Brown Pornographer/Hockey Player Gets Clean Slate
Oh how easily we do forget.
When Brown freshman and native Canadian Harrison Zolnierczyk was charged earlier this year on accounts of “child pornography,� the commentators on Ivy Gate went wild. There were cries for justice, for retribution, for glimpses of the footage he put on photobucket of his girlfriend getting down and dirty on his friend/hockey teammate Bradley Harding.
You ivy league plebs demanded that the law (albeit Canadian) be put into effect, saying that he deserved to go to jail for secretly directing underage porn without his girlfriend’s consent, and that he deservedly would never get this off of his record. In particular, one commentator who goes by the name Irony wrote, “What a foolish mistake he made and now that will cost him for the rest of his life.â€?
Well, ironically, as the Brown Daily Herald recently reported, Zolnierczyk’s record will be as clean as a whistle by the time he graduates. In April, Harry pleaded guilty to “two counts of electronic voyeurism,� and in June was sentenced to three years’ probation with conditional discharge.
This means that if he can keep his hands on his hockey stick and off of his video camera for the next few years, there will be no legal record of this crime. All he needs to do is change his name (let’s be honest, there are too many consonants in that thing anyway) and no one will ever know. Zolnierczyk will be back in school this coming fall, and he may even be playing hockey. Better yet, Brown’s Vice President for Public Affairs and University Relations Michael Chapman made this statement to The Herald:
“The conditional discharge means the court found no charges to pursue. We expect him to return this fall, and his conduct at Brown has raised no concerns.”
Gotta love Brown: you can pass/fail all your classes, read whatever the hell you want, and maybe even create an academic major in something like “electronic voyeurism.� Hey, it’s no concern!
–JULI MIN
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July 23rd, 2008 at 12:09 am
nice post :)
July 23rd, 2008 at 12:37 am
Oh please, spare me your bleeding heart journalism. Child pornography laws are meant to hamper to exploitation and abuse of innocent children by adults, not slutty, 17-year-old girlfriends. Zolnierczyk’s intent were not the product of a pedophile, nor were exploitive in that vein. To punish him to the fullest extent of the law would be venal and stupid.
July 23rd, 2008 at 1:01 am
@jazzarini: If the reporting is correct, dude taped his girlfriend WITHOUT HER CONSENT and put it on the internet. Child porn laws are meant to protect those who don’t consent to having their nude photos sprawled across the internet - and legally, a minor cannot consent to that. How is that not exploitative? Granted, it is exploitative independent of the factor of age. But Zolnierczyk is not the victim here - he broke the law (and yes, the spirit of the law) regardless of how old the girl was. Once the authorities learned the girl was underage, a child porn charge would have been an automatic magnifier to the baseline charge of posting nude photos of someone without their consent. It also makes it much easier to prosecute. Granted, maybe the child porn charge should not magnify the “core” or baseline charge quite “to the fullest extent of the law,” but I think Juli’s point is more about Brown’s absurdity in saying “his conduct has raised no concerns.” Legal questions aside, homie took naked pics of his girlfriend without her consent and put them online. That’s a concern, and he’s an asshole who doesn’t deserve any breaks.
July 23rd, 2008 at 5:51 am
Anybody else think the punishment from Brown would have be different if he weren’t an athlete? Not only do they get HUGE admissions breaks, but now this? Who knows?
July 23rd, 2008 at 10:18 am
Didn’t something like this happen at Yale one or two years back with some international kid (a non-athlete, incidentally)? What happened to him? Could be a valid comparison…
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:04 pm
@Dartmouth:
What he did was definitely mean-spirited and the work of an asshole with poor judgment, but it doesn’t strike me as evil or criminal the same way a 50 year old taping sex with a 10 year old child might be. And it definitely doesn’t raise concerns to anywhere near that level. It was the stupid mistake of a young person whose pre-frontal cortex might be a lil undeveloped.
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:33 pm
@jazzarini
Don’t even try to spin his actions as just off the beaten path of rationality. What he did was disgusting. Just because there are more heinous crimes out there deos not make his any more acceptable. In my opinion he was old enough have Mens Rea (the knowledge that something is wrong, and choosing to do it anyways), and therefore I do not accept ignorance or stupidity as a defense.
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:48 pm
“She was 17 years old when Zolnierczyk surreptitiously recorded her topless, performing oral sex on his co-accused, an Alberni Valley Bulldogs Junior A hockey player whom she thought of as her boyfriend.
Zolnierczyk added what Judge Douglas Cowling called “an adolescent, crude and tasteless commentary” to the footage and then posted the video to the Internet. Later he shared the four-to-five-minute video with other people.
The woman also told the court that she knows for a fact that the video was sent out to people via instant messaging software, so it may be still tucked away on any number of hard drives.”
(http://news.guelphmercury.com/Wire/Sports_Wire/Jr_Hockey_Wire/article/338031)