I came home from work the other night to discover that my roommates had erected a miniature shrine to Michael Jackson above the television. It consisted of the Thriller Album (original vinyl release), a large lit candle, and a handwritten note. The note read:

"Our prayers go out to Michael Jackson in his time of need. We know the evidence doesn't look good, but we're sure he didn't do it. We also pray that he realizes he is a 45-year-old man with no nose who should try his luck with adult women."

Tongue in cheek tone aside, my roommates do believe in Michael's innocence. Many people do. For all the Michael Jackson jokes cracked by Jay Leno and immortalized in print by the Onion, Michael Jackson is still regarded as a genius and admired as a consummate entertainer by many people. There are even some who believe he is guilty, but still support him. As a friend of mine recently remarked to me, "If he keeps making albums like Off the Wall, he can f*** as many boys as he wants to as far as I'm concerned."

The latest chapter in the tragedy of Greek proportions that is the Michael Jackson story has been all over the headlines. Depending on their tastes in infotainment, people are either hungrily following the story as celebrity gossip or eschewing the story as celebrity gossip. However, far bigger questions are in play than the psyche or guilt of a troubled pop-cultural icon.

The new Michael Jackson case, which most likely will go to court, raises two important questions. First, what happens when someone this rich, this powerful, this famous, and this popular faces charges this serious? It will take time to answer this one, as the slow wheels of the California justice system turn. Second, in light of how much the public loved and trusted Michael Jackson and still does, what is the public missing? What aren't so many people seeing in Michael Jackson if he can run a popular children's theme park and still have a growing body of circumstantial evidence against him, evidence that paints him as a child's worst enemy?

And yet these two questions jointly lead to a far bigger question. What is pedophilia? It is a question we all ignore, because we think pedophilia is something weird on the fringes of society. It makes us uncomfortable. We don't want to think about it. Why should we have to? After all, we tell ourselves, it'll never happen to our children. Or perhaps we don't have children.

I don't have children. I don't know if I ever will. However, the question of the nature of pedophilia is one I felt compelled to answer for myself long ago.

I was sexually assaulted at the age of twelve. It wasn't pedophilia by clinical definitions, because the assailant was approximately my age. The assailant was bigger than me, a neighborhood bully, and in the seven years he remained in my life afterwards (or shared adolescence), he used various forms of emotional and physical intimidation to keep me from becoming sexually active, and even tried to convince me that I was the one who had raped him. He always assured me that he forgave me for the sin of rape and the "sin" of being gay, but that no one else would, so I shouldn't discuss what happened between us with anyone, especially not my parents.

On my end, the psychological damage has been profound. Sadly, every therapist I've been to has told me most victims actually fare worse.

Ultimately, I spent a long time in the clutches of Stockholm Syndrome – a syndrome where one identifies with one's captors or tormentors. When debates about how to deal with sexual predators arose among my friends or peers, I would always insist that pedophiles and rapists are not beyond reform, and should be rehabilitated, reintegrated into society, and treated with compassion. This paralleled real life patterns I had at the time, patterns of seeking out pedophiles and rapists in real life and spending time with them.

I have recovered from Stockholm Syndrome at this point. I have a healthy hatred of my attacker, and a genuine belief that pedophiles most likely can't change. (I hesitate to say pedophiles NEVER can change, but this is because I believe we live in a world with few absolutes.)

This opinion is by and large bolstered by the experiences I had "befriending" pedophiles and rapists during a time when my behavior was a good deal more self destructive than it is now. Most of the sexual predators I encountered were despicable human beings. They had developed complex rationalizations to justify their behavior.

I have found that if you ask most pedophiles if pedophilia is bad, they will say it is. However, they have reasons why it was acceptable when they did it. One pedophile I discussed this with explained to me that he was driven to rape his sister when she had barely learned to walk because his mother was domineering and abusive toward both him and his sister, and doing such a horrible thing was the only leverage he had to fight back against his mother. He made himself out to be a hero, morally defiling himself as a means of fighting an unjust parent. He told me that, whether his sister would care to admit it or not, she was glad to have been raped by her brother to fight their common enemy.

Another pedophile I knew had a much simpler rationalization. He blamed it on drugs. He was addicted to heroin when he molested his two daughters and was thus out of control of his actions. (For reasons I can't fathom, this man actually managed to regain custody of his daughters five or six years after being released from a very short incarceration.)

Another pedophile I encountered was very dichotomous. He seemed to have what amounted to three separate personalities. One of them would deny that he did anything of that sort. One would BRAG about the fact that he preyed on children against their will. And one of his personalities would insist it was all consensual. One of his victims eventually filed charges with my help.

Pedophiles are extremely malicious and manipulative predators. Whether or not pedophiles can change is incidental to the fact that most of them won't, because they enjoy the power they think they have too much.

I have come to believe that pedophilia is not a disease of physical desire, like alcoholism. It is a far more insidious addiction to power, or perceived power. Pedophiles create their own moral and sexual world, one where they perceive themselves as having absolute supremacy. They dominate, control, and think of themselves as the owners of the children they hurt, just as many of them were dominated, controlled, and owned as children. They believe the only way they can reclaim the power that was stolen from them in childhood is to steal it from another child.

Most rape victims make at least a partial psychological recovery (as I have). I believe pedophiles represent a segment of rape victims who make no recovery at all. Their failure (and the defacto triumph of whoever abused them) comes when they cross that line from prey to predator. They become what they despise the most.

I'm not sure I know the answers to the more complex questions about pedophilia. I don't know quite what the suitable punishment for such a person is, and I'm uncertain of how to best protect society from such predators. I think it should go without saying that I don't know whether Michael Jackson will be found guilty. However, I do know that rape should not be pushed out of the mainstream of public discourse. Too much is at stake.