Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting

1. Trapped in the Story

When you get hit with an allegation
that you're a pervert and a child molester,
what do you do?--Jerry Barr
(Roseanne's father)

I never got a chance to tell my story.
No one ever said, "What happened?"
--Mary Baxter

I am tenderly aware that not a few of the assertions made in the Introduction rest on the fact that they've been presented in English sentences. Without support, and soon, they'll die. Even so, reinforcements won't arrive until this short chapter does its job, which is to show how our culture's commanding story about child molesting works when it goes into action. It is the simplest story; and, like most simple things, intolerant and relentless: it recognizes no other stories and claims for itself absolute truth. It is ferociously pious and thus has the force of dogma. Resist it at your peril--though it is healthier to resist than to swim in it.

    We like to think there are innumerable sides to any story. Not to this one. It has an outside, where those of us who tell it can stand, and an inside, occupied by those about whom it is told, the actors caught in the story. Those inside are enmeshed in a script with nothing but bad parts, a contest-story in which everyone loses, the accused and the accusers. There are two main roles, monster and victim--both unrewarding--along with supporting parts for police, judges, juries, therapists, parents, friends, journalists, and lawyers.

    Because this is a Gothic story, the rigid parts allotted by our culture to those doomed to play them out demand acting so shrill that Bette Davis would have turned them down. Those within child-molesting dramas become intensely isolated, caged by their parts and denied any view outside them: the scripts constitute total reality. When asked, as they sometimes are, why their enemies are acting as they are (or have), participants invariably say, "I don't know." Of course they don't. Motivation is not a big issue when the story is about angels and ghouls.

Drama at Van Buren High

When the drama becomes strained and its fictional nature starts to show through, we play it at a higher pitch, show our confidence in the standard story by having it screamed at us. Those caught in that blare find their voices absorbed into headlines that do not ask for a response: "Student Tells of Sex Encounters"; "Teacher Sex Trial Goes to Jury." Just past the headlines, there in the very first paragraph, is a caricature of a life: "A high school teacher had sex with a student at a mountain getaway, in the school teacher's prop room and in her class-room office to compensate for the love and approval she never got from her mother, according to court testimony Monday." That's what happened to Mary Baxter, a teacher at Van Buren High, in a Los Angeles suburb, and to Alan Hoyt, her seventeen-year-old accuser.

    Once embedded in the cultural narrative, both sides bitterly protest the fact that no one seems especially interested in their story, that they have become anonymous and somehow utterly predictable, subject to implanted emotions and expectations alien to them. Mrs. Baxter is most eloquent on this point. She grants that her attorney wanted simply to hit the high spots, and even understands "why you would want to believe the accuser, for otherwise no one gets caught and you create an environment where true victims are afraid to come forward." All the same, she remains baffled and frustrated. "I never," she says, "got a chance to tell my story--never did, not even during the trial. No one ever said, `What happened?'" The fact that Mary Baxter is uncommonly thoughtful and articulate only makes matters worse for her: she has a complex and modulated story to tell, but she is forced into a monotonously single-toned, crudely rudimentary plot.

    As, in a very different way, is her accuser. A smart and active older adolescent is shrunk into a child, a generic "essence-of-child," by this cultural story, remolded as passive, innocent, and guileless. His actual age, activities, particularities are melted away to fit our needs. Alan's sexual activity in particular is fashioned as unwilled, forced onto him or drawn from him "unnaturally." Thus, while sex is, of course, the center of the drama and of our interest, it is also made to seem freakish and shocking, providing us with a safety screen. We need never acknowledge our own part in creating this erotic spectacle, since the eros is both displaced onto the actors and made oddly hallucinatory, just as Alan's slippage from adolescent into child is both essential and misty.

    Before we vanish into the mist ourselves, perhaps we should look at both principals in a way that does a little justice to their human variability and mysteriousness before they merge into the stereotypes of the child-molesting trial we have before us.

    Alan Hoyt, first of all, is probably, despite his youth, nearly as complex as anyone in this drama. In the fall of 1992 he was sixteen and, at least on the surface, zinging along: doing well in his classes and with the girls, happier at home, connected to a Big Brother, working with a therapist he liked, off the drugs that had been making things tough for him (LSD and pot) and onto Prozac, which was helping. Earlier (in June) his mother had arranged for therapy, worried that his behavior--"he lies, he is manipulative"--was linked to deeper problems. Possibly those problems had to do with drugs, with feeling unloved, with being molested by his father as an infant, and with being sixteen. Anyhow, as school started he seemed to be making progress in carving out a position for himself, one both safe and productive. He was deliberately trying to reorder his life and expand his interests, acquiring, among other things, a subscription to the L.A. Philharmonic. As his junior year opened, "things were," his mother says, "going much better," partly because he had found creative outlets in literature and drama classes and an unusually receptive and gifted teacher.

