by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Defending
Our Kids: The Julie Posey Story, a Lifetime original production from 2003 starring Annie Potts (who was
just right for the role: not especially attractive, and with a whiny voice that
got grating at times, but also thoroughly convincing as a mother whose
protectiveness towards her own daughter got turned into a larger cause) in a
fact-based story about Colorado housewife Julie Posey. The film opens on the 13th
birthday of Julie’s daughter Krystin (Ksenia Solo), for which mom has made her
a shirt she immediately rejects as terminally lame and dad has bought her her
own computer. Krystin immediately starts logging onto chat rooms and meets
someone whose screen name is “magicman” and whose real name is Sam (C. David
Johnson); she befriends him online and eventually they set up a face-to-face
meeting — only mom gets alerted to what’s going on just in time when one of
Krystin’s schoolmates comes over to look up a homework assignment she and
Krystin were working on, and by accident the schoolmate and Julie accidentally
boot up Krystin’s chat-room account. In a thrillingly directed suspense
sequence (the director is actress Joanna Kerns, making her debut behind the
camera and turning in a marvelously effective job with a real flair for
thriller-type action) Julie gets into her black SUV (a vehicle which looks
awfully sinister itself trolling down the streets of Denver) and manages to
find her daughter and her daughter’s would-be molester just as they hook up in
the park. She reports the incident to the police but is told by detective Mike
Harris (a rather gangly Michael O’Keefe — actually one nice thing about this movie is that the people in it are
ordinary-looking instead of Hollywood-attractive and therefore more believable
in their roles than glamour stars of both sexes would have been) that there’s
no proof that Sam was actually approaching Krystin for sex and therefore
there’s nothing that they can do. Julie points to all the correspondence
between her daughter and Sam on the Internet and is told that’s protected
speech under the First Amendment — to which Julie replies, “Well, God bless
America, but keep him away from my daughter.”
Before this Julie had been
talking to her husband Jerry (Carl Marotte) about going back to work now that
Krystin is a teenager and therefore no longer needs as much supervision (now
that she’s meeting up with pedophiles on the Internet and making dates with
them? Yeah, right), but now she decides to
offer her services to the police as a free-lance cyber-investigator, trolling
the chat rooms herself and posing as a 14-year-old girl to make dates with
scumbags and thereby set up stings at which the police can arrest them. She
reluctantly persuades Mike Harris to work with her on doing this, and Mike
offers the services of Cassandra (the attractive Janet Kidder), who’s both his
police partner and his girlfriend (the imdb.com page on this film lists her
last name as Harris, reflecting their marriage during the course of the story)
and who’s petite enough she can pose as the physical incarnation of Julie’s
screen persona. The first sicko they bust is a charismatic piano teacher named
Steven (John Ralston, by far the hottest guy in the movie and someone who
projects the air of being so irresistibly attractive he could probably get
anybody he wanted, woman, man or child, to have sex with him!) whose perverted
fantasy is to deflower a 14-year-old girl while her mother watches. Then they
attract the attention of an even slimier slimeball referred to in the dramatis
personae only as “Texas Top Dawg”
after his vanity license plate, who sends a music box that plays “The Yellow
Rose of Texas” to the Posey’s home (leaving them scared shitless since Julie
never gave her the address) and makes arrangements to meet his supposed child
date at a diner — only Julie herself crashes the sting, against Mike’s solemn
warnings to stay out of the scene of any actual arrest, and thinks Texas Top Dawg
is reaching for a gun when all he was grabbing from his waist was a cell phone.
(She’d earlier been spooked by the pro-Second Amendment bumper sticker she’d
seen on his car, which is a black SUV not all that different-looking from hers.)
