DIFFERENT TAKE

John Grisham Sorry for Kid-Porn Comment

Said not all watchers are pedophiles.

Best-selling novelist John Grisham has apologized for saying there are too many people in prison for watching child pornography. "Anyone who harms a child for profit or pleasure, or who in any way participates in child pornography—online or otherwise—should be punished to the fullest extent of the law," he said on his website. "My comments made two days ago during an interview with the British newspaper The Telegraph were in no way intended to show sympathy for those convicted of sex crimes, especially the sexual molestation of children. I can think of nothing more despicable."

Grisham told The Telegraph on Tuesday: “We have prisons now filled with guys my age. Sixty-year-old white men in prison who’ve never harmed anybody, would never touch a child. But they got online one night and started surfing around, probably had too much to drink or whatever, and pushed the wrong buttons, went too far and got into child porn.” Grisham used an example of a friend who got caught up in a Canadian child-porn sting a decade ago who Grisham thinks got too stiff a sentence. “There’s so many of them now. There’s so many ‘sex offenders’—that’s what they’re called—that they put them in the same prison. Like they’re a bunch of perverts, or something; thousands of ’em. We’ve gone nuts with this incarceration,” he claimed. Grisham said then he has “no sympathy for real pedophiles” and that they should be locked up.