PITTSBURGH, PA — While Karen Fletcher’s prosecution is a success of sorts for the Department of Justice – it’s not necessarily one that can rightfully earn a proud victory lap. After a year and a half of battling the agoraphobic and socially anxious 56-year-old housebound woman, she has agreed to plead guilty to obscenity in order to avoid what is likely to be a week-long court room ordeal.Although Fletcher’s First Amendment attorneys would prefer to see an acquittal – and address the important legal question of whether text-only material can be obscene — their client’s incapacitating fear of what lies beyond her front door makes the guilty plea a far more appealing option.
Fletcher, who once ran the Red Rose Stories website, was accused in 2006 of six counts of distributing obscenity online due to the nature of the fictional tales that she and her handful of $10 per month subscribers posted.
At issue is the fact that the site’s contents featured tales of rape and torture; something found in many forms of literature, but this time focused on children and the occasional infant.
According to Lawrence Walters, one of Fletcher’s attorneys, the case might have been entirely different had the client been entirely different.
“With a different client, with somebody who had the strength to fight, there might have been a different outcome,” Walters told the press. “While we’d like her to be a standard-bearer on First Amendment issues, this is not the person to endure a trial.”
Walters, and others who have watched the case proceed, fear that incarceration could be a death sentence for the mentally and emotionally frail woman who says the tales of terror she and others penned have helped still demons from her own life.
In order to avoid the possibility of incarceration, Fletcher, whose income depends upon disability payments, plans to plead guilty on August 8th before U.S. District Judge Joy Flowers Conti. This will allow her to avoid prison and live life much as she has; exclusively within the walls of her own home. This time, however, Fletcher’s self-imposed exile will have the government’s stamp of approval – and no access to the internet, since her computer is in the possession of the government.
Fletcher says she remembers nothing about her life prior to the age of 14, when she ran away from home, has explained that she began writing her fictional stories of hideous child abuse as a form of cathartic release to deal with likely sexual abuse she suffered as a minor.
“At first,” she writes, “I would capture a particular feeling of dread and try to weave it into a scenario that explained the feeling.”
Whether those feelings relate to violations from her past is unknown even to Fletcher, who has been able to face the court only once during her case, due to her debilitating fear of what she calls “monsters.”
“I may still be afraid of the monsters,” she observes, “but at least in the stories, they prey on someone else, not me.”
Defense accounts have related how Fletcher required a $10 monthly fee to join the website in order to keep children from viewing the disturbing material. Further, she has explained how she kept careful watch on the 29 site members to ensure that none posted photos of genuine child-adult sex.
U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan, likely smarting from her failure to convict Extreme Associates, has no sympathy for Fletcher or her lifelong battle with “monsters.” Instead, she has categorized the woman’s writings as “disturbing, disgusting, and vile” and insists that such work encourages others to actually commit acts of violence.
Others, including First Amendment attorney and Free Speech Coalition board member Reed Lee, disagree.
As Lee sees it, however horrific, Fletcher’s untrue tales satisfy the so-called Miller Test and possess serious artistic, literary, social, or political value.
“Even if you don’t think there’s political value in it,” Lee explains, “there’s tremendous social value in breaking that spiral between silence and shame.”
Fletcher’s case had the potential to become historically important, since the federal government has never won an obscenity case under current laws when the material in question has exclusively been the written word.
Lee points out that, unlike disturbing or challenging imagery, “With text, you can always stop reading. You’re less likely to be offended than if an image is just splashed at you.”
Although disappointed that their client has opted to avoid a court ruling on the subject, Walters says that “Our first obligation is always to our client, even though it may not be in the best interest of constitutional rights, in general.”