    Mary Baxter was teaching both Alan's AP literature class and the drama class that was part of the blooming theater arts and theater history program she had established. Attractive, witty, and dexterous, she had the sort of energy that seems always to be going outward, engaged with the person before her. Elected Van Buren High School Teacher of the Year in 1991, she was at a fine point in her life: she and her husband, married for eight years, had decided the year before that things were so propitious they could proceed with two important plans: Dolph Baxter could begin full-time Ph.D. work, and they could start a family. Mary Baxter sailed happily into the fall term.

    That Alan was in love with her is hardly a bombshell, and it was only a matter of time (a very short time) before he confided in her--not his love but his troubles. Nor was she surprised at this overflow: "When you teach drama it all comes out, including the horrible stories. I usually found myself knowing more about the kids than I really wanted to; but it was vital that kids felt they could be open with me." "OK," I say, "but what about kids falling in love with you?" "Yeah-yeah," she says wryly. "I'm not conceited, but that's not uncommon with high-school boys and their teachers--I could list many. I'm one of many teachers--perhaps nearly all teachers--forced to deal with that issue, and it usually isn't, for any of us, that big a deal." "And Alan? "I don't know if I'd say `in love'--but a crush." (I would say "in love"; but I wasn't there.) "Later on," she adds ominously, "I think he was obsessed."

    That's one possibility: Alan became obsessed with Mrs. Baxter, entered into a fantasy projection that we all recognize (remember), and didn't know how to stop it. That would explain why Alan exploded when, in January, Mrs. Baxter told her students she was pregnant. Feeling betrayed, perhaps, and fearing that his fantasy place was being usurped by the husband, he tried to reclaim his imaginary position by declaring, among other things, that the baby was his. But there are other possibilities, as we shall see: Alan was in big trouble at school and may have concocted the charges to deflect attention away from his plagiarism and onto more sensational matters. He may have wanted to replay in another arena a terrible but necessary drama he could not enact with the real demon in his life, his father. He may have had no deliberate plan at all, may have simply fallen into a course of events that seized the initiative from him. And it may all have happened as he said. I suppose it is clear that I don't think it did; but for our purposes actual events are less important than the power of the cultural narrative, which now takes over and renders historical truth irrelevant in the face of the "truth" mandated by the way our culture wants to see these things.

    Two complex and articulate people, Mary Baxter and Alan Hoyt, are complex no longer, really now are rendered mute. The official plot speaks through them, does not allow them to do anything impromptu or out of character. Let's look at one example, the "drama log," a homework assignment that entered the stack of supplementary sheriff's reports very late in the game, on November 17, 1993 (the case began in late May). Detective Julia Pausch, author of this report, says that at that meeting Alan "told us that he had found an entry in his drama log from school that he thought would be helpful in proving the allegations against Mrs. Baxter." Pausch, who from the start saw her duty as gathering "proof" rather than investigating, treats the material with her customary quasi-literate solemnity: "I read the paper and saw that Alan wrote an entry on 11-25-92. There was a notation written below it [from Mrs. Baxter], saying, `Peachy. How are you? Doncha Love Thanksgiving?'"

    There are, in fact, more entries than just this one, though the eye of Detective Pausch located the one that could be twisted into use at the trial. There are ten entries in all, stretching from September 15 to December 3, mostly involving Alan's claims to increased knowledge about Greek ("which I had known little to nothing about") and Roman theater (despite being "confused w/all the weird names"), to greater confidence about his role in an upcoming play (Tom Jones), to various acting techniques he has mastered. For me, this is a weary stretch of reading indeed, and I marvel at Mrs. Baxter not only examining so much (representative, I suppose) self-centered blab--"This week I learned a tremendous amount about the audition process"--but summoning the enthusiasm to comment on it. Those comments, granted, are not lengthy, usually amounting to a hearty "Good!" though now and then whole sentences are heroically added: "Re: Western [his role]--I've seen tremendous growth. More will come this week." It seems to me, in other words, a highly conscientious pedagogical performance, one I would not be up to but can applaud.

    But Pausch and, a short time later, the prosecution did not see it that way, interpreting the comment on Thanksgiving as an erotic nudge from teacher to student, a smutty response suited for the Penthouse "Forum." By this later date, Alan had located the most elaborate of his sexual encounters with Mrs. Baxter on the day after Thanksgiving, making "Doncha Love Thanksgiving" transparently (for Pausch) a way of reliving (reinciting?) the ardor of the Friday before. There's no way to catch the full flavor of this interpretive act without slogging over the whole Sahara of the drama log, but perhaps you can get a sniff from an excerpt written the week after Thanksgiving vacation:

11-25-92 The Play is Finally over! I think My best Performance was opening Night--Though All Nights Went Very Well. I Learned To Use Pre-Performance Fear & Anxiety To Your Benefit. I Learned A Little About Roman Theater This Week Too! How Are You?

Peachy. How are you?
Doncha Love Thanksgiving?

