How a Photo Can Ruin Your Life

Have you ever taken a photograph of your kids naked? You could be arrested just like grandma Marian Rubin or father Jeffrey B. I know this sounds ridiculous but this could easily happen to anyone who owns a camera and wants to catch their kids doing the cute kinds of things that kids often do. In the name of fighting child pornography the FBI has issued blanket requests to photo processing labs and computer repair shops in some cities to be on the lookout for pictures of kids in compromising positions, urging them to call the authorities whether they’re sure or not about a picture’s legality.

Three-year-old Sarah M. is either a toddler in her birthday suit playing in the garden, or a nude temptress with a sultry look who requires protection from the culprits who took this photograph — her doting parents. Tragically for a number of people all over the country, innocent family photos turned over to the police have led to financial ruin, divorce, debt, public humiliation, and lifelong scorn as a registered sex offender for mothers and fathers. Here’s how a zealous prosecutor could view Sarah M.’s picture: Smoldering eyes; styled, tousled blond tresses; pouty, parted lips; splayed legs; an engorged navel. And that viscous liquid dripping from the wand onto her thigh? Money shot.

Some cases involved pictures much less provocative than Sarah M.’s. Based on the way prosecutors interpreted photos in a few of those cases — Marian Rubin, a New Jersey grandmother charged for taking nude photos of her granddaughters, then aged 3 and 8; and Jeffrey B., a New York father who lost custody of his two daughters after he shot pictures of them mooning him — it’s possible to spot red flags where our innocence used to be. Just because they didn’t shoot the picture for the purpose of sexual stimulation doesn’t mean parents who just want to document their child’s garden years can’t get stuck in the sordid world of pedophilia.

Below are the stories of Marian Rubin and Jeffrey B. both of whom have had their lives turned upside down after taking nude pictures of their kids.

MARIAN RUBIN

In early 2000, Marian Rubin’s granddaughters, Amy, then 8, and Kayla, then 3, were dancing naked on her bed before bath time, strutting their best Britney and Christina moves. In still photos, they must have looked posed. The night that she was arrested, after picking up the nude pictures of the girls at a local MotoPhoto outlet — Rubin, an experienced and award-winning art and children’s photographer, insists that she never intended to publish these photos — Montclair, NJ, police went to the girls’ home and had their parents wake them up.

“They asked totally inappropriate questions,” says Rubin, who is now 72. “‘Did Granny get undressed, too? Did Granny touch you? Did Granny touch herself?’ They threatened my son and daughter that, if they didn’t cooperate, the kids would be taken away.”

Rubin wrote a book, Naked Truths (www.naked-truths.com), detailing her outrage at what she calls vigilante film processors, and she excoriates cops and prosecutors for being unable to admit they’d made a mistake.

On her lawyer’s advice, she took a deal called a “Pretrial Intervention” that amounted to conditional probation but left her with no criminal record. She now regrets not taking the case to trial. Even though a federal judge later found the pictures to be “totally inoffensive,” Rubin is still paying off the $30,000 debt.

“I haven’t taken a nude picture since,” says Rubin, who has won awards for nude bodyscape photography. “Portraiture was my thing. They took away my innocence, constricted my vision, brainwashed me into seeing things differently. They definitely changed my pictures of children.”

JEFFREY B.

Jeffrey B. (he requested his last name not be printed to protect his daughters) was divorced and had custody of his two girls, then aged 4 and 7, until a Genovese drugstore photo lab in the New York City borough of Queens inserted a note into a packet of his prints that said several shots had been turned over to police. Seven years later — after four weekends in jail, three years on probation, mandated therapy, losing custody of his daughters, contemplating suicide, and incurring about $300,000 in lawyer’s fees and loss of income — he’s a registered sex offender and has no contact with his children.

The lawyer who handled his appeal, Joseph Klempner, who also wrote Irreparable Damage, a novel based on the case, says Jeffrey B. is “destroyed,” and has not taken a single picture in seven years. “I’d stake my life on the fact that all he was doing was taking cute photos of his kids,” says Klempner, who saw the offending pictures.According to Klempner, the prosecutor said she found the silk sheets on the bed where the 7-year-old’s picture was taken “very telling.” The girl had mooned her father, and he snapped a picture from across the room. “It would take the Hubble Telescope” to see her unmentionables, relates Klempner.

In the other offending photo, the girls are shot from below, sans bathing suit bottoms, as they pretend to read books. A crucial fact in Jeffrey’s conviction: One girl testified that Daddy posed them.

It is a sad commentary when parents who obviously love and dote on their kids can be arrested and imprisoned for taking pictures of their own kids in the buff. Maybe next time someone will be arrested for changing diapers in an inappropriate place.