My Conversation With Rob Taylor

From my Facebook. Also note that he is much more civil when he has to talk to someone directly than when he attacks them on his blog, calling nearly everyone who isn't him a child rapist. Let me put it this way: I like Email!Rob. I can talk to him, and he is very polite. Blog!Rob seems to be out for the attention he gets by being a sensationalist, and doesn't seem to admit he's wrong very well.

But, in any case, here is our conversation, him in bold, me in italics.

I saw your comment and would like to give you a forum to fully express your point of view. I have responded already and my feelings are unchanged but I'm old fashioned enough to remember when we of the Old Ways looked out for younger sisters and brothers. Though I have no sway with PJ on whether your page will stay up and will relate your new found disaprroval to them on my blog and privately.

I also think you could do much good for children by helping out if you have indeed recognized your errors. The grooming of victims is something many don't understand and your experience could be a great help to parents.

Thank you. This whole ordeal has come back time and time again, and it's not a period in my life I'm proud of. I was young and I was misled into thinking that they were the morally just party. I know now that that is not true, and I want to correct what I did. If you know of any advocacy organizations that could benefit from my experience, please let me know. I want to help in any way I can to prevent what happened to me happening to someone else. It ruins your life, and you never suspect that anything is wrong. I can only be glad that I realized that there was.

Pagans Against Child Abuse is good but we'll want to check you out first. I'm curious. You were groomed for the site (not unusual) but why and how? I think we need to know how you came into contact with these people in the first place.

I would say visit a site called Absolute Zero United. And on a religious note there are rites you can use to control your, shall we say impulses. I am an alcoholic and I control my addiction in part through magic. I feel as though your own shall we say addiction, can be controlled the same way.

Also people, place and things. You need to cut ties with not just the people online, but the materials and morality they represent. Let me ask you a question-why did you comment on that post today?

Thanks again, and I'm sorry this is going to be such a long message, but I feel like I need to answer your questions as fully as I can. Even writing it down and telling someone helps me work through a lot of the why of it, which I haven't really understood.

The scary thing is, I came to them on my own. When I was almost thirteen, my mother passed away from an aortic aneurysm. A couple months later, my father began dating her best friend. I was home alone more often than not. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it was any of their fault, but those were my circumstances. I felt abandoned and alone. A lot of girls my age might have turned to parties and sex within their own social group to cope with that sort of feeling, but I didn't have many friends and spent a lot of time online. I don't remember exactly how I came to the Free Spirits, I just know that there was a curiosity in me for everything taboo, to push every limit, and that I needed someone or something to protect me. When I found them, I posed alternately as a boy my own age, as a transgendered individual, or as a man. Sometimes I was myself. It's amazing and terrifying how you think you're finding something you agree with, but really, you're twisting your own views to match what you see. I learned to twist not only my views, but the views of other people as well, and that is exactly how this movement gains what little acceptance it does. These people say, "Oh, we don't want to have sex with children, we would never rape or take advantage of a child. We just want to love and protect children." which sounds good if you can ignore their rants about abolishing the age of consent. When I was a minor, of course I could ignore that. Almost every minor who is curious about sex or drinking or driving or cigarettes thinks that the legal age for all of them should be lowered because they don't want to wait to fulfill that curiosity. I believed everything they said, and when they said they were being persecuted, I lashed out at whoever they said was doing the persecuting.

It's almost like a cult, in a way. Everyone who is lured in comes for different reasons, but they're all missing something, and the ones who have already been absorbed by that cult deceive them into thinking they can find it through being a part of their movement. They justify what they do to you and it sounds logical because you've already grown to trust them. And even once you get out, there's this Stockholm-syndrome type of thing where, even if you know that they're wrong and that they're lying to you, and that they are the bad guy, you feel like they were your friends. Finding my profile on there was a wake-up call to me. I realized that I can't let myself feel that sympathy for them that they bred in me, or I'm exactly like the worst of them. That it doesn't matter if I don't count myself among them anymore, if I reach out to them, that's exactly what I am. And I think that's what I need to let go of most.

I don't have urges to have sex with children. My fantasy was always to be the child, to have someone like these men, who I imagined were good, honest people, to protect me. It was never even really a sexual urge, but looking back now, I see how I twisted my own needs so I could fit in. It's weird, and I don't understand it -- I'm not a psychologist -- but somehow, through my need to be protected, I became the sexualized child, obsessed with it and with becoming it, because, looking at these men and what they had to say, that was how I could gain attention from someone like them. I joined dating sites when I was as young as fourteen, posing as an eighteen year old boy. At fifteen, I entered an online relationship with a forty year old man whom I told I was sixteen (then the age of consent in Indiana). I made a few attempts at meeting him in person, but I always backed out. I couldn't handle the repercussions.

Someone from the Free Spirits sent me an email, asking me how I was handling being profiled. I had no idea that I had been. I left that community a long time ago, though I still felt sympathy for them, and am still dealing with those feelings that these people are my friends. I know that they aren't, but it is difficult to leave behind something that you really believed was truth. I just wanted these people who were compiling information about my life and posting it publicly to know that they had the wrong information -- they took pictures of me from last year and information on me from then as well, like my age and my undergrad status, and applied it to things I had said when I was younger and still involved with the Free Spirits. The quote they love to use about me being able to convince anyone -- I said that when I was 15 or 16. by the time I was 17, I had cut off from the Free Spirits. It just seemed to me like the PJ people were using pieces of my life out of context to further their cause, and no matter how just the cause, I don't think that justifies lying, omitting, or not giving the whole story. I don't think it's justified for anyone to take away my voice for things I said when I was still a child.

This is it so far. If he responds again (and I think he will, he does need more material to post and feel morally superior about), I will certainly post it.