The prosecution later seemed unable to decide which was more offensive: that a teacher would refer to what they figured was sex or that a teacher (of English!) would write "Doncha."

    In Dickens's Pickwick Papers, the incriminating evidence in a breach-of-promise suit brought against the hero by his landlady is a note he sent her while on the road, warning her of his arrival: "Dear Mrs. B.--Chops and Tomata Sauce. Yours, Pickwick." To the unwary, this looks like a dinner order, but the prosecution knows better and hopes the jury will too, will see that the very "covert, sly, underhanded" language is "far more conclusive" than anything direct could be, since it is evident that this coded message was "intended at the time, by Pickwick, to mislead and delude any third parties into whose hands it might fall." Having said this, the prosecutor need only read the message again for its meaning to be clear as day: "Gentlemen, what does this mean? Chops and Tomata sauce! Yours, Pickwick! Chops! Gracious heavens! and Tomata sauce! Gentlemen!"

    Doncha! Gracious heavens! Love! What can this mean? Thanksgiving! Now, really!

    Under the conditions of our culture's master narrative of child molesting, nothing is without meaning, and all meanings are sinister. An indifferent action, an action meaning what it seems to mean, is unthinkable. And so it is with characters: everyone is either impossibly devious or impossibly naive. Mary Baxter is either "a troubled, unhappily married woman willing to `seek love anywhere,'" a diabolical fiend who "preyed on an impressionable young student in order to satisfy her need for affection," or a persecuted saint; Alan Hoyt is either a helpless child or "a manipulative, trouble-making student." Where is there such a world as this, where such inhabitants?

The Story

As it turned out, Mary Baxter was charged with only one misdemeanor count, oral copulation with a minor, his allegations of other forms of sex being irrelevant, since the other forms of sex he mentioned were not against the law--not at the time anyhow; sexual intercourse with boys aged fourteen to seventeen was not officially prohibited until a year after the alleged affair ended. The reduced charge, however, scarcely worked to her advantage, since it focused on what to many is the more salacious sexual activity and also allowed the drooling Glendale News-Press to insert in its daily account of the trial a reminder that prosecutors had no doubt that intercourse took place (and very often) but were barred from raising that issue by the fact (ironic) that the bill outlawing sex with boys under eighteen (sponsored by Glendale's own state senator, Newton Russell) didn't go into effect until January 1, 1994. This allowed the prosecution to try Mrs. Baxter on charges that were never addressed and thus could not be refuted. Of course, the accused in such cases can always do as little to refute such charges as accusers can to substantiate them, and that allows us to write virtually any story we like, the one we like being, every time, a variation on the same tale.

    In our case, the story is this: Alan Hoyt, in the fall of 1992, was enrolled in Mary Baxter's classes in AP English lit and drama. We already know that. Through these classes he became involved in the fall production of Tom Jones and the spring's Romeo and Juliet, both unluckily charged plays, the former dealing, even worse luck, with a young man pursued by older women. During rehearsals for Tom Jones, in which Alan played the middling-important role of Squire Western, he began, along with other students, staying after rehearsal and, especially in the week preceding Halloween, talking to his teacher about difficult personal problems, including those stemming from the incest. These wrenching conversations, filled with high emotion and tears, were not unusual, says Mrs. Baxter, given the way theatrical experience (and empathetic presence) works on young people. Still, Alan's pain was fierce: he spoke, she says, of being raped by his father, of anger he did not know what to do with, of a drug problem, of a life he regarded generally as "a big stinking mess." Mrs. Baxter directed Alan to the school counseling program, but he said he had tried it, found it wanting, and was already involved in successful private therapy, needing now only to talk.

    At this point, Mrs. Baxter made what she told me was "the mistake of my life," though at the time it seemed banal: having heard that writing a letter to the abusive parent could be therapeutic, she mentioned to Alan that it might help both his psychic health and, not incidentally, his acting: "I was being very selfish, looking for a way to keep him from being absurdly angry on stage." It was a suggestion he took up at once. She told him further that she could "kind of understand his anger," having been abused herself as a child, though not sexually. He wrote his letter, showed it to Mrs. Baxter the next day, and then suggested she write one too, which she, as a sign of trust, agreed to do. The following day, these letters (written with no intent of sending them) were exchanged, Alan taking Mary's, writing on it "Do Not Mail," and retrieving his own as well, for use by his therapist--and, as it turned out, the prosecutors, who read out the choicest parts in court, parts in which Mary tried, she said, excessive language in a futile attempt to tap her anger, parts in which she complained to her mother about being made to feel hurt and unlovely.

    In November, then, we have the play itself, which as we read in the drama log, went smoothly enough. According to Mary Baxter, nothing else of note happened that month, although she did give Alan a couple of music tapes (one classical, one of old standards, sung mostly by Ella Fitzgerald) to facilitate his attempts to enculture himself. According to Alan, somewhere about November 10 they began having sex (genital, with him on top, apart from the one oral encounter) in her office, in the prop room, in Mary's car (driver's side), outside on the ground (in the Angeles National Forest), and several times on that all-stops-out mountain cabin encounter the day after Thanksgiving.

