Gary Bremer

BA,^* Dartmouth College

Gary Bremer was the valedictorian of Dartmouth’s class of 1984. Great! Twenty-two years later, when he was forty-five, he was arrested for having copious quantities of child pornography on his computer. Not great!

At Bremer’s trial in Connecticut Superior Court, the judge proclaimed the pictures “vile and disgusting in every sense of the word” and sentenced him to two years in prison plus five years’ probation; the judge also prohibited Bremer from having any contact with minors or with the Internet, and placed him on the Connecticut sex-offender registry for ten years.

For a guy smart enough to get into Dartmouth and to graduate ahead of all the others smart enough to get into the class of ’84, he was kind of stupid. Why do we say that? Because he did a number of stupid things:

• Stupid thing no. 1: He claimed he didn’t know he was breaking the law when he downloaded hundreds of pictures of children and babies being sexually assaulted by adults.

• Stupid thing no. 2: He put prurient titles, like “child porn” and “Lolita,” on his pictures.

• Stupid thing no. 3: He claimed that in 2002 he decided to kick the habit, drop his Internet connection, and get rid of his laptop—by pawning it, without first wiping the hard drive clean or driving a railroad spike through it. When he didn’t return to claim it, the pawnshop fired up the computer to check it out. Guess what they found.

• Stupid thing no. 4: Bremer, through his lawyer, claimed the oldest excuse in the, uh, book, which was that he was planning to write some kind of book and was using the vile and disgusting material for research. “Artistic purposes” happens to be an accepted defense for being a kiddie-porn enthusiast in Connecticut. It didn’t work.

• Stupid thing no. 5: After entering his guilty plea, Bremer apparently forgot his “artistic” defense and said he didn’t know why he had all those pictures of adults sexually assaulting children and babies.

Bremer collected his illegal pictures from the Internet and never, as his lawyer put it, “crossed the line from fantasy to reality,” i.e., never had any contact with an actual child. Great! Well, adequate, anyway.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children identified at least three of the children in Gary Bremer’s collection as victims of sexual assault, perpetrated by people who did have contact with actual children but in all likelihood were not Dartmouth valedictorians.