During Michael Jackson’s trial for pedophilia in 2003, I lived in Santa Barbara, and Neverland Ranch was in Santa Barbara County, so the trial was treated as a local event. We Santa Barbarians were privileged to varying versions of the Inside Story. Example: “My best friend’s hair stylist told her that one of his clients overheard the sister of a guy who cuts grass at Neverland say on her cell phone at Trader Joe’s that Jackson did sexually abuse that boy.”

Based on such solid evidence as well as on media stories from actual reporters actually covering the case, people I knew thought Jackson was guilty. After all, the pervert charges first surfaced in 1993 and never quite went away. And, to be frank, Neverland and Jackson, however beloved by many, were considered by more-or-less neutral observers to be just too weird for him not to be guilty of something illegally weird.

But the other day I raised the subject with the thirty-something who was cleaning my home. Let’s call her Pam. Pam said Jackson was such a beloved icon of her youth that she was convinced of his innocence. She said he just loved children, boys and girls alike, and innocently. The media indicate that she is not alone. Many, including Jackson’s friend Elizabeth Taylor, have voiced similar convictions over the years.

Pam went on to tell me that for three years her former fiancé’s father had sexually abused her daughter. When Pam found out she took the bastard to court. Attorneys and social workers believed her daughter but didn’t have enough evidence to convict the pedophile whom the girl had called Grandpa.

I have to wonder if one reason people believe Jackson was innocent (beside the fact that his guilt was not established) is that children are sexually abused by adults often enough that we want to believe our favorite stars are better than the perverts who pass as normal all around us but surface often and close enough to make us nervous.

Pedophiles (whether or not they are in their victim’s family) can, after all, be good at hiding in plain sight. A friend told me her father had raped her repeatedly when she was a child. During that same time, he was head of the ethics committee of a prominent association of professional psychotherapists. He was a pillar of his local and professional communities. My friend said people would rather think she and her mother were lying about him than believe that he was doing what he was doing to his little girl.

Unfortunately, just as people don't necessarily recognize pedophiles, pedophiles don’t necessarily recognize that they are dangerous. The mind numbs as Michael Jackson asks with wistful self-justification, on camera, “What’s wrong with sharing a bed” (with a boy)? And the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) actually advocates legalizing sex between men and boys. I even saw a sickening report on television about men who exchange stories about their repeated rape of their own daughters. They seem to think they are, as responsible parents, teaching their girls how to love.

Recently a client I was interviewing in connection with his memoir, which I am writing, said that as children, he and his little sister went to Saturday afternoon movies. There was a bald man who habitually attended, too, and who wanted to sit next to his sister and massage her thigh during the movie. They told their parents, who were too innocent to understand the implication. The kids coped by changing seats whenever the pervert sat next to the sister.

My client's story reminded me of the man who sat next to me at a Saturday afternoon movie in the seemingly secure Manhattan suburb where we lived. I was nine or ten. He massaged my thigh throughout the film. Later at home, I told my mother, who asked if I’d reported him to the theater manager. I said, “No. I thought that would be rude.” She said it is smart not rude to report dangerous people; and it is very important.

Still earlier, when I was six, I was walking to school when a woman stopped her car on the shady suburban street, rolled down her window, and tried to persuade me to get into the car. I said no. She persisted, offering to drive me to school. I said no. She offered me candy. Aha! Just the ploy we children had been warned about, even in that safe town. Recognizing the script, I repeated firmly the one-word line I’d been taught: “No.” Then, improvising, I added, “I’m almost there. I’ll walk.”

I still wonder what her life story was and what my life story would have been if I’d gone with her. She seemed both plaintive and dangerous. While women pedophiles are much less common than male pedophiles, they do exist. I'll never know if she was one or was instead a kidnapper with other twisted motivations or ...

Yet another time, my friend Corny (for Cornelia) and I were sitting on a bench by a river in a woods where we were never allowed to be without a grownup, because dangerous men might follow the river up from the city. We went there without an adult all the time, which is why I was perhaps more familiar with the sight of male masturbation and orgasm than many other gently raised little girls. (Me at nine to my mother: “What’s that white stuff than comes out of a man’s penis when he pulls on it?” Poor mother later said she sometimes thought I’d never live to grow up.)

Anyway, a scruffy looking man on a bike stopped, leaned his bike against the bench where Corny and I sat, and told us we should rub each other “like this:” on each of us, he rubbed the central spot just above the area where our tightly crossed legs met. I was scared but didn’t want to be rude or provoke this stranger. My mind raced. I said, “I just remembered. I have to go home right now and practice the piano.” Corny said, “Me, too,” and we fled.

One thing that probably hasn’t changed from my mother’s generation to mine to my son’s is the ghastly fear that our children might fall into the hands of a pedophile despite our best efforts to keep them safe. The defining event for my generation of parents in this regard was the May 1979 disappearance of Etan Patz in Manhattan. Last month, the media marked the thirtieth anniversary of the traumatic tragedy, and “Etan Patz” rose to the top of Google Trends. When I saw it, I was unprepared for and unguarded against the memory, and the horror and fear I’d felt at the time resurfaced with all its old intensity. The assumption was and is that six-year-old Etan was kidnapped by a pedophile while walking alone to the school bus.

Like Etan’s family, mine also lived in Manhattan in 1979. The Patzes lived downtown. We lived between Lincoln Center and Central Park. On lampposts in our neighborhood, have-you-seen-this-boy fliers with Etan’s beguiling photo appeared. We parents saw them whenever we went out; whenever we took our children to the school bus stop and waited to see them safely board; whenever we picked them up from the school bus and walked them home.

As another mother who was in Manhattan in 1979 said last month to Lisa Cohen, author of a new book on the case [Note: She has posted a  comment below], “Etan’s disappearance forever changed the way children are raised in the city.”

Her remark reminded me that in 1969 when my son was born, a friend, the photography critic and author Vicki Goldberg, said (referring to a Francis Bacon quotation), "Now you have a hostage to fortune. Your life will never be the same again."

I never forgot the quotation, and I have come to understand that every child is a hostage to fortune, and in the post-9/11 world, we all know more surely than ever what can befall a hostage. Pedophiles are terrorists in the starkest terms: they spread terror.