    In December, Alan's mother gave Mary a Christmas gift and invited her and her husband to go to the San Gabriel Civic Opera's performance of The Nutcracker. Mary went, accompanying Alan, his mother, and his sister, and taking along the young daughter of a friend, Dolph Baxter choosing to give it a miss: "Not only was it The Nutcracker, but the San Gabriel Civic, for God's sake!" In return, Mary gave Alan a book (having given other students gifts as well), The Little Prince, inscribed "Unconditionally," a reference, she says, to her assurance to Alan that despite his earlier rocky experiences, she loved her students without conditions (though she comments now that had she known, she would have attached a qualifier about the effect being dragged into court could have on the "unconditional").

    In January, Alan invited Mary to go to an L.A. Philharmonic program on his subscription, his usual companion being unable to attend. Alan said it was on this date (January 9) that they last had sex and that he decided it was time to end it all. Mary says he took off his shoes during the performance and embarrassed her by being a little slovenly; otherwise, it was an important concert to her only because she had a chance to hear Corigliano's First Symphony, The AIDS Symphony, which she connected to the recent death of a friend. Also in January, Alan went off antidepressants--"And we all felt that!" Mary says. More important, perhaps, he suffered what he may have taken as a double-barreled betrayal: expecting to be cast as Romeo in the play, he had to make do with the part of Mercutio; and he heard for the first time that Mrs. Baxter was going to have a baby in August. Alan's account is that she had told him of this in December, along with the news that he was the father.

    Both accounts agree that relations between the two deteriorated throughout the winter and spring, rehearsals being so stormy that Alan came to be directed by proxy, through student directors. In April-May Alan contracted mononucleosis; became convinced, apparently, that Mrs. Baxter was giving him unfair grades; wrote a letter to the principal complaining about that (and about the way Mrs. Baxter was promoting "female supremacy" in the classroom); and plagiarized a paper for Mrs. Baxter on the playwright Ionesco. Mrs. Baxter learned about the letter of complaint during a discussion with her principal about her fall maternity leave and agreed that a special meeting with Alan to discuss the letter should be arranged, as it was, for May 26.

    Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Mrs. Baxter, Alan scheduled on May 23 a double session with his therapist for the twenty-fifth. On the twenty-fourth, Alan's mother elicited from him a full disclosure of the alleged affair. She accompanied him to the double session with the therapist, who, when informed, did what she was by law required to do; she called the cops. The timing of all this seems suspicious, I know, but waive that. On the twenty-sixth, then, expecting to discuss Alan's academic problems, Mrs. Baxter, along with her department chair, entered the principal's office to be confronted by the Hoyts (mother and son), the therapist, and the charges. Mrs. Baxter left, called her husband, and returned to her classes.

    On June 18, she and her attorney met with Detective Pausch. Mary Baxter reconstructs the opening of that interview as follows:

Pausch: You know you don't have to do this interview and that we can stop at any time if you don't feel well.

Baxter: Okay.

Pausch: Do you understand the charges against you?

Baxter: Yes.

Pausch: How do you respond?

Baxter: They're not true.

Pausch: Well, I don't believe you. He says that between either October or November and January you had sex with him, and I believe him.

    Later in the interview, according to Detective Pausch's own report, Pausch told Mrs. Baxter that "things don't look good," that she was busy "gathering proof" against her, and that Mrs. Baxter was "an actress." Pausch's animus spills over in her description of Mrs. Baxter's manner during the interview: "Throughout my interview with Mrs. Baxter, she remained very calm. She answered my questions deliberately, with very long narrative answers. She would sit in her chair and rub her pregnant abdomen with great affection. Mrs.' Baxter was very composed despite the serious and embarrassing nature of the allegations against her." Detective Pausch closed her report with a sneer: Mrs. Baxter's lawyer "handed me a stack of papers," "statements about what a great teacher she is, and how Alan Hoyt is a troubled liar."

    The rest of the summer was empty; the teacher's union to which Mrs. Baxter appealed disappeared, though her principal and fellow teachers offered strong support. That summer (1993) the Baxters' child, Philip, was born; the next day, Mary was served with a subpoena. Throughout the fall and winter, the district attorney's office tried to force the Baxters to have blood tests made on the baby to get evidence on his paternity, a procedure the Baxters both found "sickening" and invasive, and steadfastly refused. The judge in the case eventually upheld the Baxters' refusal, declaring the tests a violation of the child's civil rights and also irrelevant to the charge (which was, after all, "oral copulation").

    The trial lasted from March 3 to March 18, 1994, and ended in acquittal. But the drama is far from over. In May, Mary Baxter received a summons informing her that Alan Hoyt, through his mother, was naming her, her principal, and the school district in a civil suit, asking for damages on seven causes of action ranging from malpractice to childhood sexual abuse to negligence to battery to infliction of emotional distress. That Suit lingers on today, more than three years later, along with the possibility of a countersuit. In August 1994, Mrs. Baxter was forced to appear before the state Committee on Credentials in Sacramento. In September, she was informed, without any explanation, that the committee had declined to renew her teaching credentials.

