Galen Baughman, 32, who was imprisoned and registered as a sex offender in 2004 after having oral sex with a 14-year-old boy, had gone on to become a highly vocal spokesperson for sex offenders' rights.
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| Arrested: Galen Baughman (pictured), 32, became a prominent spokesperson for the rights of people on sex offenders' registers after he was imprisoned for giving oral sex to a 14-year-old boy in 2004 |
He opened the Center for Sexual Justice, and wrote a number of articles and gave a TEDx Talk on the topic - but on the weekend of April 23 gave himself up to police for sending texts to the boy, in violation of his parole, Slate reported Monday.
Baughman had met the boy at the funeral of a mutual friend in 2015, according to the official report by his parole officer, which includes many pages of text messages.
In one message, he told the boy to use Kik or Snapchat for 'conversations you don't want to be seen' by cops or parents, Slate reported.
In others he asked the teen if he was 'the best looking boy you know' and pressured him into talking, saying 'Am I still on your list for tonight? Or do you not have time...?' and 'Since you’ve never answered the question about whether you care about me it’s pretty clear what the answer is.
In one message he invited the boy to come visit him in Washington, D.C.
The boy's mother found the phone messages in late 2015, and contacted authorities. Later she told his probation officer she believed he had contacted other boys.
In April a warrant was issued for his arrest for being in violation of his probation, which forbade him from communicating with anyone younger than 18.
Speaking to a chat group including Slate, Baughman said, 'The probation officer’s claim that I should be arrested and held without bond for a first-time technical probation violation where no criminal behavior is asserted is ludicrous.
'Suggesting that I should be imprisoned for behavior that is neither harmful nor criminal is even more suspect.'
Baughman was 19 when he was arrested for giving oral sex to a 14-year-old boy and given six-and-a-half years in prison.
But after he finished that sentence, Virginia prosecutors - who said he might fit the profile of a sexually violent predator - tried to keep him locked up under 'civil commitment' laws that allow for indefinite detention for psychiatric evaluation.
He was eventually let out in 2012 and went on to become a loud and increasingly visible campaigner for the rights of people on the Sex Offenders' Registry, hoping to redeem sex offenders in the public's eyes.
He spoke to journalists on laws that affected people on the registry, wrote an essay decrying civil commitment that was praised in The Washington Post and gave a TEDx Talk titled 'Are We all Sex Offenders?'
In the talk he described his civil commitment trial as 'a witch trial' in which he was barred from mounting a defense and the prosecution relied 'almost entirely' on the label sex offender.
He also said that the prosecution's expert diagnosed him with 'hebephilia', which he described as 'the psychiatric disorder of finding sexually mature teenagers attractive'.
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| Talk: Baughman wrote articles about the rights of sex offenders, and claimed in his TEDx Talk (pictured) that 'all humans are attracted to teens'. He was arrested April for texting a 16-year-old in violation of probation |
Baughman's work won him a fellowship from the Open Society Foundations, which is run by philanthropist George Soros and promises 'to build vibrant and tolerant democracies whose governments are answerable to their citizens'.
That fellowship, Slate said, was 'a perch from which he set out to work on ending civil commitment in Virginia.'
But his campaign has been scuppered by his arrest - much to the horror of his former friend Josh Gravens, who was registered as a sex offender at the age of 12, after he inappropriately touched his eight-year-old sister.
Gravens, now 29, had worked with Baughman to create 'a world where people like us weren’t forced to the margins of society' and says Baughman's arrest will have a 'devastating effect' on their campaign.
Though he saw nothing illegal, he said he was horrified to discover that Baughman had been talking to two teens and told him 'pretty aggressively' to stop.
When Baughman refused, Gravens said, he cut off all contact with the man and told the teens' parents.
He added that when he asked for others in their advocacy community for advice they told him not to bother Baughman.
'I don’t think they wanted to [believe it].' Gravens told Slate. 'And so we are where we are today.'
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