Back to Indiana

Please indulge me while I tell you a story about Michael who has been a friend of mine since 1990.  This is a story about Michael doing the right thing but being discriminated against by doing so.  Anyway, here’s the true story:

Michael contacted law enforcement in Pennsylvania regarding suspicions about sexual predators in 2004-2005, and I remember the angst and stress this caused him as he worried about one alleged victim and not being able to get help to that person. When he returned to Indiana for grad school, and after discussing what he knew about PA sexual predators, he became the target of discrimination in his graduate program. This nearly killed him. Still, he continued to investigate and found out that people at IU were likely tied to a man-boy sex network, drug dealing, and pornography; he found direct ties between Indiana predators and those he investigated in PA. He again turned this over to law enforcement with no results.

Leaving Indiana in 2007 on the advice of his Asperger's therapist (a Ph.D. psychologist) and his ADHD psychiatrist (an M.D.), he moved to  California "where folks are more likely to understand what it means to have ADHD and Asperger's." He found work at UCSC, and within a  few months he was invited into a PhD program there.  Then after getting back in touch with the people from IU for the necessary recommendations, people from work, who up until then had gotten along with him, suddenly started asking about his interest in underage men and drugs.  One told him they even thought he was going to be arrested!

Though accepted into the PhD program, he lost his funding and began his time as a homeless man; he and his cats lived in a parking lot that first week in his car and many times after that.  So six years after he began sounding alarms and three years after losing his quest for a PhD and going homeless, Michael has finally been vindicated by arrests in Pennsylvania (and a suicide in Indiana) and across all the networks he described. To put an end to rumors, he even returned home to Indiana where they began.

After a year, despite all the rumors, he remains poor, is still trying to create psychology-based software (which he has been doing since 2003) and is unable to find appropriate work in high-tech. We know the world is pretty screwed up right now, but for the person who sounded the alarm still to be living with the effects of discrimination and to be going through all this isn't right. It's like blaming the fireman for the fire.