That's the story, and it's a common one, common and ugly and, in my view, devised to minister to interests that have nothing to do with justice. After all, who wins? Who is the better for this turmoil? What principles are served? I think only the story gains, the story and the ghostly cultural psychodrama it is devised to enact. In the case before us, I think everyone involved, even Detective Pausch, is telling what she or he takes to be the truth, "truth" having been usurped by the demands of the roles they have been forced into. Because of that, I want to spend the rest of this chapter analyzing not questions of guilt or innocence, which the story itself assigns, but rather what seem to me a few curious, especially vulnerable points in this particular story.

What Sort of Sex Did You Say It Was?

Cases like the one I described above do not seem to excite in us high demands for logical consistency or even plausibility. It may be that our prurient interest is so high we are willing to forgive a fair amount of haziness, contradiction, and plain nonsense. In this case, common sense often took quite a beating, which says no more than that our master story requires a whopping investment.

    For instance, though insisting he broke off the sex business on January 9, Hoyt was always blurry on when the affair started and how often it was consummated. In the original sheriff's report he estimated twenty-five encounters, but later changed his guess to "approximately 5 times a week," which would yield between forty and sixty. Hey, who's counting? We also will pass over Hoyt's account of the inauguration of the physical business: "He said that the first time he and Mrs. Baxter kissed they were sitting in her car and it just sort of `happened.'" That this sounds like a mixture of fantasy and teen romance novels might not rule out its truthfulness, since perhaps (I wouldn't know) actuality can be a blend of fantasy and teen romances. We might also choose to be deaf to the testimony of two students at the trial who said they were usually around when the auditorium closed, watched Mrs. Baxter drive off alone, and even walked home with Alan Hoyt.

    But how do we conceive of the locations for these bouts? "Alan told me," Pausch says, "the majority of their sexual encounters took place in the Angeles Crest [sic] Forest, either in the suspect's car or outside the car." Actually, it's the Angeles National Forest, the Angeles Crest Highway being the best way to get into it. One supposes (and Hoyt's courtroom testimony confirms) that he was claiming he and Mrs. Baxter traveled up the highway and into the forest, where they would sometimes stay in the car, sometimes get out.

    There are problems either way. Putting aside the fact that this road and area are frequently patrolled by police on the prowl (why?) for teenagers making out in cars, rendering it a terribly indiscreet choice, going up there near midnight in these months and getting out of the car, much less taking off any clothes, would have been most uncomfortable. At nearby Mount Wilson, the average temperature in November was thirty-nine degrees, and it got worse: thirty-five in December and thirty-two in January. Staying inside the car would have improved things, but not much, if Hoyt's testimony is to be believed. He said in court that they had sex on the driver's side, defendant on the bottom; but there is less than twelve inches of clearance between the steering wheel and the seat. Maybe it's possible--for lindy champions--but it sounds so pinched that it would hardly be worth the trip.

    And then there's the car Alan Hoyt testified to being in more than twenty-five times and which he insisted to the bitter end was a blue two-door Japanese-made compact--heroic consistency, considering that anyone who looked could see that it was a dark gray Volkswagen with four doors.

Our Little Mountain Hideaway

It is odd how some details are given meaning in these cases and others are ignored--or is it? Somehow it doesn't seem germane that the plaintiff had no idea what kind of a car he was in as he (so he says) went at it night after night, or how the freezing cold militated against his pleasure; it only matters, perhaps, that he's focusing our attention in the right area, giving us the details that do matter. And those are the details that contribute to the hard-core story being demanded by prosecutors, press, and public. It's extremely difficult for a defendant to relocate details from this hypercharged sexual conspiratorial context back into a mundane, it-doesn't-mean-much-of-anything world. Once inside the story, it's the story that decides which meanings will count, not the human participants being tumbled around. If someone says something happened, you simply cannot say, "Yeah, so what?" even if that's a good response. "Yeah, so what?" will get you into big trouble.

    Even worse, when the story takes to inventing scenes out of whole cloth, simply to make itself play better, there's not a lot that can be done to resist. For instance, in the Baxter trial, there's the mountain cabin, quite obviously less a lonely, romantic chalet than an overused, bustling family getaway; but "obvious" just didn't matter.

    The cabin owned by Mary Baxter's family is in Wrightwood, a couple of hours from the valley, up in the mountains--the mountains playing so prominent a part in this story that it sometimes sounds like Heidi. The cabin isn't mentioned in Alan Hoyt's first report to the police, but when Detective Pausch arrived on June 11 he had recalled a trip to this cabin with Mrs. Baxter, right after Thanksgiving, for eleven hours of the usual, and had prepared a detailed diagram of the cabin. In addition to the diagram, Hoyt provided supporting details: there were other cabins around, the street was paved, the land sloped up, and there was a general store not far away. All of this strikes me as purely generic for a mountain town, but I'm not Detective Pausch, who saw that it was all highly significant, emphasizing the fact that this particular mountain land really did slope, just as Alan said.

