Former Internet Exec Says Online Pursuit of Girl Was Role-Playing

Taking the stand in his own defense, former Internet executive Patrick Naughton testified Thursday that he never intended to have sex with a minor and that his steamy online encounters with an undercover FBI agent posing as a teenage girl were part of a fantasy life he pursued to escape emotional problems and mounting pressures at work.

During more than three hours of testimony in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Naughton repeatedly said that lying about one’s age, gender or other personal details “is the point” of taking part in the sex chat rooms on the Net.

For that reason, Naughton said, he thought it was far more likely that he would meet “a nice, confused, 40-year-old woman from Encino,” than a 13-year-old girl when he showed up for an alleged sexual rendezvous at the Santa Monica Pier on Sept. 16.

Naughton, 34, was formerly executive vice president of Go.com, a popular Web site now owned by Walt Disney Co. He was arrested at the pier in the culmination of an FBI sting operation in which an undercover agent posed as a teenage girl and corresponded with Naughton for nearly seven months.

Naughton’s unexpected appearance represented a bold move by a defense team that is pursuing what many consider a risky and unprecedented legal strategy. Their central argument is that Naughton’s statements online and subsequent actions aren’t incriminating because they were grounded in an online fantasy world.

Legal experts have expressed skepticism that the strategy will succeed. But if it does, it would mark a major setback for the FBI and other law enforcement agencies across the country that now depend heavily on online stings to nab would-be sex offenders.

Naughton faces three felony counts centering on charges that he used the Net to solicit sex from a minor. If convicted, he could be sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Asked why he went to the pier for the meeting, Naughton said: “It’s just curiosity. I felt confident enough that it wasn’t an actual minor.”

But under cross-examination, Assistant U.S. Atty. Patricia Donahue hammered away at his account, contrasting his claims that he had no intent to seduce a minor with often explicit evidence.

In aggressive questioning, Donahue confronted Naughton with sexual propositions that he unwittingly made to undercover agents on the Net, sexually explicit pictures of children found on his computer, and the titles of the three sex chat rooms he admitted he frequented, all of which cater to men with sexual fetishes involving underage girls.

“There are 3,000 to 4,000 chat rooms on topics including sports, card-playing and mountain bikes,” Donahue said. “And you went into ‘Dad and Daughter Sex.’ ”

Donahue also called attention to the fact that while Naughton was frequenting such chat rooms, he was responsible for some of Disney’s most sensitive Internet operations. Naughton acknowledged that he helped design software for Go.com site to guard children from accessing sexually explicit material on the Web.

Even under such questioning, Naughton, wearing a dark suit and eyeglasses, testified in a calm and composed manner on the fourth day of his trial.

At various times, Naughton revealed personal and potentially embarrassing details, and sought to portray himself as a lowly computer software engineer overwhelmed by the soaring responsibilities of his stellar career.

Naughton said he traveled to the pier that evening largely because he found himself with “time to kill” after arriving at Burbank Airport that evening for a meeting at Disney the next day.

“I was actually in a really bad mood because of things happening at work,” he said. “I was contemplating resigning the company and was kind of despondent. I thought the worst case scenario was I’d have a nice drive, see the ocean, have dinner and come back.”

While claiming that role-playing is rampant online, Naughton admitted that he always provided accurate information about himself during online chats, even pointing his supposed 13-year-old correspondent--actually an agent--to one Web site that had a news article about him and another that had a picture of his exposed genitals.

Asked why he furnished such information if fantasy was his real objective, Naughton replied: “The role I was playing was a character of me. If you ask my psychiatrist, I have a lot of self-image and ego problems. I was looking for approval.”

Naughton said he has been a devotee of Internet chat for more than a decade, and is a “sexually conservative guy.” But he implied that he has become increasingly active in seedier chat rooms in recent years as work pressures and travel demands escalated. Naughton, who has been married for 10 years, said chatting became “an escape from a lot of work stress.”

Naughton claimed that he was always suspicious that “KrisLA,” the online identity of the undercover agent, was not really a 13-year-old girl. He cited contradictions in messages she sent.

At one point, he even said that his chat sessions with “KrisLA” were particularly unsatisfying. “Kris wasn’t a good chat partner,” he said. “It was always the same question: ‘What are we going to do [if we meet]?’ It was annoying.”