When I was living in Los Angeles, California so many years ago, I had briefly become hooked on a soap opera named The Bold And The Beautiful, because the setting for that television program was also Los Angeles and I simply found it interesting to see how a soap opera handled the background of the City of Angels whenever there was a scene in which the characters were outside walking or driving around. Interestingly enough, there was a storyline in the television program about a 20-year-old man who was on trial for having sexual intercourse with his 17-year-old girlfriend.
I knew that the statutory age of consent in California had been 18 years old since 1913, which was the same year that Pancho Villa escaped the Lecumberri Prison in Mexico. However, I had thought that the producers of this soap opera were stretching their imagination a little too far in presenting a scenario in which a young man had gotten into trouble with the law for having sexual intercourse with a girlfriend that was very close to him in age difference, even if she was still a minor. I had always found that the authorities there in Los Angeles were usually interested in extreme situations in which there was a very noticeable age difference between an adult and a minor in a sexual encounter rather than Romeo-and-Juliet romances.
Anyhow, in that same soap opera, the 20-year-old man was eventually acquitted of all the criminal charges by jury nullification, even though he had broken the law. Supposedly, he and his 17-year-old girlfriend lived happily ever after. Quite frankly, I stopped watching that soap opera after a few subsequent episodes, because I didn’t want to get hooked on it for too long. Therefore, I don’t really know what became of that young couple.
The other day I came across an online forum in which an attorney explained to this one couple in California that their 25-year-old son was not likely to be arrested for getting his 15-year-old girl pregnant if the girl’s parents were not seeking to press charges against him inasmuch as that state jurisdiction was not as aggressive as other state jurisdictions were in our nation about enforcing the statutory-age-of-consent laws on their law books. What this same lawyer posted made perfect sense, because I recall California being very lax about enforcing their statutory-age-of-consent laws up until Governor Pete Wilson got elected to office during the years that I lived there.
Therein the responding attorney stated:
It is doubtful that the birth certificate would come to the attention of the prosecution. California has the highest teen birth rate in the nation. According to some statistics I have seen, a teenaged girl gives birth every 8 minutes in California. A large percentage of those babies are fathered by men over the age of 25. Your son is not unique, and the system is under a deluge of cases just like his. The chances that merely placing his name on the birth certificate would result in his prosecution and conviction are rather remote.
Therefore, it can be no secret that adult/adolescent romantic relationships are more common and more legally tolerated in California than anywhere else in the United States of America.
Governor Pete Wilson was someone who felt that he had to make an example out of the state of California; and after he got elected to office, he was pushing prosecutors and law-enforcement officials left and right to enforce the statutory-age-of-consent laws and to make as many arrests as they could for “statutory rape” in that state jurisdiction. By the time that he had left office, I had already moved away from California. However, I had heard that California had gone back to its lax ways about enforcing their statutory-age-of-consent laws.
Because Arnold Schwarzenegger is originally from Austria where the statutory age of consent is only 14 years old, I cannot imagine that he was a stickler for these laws in the same manner that Governor Wilson was, when he was the Governor of California so many years later. Then again, if any adult man were ever to go to bed with a girl he thought to be 18 years of age and found out afterwards that she was only 13 years old, I don’t think that he would want to face the scary experience of someone like Governor Schwarzenegger turning out to be the underage girl’s father and catching him in bed with his daughter. That man might just get a free flight to Jamaica without the airplane.
A. YouTubers Are Getting Way Too Worked Up Into A Frenzy Over Tony Lopez
Recently I stumbled across a story on YouTube regarding a social-media influencer named Tony Lopez. American YouTubers are getting up in arms about his having flirted with various underage girls on the Internet who were only three to five years younger than him, and he had tried to meet up with these girls. He was 20 years old at the time that he did so. YouTuber Spill Sesh provides the full details of this discovery in her video below.
Tony Lopez Addresses Allegations Made Against Him
After listening to this video and detecting the naivety in YouTuber Spill Sesh’s viewpoints regarding this matter, I get the distinct impression that she lives in some quiet, sheltered suburb in a remote part of our nation. She doesn’t really go into the nitty-gritty details of the controversy surrounding Tony Lopez’s current situation in her video. Therefore, one can easily mistake Mr. Lopez’s actions for protected speech alongside his right of assembly that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution affords every American citizen, young and old. In many cultures of the world, nobody would even bat an eye at his actions.
I’m not going to argue any of the points that YouTuber Spill Sesh made in her video, even though I found her narration to be an ongoing sermon to chastise someone for something wherein nobody actually got hurt. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and she is certainly entitled to hers.
Self-proclaimed child advocates and self-appointed pedo-experts all seemed to have a love fest in the comments section of that same video. They did not hesitate to throw every derogatory and degrading word around at Mr. Lopez that began with the letter “p.”