    On August 9, Detective Pausch filed a report of a visit she made with Alan "to locate the cabin where Alan had sexual intercourse with the suspect." No namby-pamby "allegedly" here. Alan was indeed able to point out the general store, though Pausch scrupulously notes in her report that it seemed more like a "market" to her--but then she wasn't in the same state of mind that must have possessed Alan just after Thanksgiving. They found the cabin, though, and spied in through some of the many glass windows, not having a key: "I saw," Pausch says, "that the interior of the cabin matched the diagram Alan had drawn in June." And to this she testified in court the following March.

    Mrs. Baxter says there was no trip, ever. She had talked on several occasions with the play casts about the cabin, in reference to a possible retreat there, like those she had managed with cast members and parents the year before. She had drawn diagrams of the cottage on the board and discussed its location--"Take the road until you hit the cabin with the tree growing through the balcony." So its site was no mystery, nor are its insides hidden from those (Alan, say) who, like Detective Pausch, have "stood on the rear porch and looked inside the cabin through the glass." At least not all its insides are hidden. But several startling things are not visible to peepers: some rooms, unusual architectural features, and furnishings so eye-catching only those who haven't seen them (or have merely peeked in from outside) could miss. Everything visible from the outside is in the diagram, as Detective Pausch notes; but there's nothing there that can be seen only from the inside, where Alan claims to have been. It's a detail that escapes detectives who see through the eyes of plaintiffs and a public that journeys to places already convinced that they are viewing landmarks of criminal sexuality.

    Such complicating details are so annoying that we have learned to make them not exist. Which leads us to the tattoo on Mrs. Baxter that Alan never saw, but the jury did, and also every interested trial follower, in the mind's eye. At the Wrightwood cabin (not to mention the scores of other occasions he claimed), Alan saw Mrs. Baxter naked "in all her glory," as the defense attorney put it. But he missed the tattoo, a tattoo there since 1990, when Mary and her husband celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary by--what else?--getting matching tattoos. Faced with an embarrassing detail they could not make disappear, the prosecution insisted that the tattoos, which they did not deny existed NOW, did not exist THEN, that the devious Baxters had rushed out and got themselves stuck after the fact. Experts were consulted on both sides, a defense dermatologist said the tattoo looked about five years old, all right; a prosecution expert, not a dermatologist but an actual tattooist from Hollywood (where they know what they're doing), said he could date tattoos within two years and proceeded to date this one within eight months. What's important is that the Glendale News-Press got to gibber on about the tattoo, tell us how the jury actually saw it (did the Glendale News-Press?) and how it was "a red, heart-shaped tattoo on her right thigh." I don't know if the jury peeked at Dolph's tattoo as well. I think they should have.

Do You Have a Degree in Psychology?

Mrs. Baxter gave Alan tapes (two) of classical and old standard music, a book (The Little Prince), went with his family to a ballet (amateurish), with him to the L.A. Philharmonic (he slouched), and traded letters with him in an attempt to initiate a therapeutic anger. She talked with him and tried to help him, partly because that's what she does and partly, we remember, so he might be a slightly more credible actor. There was a play going on during all this time, and Mrs. Baxter is a drama teacher. But it's her excellence as a teacher that, arguably, got her into trouble. The above list of gifts and events constitutes pretty much the whole of the evidence offered by the prosecution. And what is it evidence of? Seduction or effective teaching? To some, the letter business might make Mrs. Baxter guilty of temporary excessive zeal in promoting pop psychology, but it seems to me to be the sort of action that, as Jane Austen says, only the outcome can prove right or wrong.

    Mrs. Baxter was Teacher of the Year only a year or two earlier, and it was, at least in part, as a teacher that she was put on trial. Why did the newspaper remind us in almost every issue of her award: as a gesture of fairness or as a form of sarcasm and a way of focusing our scapegoating fury? This teacher-of-the-year can be made to stand as a convenient target for our culture's resentment of pedagogues and its delight in humiliating them. Especially now, we seem willing to see teachers as predators, enemies of the family and deadly rivals for our control over children. Perhaps teachers like Mrs. Baxter, rare teachers of enthusiasm and compassion, make the best targets because they insult our heedlessness as regards children.

    So, Mrs. Baxter was grilled by Pausch on whether her degrees really are, as they do not seem to be, in psychology. If not, the implication is, why was she talking to "the child" at all? Mrs. Baxter told me, "I knew all I could do was listen. After all, a lot of kids want to talk--and do talk, if you'll listen. I did tell him to go to Outreach, but he said he'd been there and didn't find it helpful, was seeing a therapist, and that talking to me meant a lot to him." As Ado Annie sings in Oklahoma, "Whatcha gonna do, spit in his eye?"