Then she’s called to
testify in court and the defense digs up Julie’s own dark secret — that she was
a molestation victim herself between ages 11 and 13, and though this was before
the Internet existed and her molester was a neighbor, he used the same dopey
lines as the modern-day pedophiles do. TTD’s defense attorney (a tall, wizened
and singularly homely older woman of whom it might be said, as Ralph Berton
said of his brother’s music teachers, that one wouldn’t think of her as female
except in the sense that the Statue of Liberty is female) uses that to suggest
that Julie’s real motivation is to work out the trauma from her own molestation
by targeting innocent people on the Internet and framing them for child sex
abuse. TTD is convicted anyway, but the incident leads Mike Harris to break off
his working relationship with Julie — though she continues free-lance and
finally the cops agree to work with her again since she’s still out there
finding people they don’t have the money or person power to reach and helping
them make cases against molesters. Eventually she runs across her daughter’s
would-be molester again — now he’s calling himself “samiam” and he’s a big-shot
architect designing a new performance-arts center in Boulder — only just when
she’s got him hooked on a chatroom the FBI comes busting in and seizes her
computer over her work on a different case. She runs into “samiam” on line
again, though, and this sets up a climax in which she has to pose as her own
teenage avatar (Cassandra broke her leg falling down stairs on the first night
of what was supposed to be her and Mike’s honeymoon) and meet Sam at night at a
crowded amusement park arcade, and she has to do that without the transmitter
that was supposed to broadcast her location and allow her to talk to the police
— so she’s at real risk of being ambushed in the remote part of the park to
which Sam led her before the cops finally track her down and arrest her.
Defending Our Kids has some problems, including its uncritical
endorsement of Posey’s activities (you wouldn’t know from this movie that she
is also a Fundamentalist Christian — in 2002 she moved to Wichita, Kansas, and
her current source of income is hiring herself out as a Web designer for
churches — or that that was raised against her by the defense in at least one
of the cases she worked) and the fact that after Dateline NBC and its work with a rival anti-predator group on
the Net called “Perverted-Justice” (which Posey, ironically, originally
denounced because they weren’t working with law enforcement the way she was)
these sorts of predator stings are nothing novel — and neither are the lame
excuses the perps come up with when they’re busted. There’s also a certain
degree of manipulation: writer Eric Tuchman’s script is well put together and
keeps us interested but there’s also a sense that he’s manipulated and
re-ordered the real events to create a classic three-act structure, and the
finale of her going after her daughter’s would-be molester and losing her radio
contact with the cops smacks of a screenwriter’s desperation to impose a climax
on a story that doesn’t naturally have one (as the closing credits remind us,
there are 450,000 registered sex offenders in the U.S. and 75 percent of them
use the Internet — today it’s probably closer to 99 percent and the 1 percent
who don’t probably don’t only because they’ve been paroled and one of their
conditions was not to go online — so whatever you think of Julie Posey’s
activities, and to me they smack of private-duty vigilantism even though she
was well trained and conscientious enough she knew to stay on the “right” side
of the law and not go into anything that would legally constitute entrapment,
the fact is there’s literally no end to them: there will always be desperately lonely teenagers, predators eager
to take advantage of them and an Internet that allows them to hook up).
But
overall Defending Our Kids is an excellent movie, a compelling story well told by writer Tuchman
and director Kerns and vividly acted by Potts, Kidder and especially Marotte (I
found myself identifying mostly with his character, a good-natured schlub who works in the warehouse at an electronics
retailer and isn’t drop-dead gorgeous but cute enough in a teddy-bear way it’s
easy enough to see why his wife is still attracted to him, and who makes his
frustration as her crusade takes over more and more of her life and keeps her
away from him both figuratively and literally — the scenes of him alone in their bed as she’s in
the living room tapping away on her keyboard in chat-room conversation with
some perv are heartbreaking). I left out O’Keefe because I found him a bit
homely — or maybe I was subconsciously flashing back to all those Law
and Order: Special Victims Unit episodes about pedophiles and wishing it could have been Christopher
Meloni in the role — but he’s right enough for the part and overall Defending
Our Kids is a great TV-movie even
though I can despise the sexual exploitation of children and still have a more nuanced view of Julie Posey’s
activities than the one presented in this film.