These self-righteous do-gooders acted as though he committed the crime of the century. They even went as far as speaking of him as though he were in a competition with Roman Polanski to shock the nation as much as they could. What is so interesting about it is that when Mr. Polanski had sexual intercourse with then-13-year-old Samantha Gailey-Geimer back in 1977 when he was in his early forties, she had already been dating a 17-year-old boy and had been having sexual relations with him too. That is, Samantha Gailey-Geimer had been sexually involved with a boy four years older than her, which is the same age difference between Mr. Lopez and at least one of the girls he allegedly fraternized with on the Internet.
Some of the YouTubers, including YouTuber Spill Sesh, were asking why the police were not involved in this same matter concerning Mr. Lopez. Quite frankly, in a state like California where the criminal justice system is constantly handing out get-out-of-jail-free cards to 25-year-old men for getting 15-year-old girls pregnant, I somehow seriously doubt that the authorities are going to be interested in Mr. Lopez for having some non-Platonic conversations with underage adolescent girls on the Internet here and there.
I really don’t believe that a 3-, 4- or 5-year age difference is anything to get excited about in Mr. Lopez’s particular case. If he had been a 16-year-old boy having a sexually charged conversation with a 9-year-old girl, then I would agree with others that the law needed to bring its full wrath down upon him.
B. Stop Treating Corey Feldman As Though He Is Some Kind Of Morally Superior Being
I have watched other videos on YouTube about Tony Lopez’s online communications with teenage female minors, and I have found out that some of those chats did get somewhat racy. Nonetheless, what particularly bewilders me about why so many YouTubers are making so much fuss about him is the fact that Corey Feldman had a sizzling romance with a 14-year-old girl (Drew Barrymore) back when he was 18 years old, which legally made him an adult back then.
According to what I knew from different sources, Corey Feldman had never been a poster boy for teenage abstinence up to the time that he was 18 years old. Therefore, I can easily envision that he likely put a great amount of pressure on Drew Barrymore to have sexual intercourse with him when she was only 14 years of age. Also, he had previously dated her when she was 10 years old and he was 14 years old. I can be sure that he probably put pressure on her even that far back in time to have sexual intercourse with him. Luckily, she was not one to submit to such pressure.
Because self-proclaimed child advocates and self-appointed pedo-experts have named Corey Feldman as their spokesperson in the crusade to clean up Hollywood, he somehow gets a free pass to bear no shame for having dated a 14-year-old girl when he was 18 years old. It is incredible how these self-proclaimed child advocates and self-appointed pedo-experts will do everything to avoid the subject of Corey Feldman’s involvement with jailbait after he first had legally become an adult.
Some self-proclaimed advocates and self-appointed pedo-experts will argue that Corey Feldman’s intimate relationship with Drew Barrymore happened decades ago and that it is, therefore, no longer relevant. However, that excuse does not hold water with me, because Mr. Feldman’s intimate relationship with Drew Barrymore took place in both the mid-1980s and the late 1980s; and many of these self-appointed pedo-experts and self-proclaimed child advocates continue to dredge up an incident from the early 1980s in which then-19-year-old Demi Moore kissed a 15-year-old boy. I describe these events in detail in my article titled “Is Corey Feldman A Pedophile?”
There is simply way too much hypocrisy going on with respect to how the court of public opinion has been treating Mr. Lopez. I don’t believe that he deserves to be deplatformed, and I certainly do not believe that it would be right to “cancel” him. It would be like applying a double standard to him.
Now, I don’t want any of you to think that I hold a grudge against Corey Feldman. I do admit that he is not particularly one of my favorite people. I would never wish any violence against anyone. However, it did not surprise me in the least when I heard not too long ago that he had been beaten up. I always thought that he was a punk who looked to pick arguments with others, if not fights with them. I have read comments on the Internet from others who have met him personally and did not like him because of his arrogance and rudeness.
Corey Feldman and Billy Bush are like two clowns in a circus act as far as I am concerned. I sincerely believe that Mr. Feldman craves media attention.
C. My Conclusion To This Topic
If self-proclaimed child advocates and self-appointed pedo-experts are going to pedo-shame Tony Lopez in the manner that I describe in my article titled “What Is Mendacious Pedo-Shaming?”, I don’t feel that it is right that they should put Corey Feldman up on a pedestal. He is not a better person than Mr. Lopez, and he is not morally superior to him.
If Mr. Lopez had gotten a 15-year-old girl pregnant and then had bailed on her, then I would be cheering on and applauding every effort that everyone makes to rip his presence away from the Internet altogether. However, he did nothing more than have a flirty chat with a small number of teenage girls who were not significantly younger than him as far as I am concerned. If one of us were to stick a covert listening device in a boy’s locker room at a middle school or a high school anywhere here in our nation, I can be sure that some of the smut that we would hear these boys talk about would make anything that Mr. Lopez said to these underage girls he chatted with online look like a Bible lesson in Sunday school.
Mr. Lopez is not truly a sexual predator. At least he is not any more of a sexual predator than Mr. Feldman is.
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