    Probably so. The story, in any case, allows us, once we have located an approved target, to attack her as much as we like. Here's the Glendale News-Press giving us our sadistic due: "Baxter sobbed" as the D.A. read the letter to the jury; she often "bitterly wept"; and when asked why she gave him the letter, "`I wanted to show him that I trusted him,' she testified, her face turning red and her eyes dampening."

Young Men and Bananas

Which brings us to bananas, a part of the prosecution's case given heavy play by the Glendale News-Press, which knows evidence when it sees it. In the case of the bananas, the prosecution even had what it pointedly did not have for any other part of its tale, a witness, a student and friend of Hoyt's named Fred Daley, who was able to testify, quite without hesitation, that during lunchtime a group of students would, you know, have lunch in Mrs. Baxter's, like, classroom, and she would eat her lunch there too, and when, you know, she ate a banana, "we would make eyes at her" and Alan would, like, make these lewd noises. Others would make these noises too and sometimes rude comments, as jokes, you know. Fred often made "a joke" of his own, asking the defendant to have his baby. She mostly just ignored him, but finally, in weariness, told him to cut it out. After numerous requests, he did.

    But we're straying from the bananas, which were made available for high-school wit by the play the class was rehearsing, Tom Jones, specifically by a famous scene in which Mrs. Waters tries to employ lascivious and slurpy eating to seduce the hero. It's a scene that became famous following the 1963 film and was titillatingly uproarious to these high-school boys after Mrs. Baxter demonstrated to the students playing the part how to do it. Finally, from boredom more than embarrassment, she moved her lunch spot to the faculty lounge to escape their hilarity. She dealt with matters like this by feigning amusement, inattention, or annoyance, very seldom the latter: "They were," she says with resignation, "horny boys who didn't have anywhere else to turn," except to such wildly excessive displacements, in Mrs. Baxter's view as harmless as they were witless.

    Alan was often an instigator of the banana fun, Fred Daley and Mrs. Baxter say; but he was overtly sexual in many circumstances--including a classroom reading of The Crucible--not, for most, an irresistibly arousing play. Detective Pausch affected surprise that Mrs. Baxter had not, at the very first banana episode, marched Alan to the principal's office and set into motion the discipline-and-punish machinery. Doubtless feeling that she could hardly be trotting all the boys and several girls up and down the halls every five minutes, Mrs. Baxter replied that she maintained, on principle, an open classroom, and that a trip to the principal's office was just what Alan, given his problems, did not need. After all, "though Alan was ill-behaved, he was certainly no worse than most high-school boys."

    Once inside the story, the calflike blunderings of adolescents everywhere are forgotten. We somehow fail to recall the giddy idiocy that stemmed from nothing more than horniness and managed to get itself expressed only indirectly: in public, in a burbling crowd; and then only because we were sure it would never be put to the test. We could then giggle and say obscene things precisely because all we'd ever have to do was say them. Mrs. Baxter was too wise and experienced a teacher not to know this: "I couldn't be too mad at Alan--or any of them. I'm sure we all remember being in high school." Unhappily, that is just what the story does not remember, not at all.

Bleeding the Baby

The story makes possible certain social barbarisms we would otherwise flinch from. For months before the trial began, the prosecution battled to conduct genetic tests on the Baxters' baby to see if Alan was the father as he claimed to be. The Glendale News-Press told us all about it, quoting the deputy district attorney running things, one Anne Hennigan, as saying, "We believe in fact there is a high likelihood that (the victim) is the father of the child." This is interesting. What does "we believe in fact" mean? What does "fact" have to do with it? Also, who is calling the plaintiff "the victim"? Since the word appears in parentheses, it seems as if it is the reporter, Amy Koval, who, here and elsewhere, has little doubt about who is victimizing whom. Koval is quick to remind readers, when she can, that the baby "was born approximately nine months after the start of the alleged affair," never pausing to consider that the "start" was as "alleged" as the "affair" and that the plaintiff could count.

    When the judge ruled that any such testing was a civil rights violation, the prosecution tried to subpoena Mr. Baxter and the baby, Philip, to appear in court as "exhibits." Mr. Baxter is, as Detective Pausch reported right off the bat, "half Asian" (Dolph Baxter says it usually came out as "part Oriental"); and the prosecution wanted the jury to have a look at Mr. Baxter and the baby together and see for themselves. The judge quickly vetoed that spectacle.

