it seemed like the most appropriate response.
At one point, she called me on the phone, begging me to stop, pleading for her life as she did not want to be killed or raped in prison; such was plausible, in her country, though I simply told her that it was “not a foregone conclusion” and she eventually hung up in frustration. I told her at several times that the correct response is prison, or whichever sentence is deemed appropriate by a judge; I did not tell her that she deserved punishment. I only said that the correct response was imprisonment, berating her for the stupidity on her part of having confessed to me in the first place. My emotional state was neutral, throughout the call; I did understand her fear, at one point even articulating that fact while calling her fears “unfounded”. I was torturing her, at a psychological level, during that entire call. A friend of mine was listening to the call. The purpose of this and my other efforts recording her was to demonstrate her competence, in case it ever did go to trial. I fully cooperated with the police in her state, talking to them daily via email and telephone. The police lady I spoke to was highly professional.
There is a part during the recording in which I cough, and then clear my throat. It seems relatively innocuous to the casual listener, but it was intentional and also part of my torture (LOL); she suffers from tourettes syndrome and that sound triggers violent twitches on her part. These twitches cause extreme psychosomatic pain, which leaves her thoroughly disabled for roughly one minute; the pain is felt physically and psychologically. I’d avoided making these sounds throughout my conversations whenever I spoke with her, as I’d also trained myself to avoid them in public speeches. Ditto um, er and so on - these too, also triggered her twitches. In the recording, I decided to punish her indignation with coughing. This is why she said, in that part of the recording: “Please stop clearing your throat; it hurts!”
I did not feel anything about her victims; I did not even feel disgusted by the confessions, and they were extremely detailed as I’d made her confess more while I recorded her. I’m not a paedophile myself, and I knew intellectually that she simply had a disease; this is not to say that one cannot exercise restraint either. I know that the correct response is to report paedophiles, so that is what I did. She trusted me, confiding in me at the time, unwise though it may have been on her part. I shall remember our conversations fondly, prior to the confessions, as she was otherwise a genius in her field. She was the author of several projects pertaining to computer emulation. I vividly remember her once stimming across her parents’ house in a call with me, explaining to me how the GPU works in a Sony PlayStation 3.
