Law & Disorder

A disgruntled maintenance worker at a UK secondary school has been accused of planting child pornography on his boss' computer in order to have his boss fired and to ruin the man's life. 

The perpetrator allegedly mailed a CD containing child pornography to the police, claiming that it came from his boss' computer. He also planted child porn on his boss' laptop and then phoned in an anonymous tip to the police, who seized the laptop and arrested the victim. 

Police eventually traced the anonymous mobile call back to the disgruntled employee, who had been bragging at a barbecue that he planned to carry out just such a scheme against his boss.

Why would he do such a thing? The boss was a real jerk.

According to the UK Press Association, that boss was maintenance supervisor Eddie Thompson, who last week told a court that his relationship with other staff at the school "was not a good one. I have a reputation of being exceedingly grumpy, bad tempered, and irascible—that's what I am."

What's frightening about this story is not only that it happened, but that the original porn planting and subsequent arrest happened in 2006, and real story didn't come out until 2007, when the disgruntled employee was finally arrested. The boss and his wife spent the intervening year being terrorized by angry neighbors and shunned by friends, family, and coworkers. The case is currently being tried in court, which is why all of the details are in the public eye now (and UK papers have been having a field day with them).

The stigma of possessing child porn means that such allegations, even if later proven untrue, can be damning. And the allegation can indeed turn out to be untrue. In 2002, UK police accused over 7,000 people of purchasing child porn from a website, but it later turned out that hundreds of them were merely victims of credit card fraud. Their credit cards had been stolen and used to purchase child porn, so they ended up getting caught in the police dragnet. One of those victims was Simon Bunce, a UK resident whose identity was stolen by a pedophile. Bunce was caught up in the aforementioned pedophile sting, dubbed Operation Ore. Before being fully cleared by the police, Bunce lost his high-paying job, and his family members disowned him. He may never be able to repair the damage to his reputation.

Correction: Operation Ore was in 2002, not 2007. It was only later in the decade that many of the stories of those falsely accused began to emerge.