A Foolish Consistency Is a Real Hobgoblin

But he allowed us other you-can-hardly-believe-it's-happening-before-your-eyes displays, including the daring high-wire performance of Deputy D.A. Hennigan, summing up with an argument that focused (I swear) on the very implausibility of Alan Hoyt's story and its highly variable quality, on the way it shifted and swayed to meet new circumstances. That Alan changed his story now and then, and often chose a version that slid between the improbable and the unbelievable, indicated, she said, that he was telling the truth. Had he been inventing stories, they would have been (at least some of them) coherent, in accord with the facts. Alan, she said, was a smart young man and could easily come up with a narrative that would seem true, were he lying; that he came up with stories that did not seem true indicated, Hennigan said, that true is what they were. By that measure, the world is flat, my next-door neighbor is a satanic priestess, I am ravishing to behold, and the cat drank up the last of the gin.

What's Our Role?

But sneering at others should not protect us from exploring the pleasures we take from these trials, the requirements we place on those reporting them, the way they are designed so skillfully to grab our attention, to play directly to what we want to see and hear. The allowance of disguised voyeurism in this trial, though it probably did not exceed the usual quota, was great enough to satisfy any trench-coated frequenter of bushes. The charge of oral copulation was bolstered by talk about "threshold issues," namely, sexual intercourse. Amy Koval managed to insert this legally irrelevant issue into virtually every single article, usually by way of mentioning that it was irrelevant, though it soon wouldn't be, thanks to Senator Newton Russell, R-Glendale--blah, blah, blah. But Koval didn't originate this sort of porn; she was doing as she was told, giving us what we ask for--like that bit on the tattoo, the heart tattoo, small, right there on the thigh.

    Once the trial ended, Ms. Koval searched for material in other events to supply us with what we long for. On April 18, for instance, she got another front-page story: "Nude girl, 15, hospitalized after kidnapping attempt." Clothed, she would have been page 34, tops.

When Does It End?

It ends with the acquittal on March 18--only it doesn't. The News-Press gave a single nippy sentence to the innocent verdict and then was immediately off and running: "But most jurors after two days of deliberations thought the teacher and the teenage boy did have sexual intercourse between November 1992 and January 1993, one year before the law made it illegal." The next column repeats the point: "Baxter was tried on the oral copulation charge--not statutory rape--because there wasn't a law against sexual intercourse." But what about those jurors, the "majority," who persuaded themselves of the accused's guilt of a crime she had neither been charged with nor defended herself against? A single juror identified as "Connie" says "the majority" of the jurors were convinced that sex was in the air, Connie's view apparently being plenty good enough for Amy Koval.

    As if that weren't enough, the paper provided a second, inset column, "Despite Verdict, Baxter's Future Unclear," in which Koval repeats this prattle about the majority view and raises the specter of the state Commission on Teacher Credentials hearing, though she is mum about (discreet Amy) the looming civil suit.

    Naive citizens might think an acquittal would buy them something in the way of exoneration, or at least peace. But the fact is that after acquittal the pornographic fun lingers on. In this case, the state commission refused to reinstate Ms. Baxter, apparently feeling that when there's a whiff of smoke in a Glendale courtroom, they'd better assume a firestorm. So there are likely appeals there, along with the civil suit, which might drag on into the next millennium. We know that it will and that our transmitters from the Glendale News-Press will be there for us. Amy's our friend.

Who Wins ?

After the trial, Sophia Hoyt told the paper she was "in shock," adding that "she wasn't sure if the outcome was worth the experience of coming to court and exposing the details of her family life." She's very shrewd in divining that it's exactly those details we want exposed. The more the better. But why should it be "worth it" to her and to her son?

    To Mrs. Baxter, winning was certainly a terrible loss. She speaks of the irony of the defeated plaintiffs actually being able to take a good measure of control over her life, of the horror of these months of charges and hectoring and, worst of all, silence. But she does not hate Alan Hoyt, says she can't even muster revenge fantasies. When she's pressed on that point, she smiles, "No, I'm not going to go down that road. There's no coming back." But she seems absolutely resolute about one point: she will never teach high school again: "I'm leaving teaching. I couldn't ever be the kind of teacher it would take to be safe. Maybe college, though." There's a shimmer there at the end, a little glow of hope. But it's a great sadness when we force out of teaching those willing and best able to teach.

    But we win. We ought to acknowledge it openly. We have tortured Alan Hoyt and Mary Baxter, made them compete for the role of Purity in a sadistic morality play in which both purity and its enemies are so highly eroticized that they cannot escape. That Mary Baxter is aware of the Kafkaesque trap and that Alan Hoyt may be as well is beside the point: their awareness buys them nothing.

    We become so arrogant that we even seize a bit part in the play and manage to get ourselves mentioned in the paper. Here we are, in a side column headlined "Van Buren High Trial Draws Curious." (The curious: that's us.) Ms. Koval thinks we are drawn there because "at stake is the 31-year-old woman's dignity and teaching career, now teetering on the brink of extinction," but that's only part of it. Shhhh. Here's where we come in: we are the group who "showed up to listen to a portion of sexually graphic testimony, suppressing giggles until they dashed from the courtroom." When asked our opinion of the matter, our leader, his finger on our pulse, says, "Some say she did, some say she didn't." It really doesn't matter, just so long as we can go on saying stuff. Know what I mean?