Big News! Part II – The Ortloff Nightmare

We’re recapping some of the big stories of the year and today’s announcement that former Assemblyman Chris Ortloff has pleaded guilty to a felony child-sex charge certainly makes the list.

Ortloff was a twenty-year veteran in upstate New York politics, an Assemblyman and a tough-on-crime member of the state Parole Board.

He was a member of a dozen different non-profit boards and was also a prominent businessman, author, and former journalist.

The details of his attempts to arrange a sexual liaison with two girls, age 11 and 12, are so revolting and harrowing that even hardened journalists were at a loss to know how to cover the story.

The good news is that the children Ortloff meant to victimize were, in fact, fictional — a trick crafted by New York state police.

The bad news is that the 61-year-old apparently suggested in his conversations with undercover cops that he had victimized other underage children in the past.

Some of those questions still haven’t been sorted out.

It’s always heartbreaking when a prominent community leader is exposed as flawed — case in point, Eliot Spitzer. But this case went beyond all that.

This tale has a David Lynchian, Twin Peaks quality that suggests a deeper kind of predatory evil at work.

Ortloff’s sentencing is set for April 23rd. One hopes that the court will heed these words:

“When a convicted sex offender is released, this type of crime has almost no remediation, it has a higher recidivism rate, they tend to do it, and do it again.”

Who said that? None other than Chris Ortloff himself, during an interview with WCAX TV in 1995.