Girlhood, interrupted

By Karen Thomas, USA TODAY

Talk to author Katie Tarbox about dangerous Internet liaisons

NEW CANAAN, Conn. - The year Katie Tarbox started eighth grade, she met "Mark" in a chat room on America Online. He said he was 23 and a college student in California; he recognized her "as someone different from a typical 13-year-old," she says. In his eyes, she seemed to be smart. Sophisticated. Mature.

Within a month, their online relationship graduated to the phone, where he heard about the cupcakes she baked for her 14th birthday and listened to her play piano when her family wasn't home.

He always supported and encouraged her. She was a top student and nationally ranked swimmer, but where most of the adults in her life - parents, coaches, teachers - told her to work harder and be better, he made her laugh. Eventually, he made her feel loved.

After six months, Katie agreed to meet him on March 12, 1996, when she was in Texas with her swim team for a meet. He got a room at the hotel where Katie and her teammates - as well as her mom, a chaperone - were staying.

But when she went to his room to meet him, the man she thought was her cyber-soulmate turned out to be not Mark, 23, but Frank, a 41-year-old pedophile.

Police came banging on the door after her roommate, who knew about the plans, panicked and told Katie's mom. They narrowly prevented what Katie says certainly would have been a sexual assault.

In Katie.com (Dutton, $19.95), due in bookstores May 8, Katie shares her account of the events leading to the incident that made her the first "unnamed minor" to test a federal law that was enacted to protect kids from online sexual predators.

Now 18 and preparing for college, Katie paints a vivid portrait of the pain and confusion of facing the reality that she had been duped.

"The man who had been my friend, who had listened to me and cared for me so deeply," began fading from Katie's mind.

"He was being replaced by the image of a manipulative, porn-obsessed, child molester named Frank Kufrovich," she writes. "This was not my Mark."

In the year after their meeting, as Katie appeared before a grand jury and underwent a polygraph test, she heard evidence that outlined his pattern of preying on children. Agents interviewed young girls and boys with whom Kufrovich, a financial adviser and frequent international traveler, had relationships. She says some told stories about his forcing himself on them sexually. Investigators introduced evidence about his trips to Asia for sex with preteens.

But that night in 1996, when the police told her that "Mark" had lied about his name, his age - nearly everything - Katie still felt obligated to protect him. "I was a mature person," she writes. "I was just as responsible for this as he was."

During the 13-month investigation after the Texas incident, Katie balanced police interviews with the demands of a new school, a prestigious boarding prep school in New Hampshire.

She was there when she heard that Kufrovich was indicted on two federal charges.

It was 14 more months before he pleaded guilty as part of a plea agreement. That day, Katie traveled to Texas for the hearing, at which Kufrovich offered an apology to her through his attorneys.

Several weeks later, she got a letter from him, saying: "I was the adult, not you. I should have acted like an adult. You were not at fault here."

It arrived just days before he was sentenced to 18 months in prison. At a crowded hearing, she told the court that he "had stolen two years of my life, two years of my childhood that I could never get back."

Kufrovich is no longer incarcerated and has had no contact with Katie, his lawyer says. He will not comment on the incident or Katie's book because he was denied access to copies before publication.

But today, when Katie refers to the man who interrupted her childhood when she was 13, she still struggles with the realization that Mark - her soulmate - and Frank - the little man in the weird white shoes in a Texas hotel room - are one and the same.

She still doesn't know whether to call him Frank or Mark. Mostly, she avoids his name, but when pressed, she uses "Frark."

Reconciling those two personas is one of the toughest parts of the healing for all victims of child molestation, experts say.

"Essentially, a child is trying to figure out how much (of the relationship) was real caring and concern, and how much was an attempt to seduce, manipulate and groom them," says William O'Donohue, a psychology professor who runs a child sexual assault treatment program at the University of Nevada in Reno.

The question is something Katie continues to grapple with.

"Although he was doing it in the end to have a sexual relationship, I mean, I think he did enjoy the friendship part of it, too, " she says, then quietly adds, "If the adolescent sex was all he was going for, he could've just gone back to Vietnam."

And she can't forget that first sight of him. "He was the scrawniest man I had ever seen," Katie writes. Still, he didn't look 41. Or threatening. Or scary.

"When there are gaps in knowledge, we fill them in . . . with what we'd like them to be," says Larry Rosen, a California psychology professor and co-author of TechnoStress, a book about how people cope with technology. "She projected him to be the perfect 23-year-old college guy."

In the book, Katie recalls the night in the Texas hotel room, saying that when Kufrovich touched her, she felt uncomfortable.

When he kissed her, her mind reeled in confusion.

When he forcibly groped her, Katie became scared.

It wasn't until two years later, when she was 16, that she finally began writing, hoping to put into words the inexplicable loneliness and inability to despise the man who had deceived her.

"I don't think I ever really thought it was going to be a book," she says over lunch with her mom near her family's home in Connecticut. "By the end of the summer, it was 300 pages long."

Her story, Katie says, may be a wake-up call for parents "to look at their children's lives and really see what they're doing online and try to figure it out."

In addition to examining the details of her ordeal, Katie tries to explore the underlying reasons she became a victim. She points an accusatory finger at her busy, work-obsessed parents and skewers her power- and prestige-conscious community, one of the wealthiest suburbs in the nation.

"People said to me, 'How can you let her publish that? It isn't very flattering,'" says Katie's mom, Andrea Tarbox, a financial executive at a technology firm. "It's her book, and her opinion. We continue to have differing opinions."

In her book, Katie laments her mother's long hours and weekend workdays that left little time for quality family time. Her mom concedes that with millions of dollars at stake, her hours on the job were long, "but I never missed a swim meet."

Her first reaction to her daughter's encounter in the Texas hotel room, she notes, points to how misunderstood victims of a sexual crime can be. "I thought, 'How old did you tell this guy you were?' I had a hard time imagining a guy this age would be interested in a 14-year-old."

She defended Katie to parents who felt that she would be a bad influence on their kids.

"Right or wrong, she made a mistake, for whatever reason," Katie's mom says. "But she's not a horrible kid."

Katie says people still "look at me like 'How could you be such an idiot?' They don't sit back and realize that 'How can a 13-year-old be responsible for a sexual encounter with a 41-year-old man?'"

Many victims of online predators are "kids with problems," says Ernie Allen, executive director of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. They have "problems at school. Problems with boyfriends. Problems with parents. Problems with homework. This is every kid. Any kid at some point is going to be vulnerable."

"At 13 or 14, they're spending a huge amount of time trying to be attractive to the opposite sex," O'Donohue says. "A 14-year-old boy does not have the social skills yet to do that. But you take a 21- or 40-year-old male, they know how to woo and how to compliment and how to flatter. And that can be very enticing."

Still, in online conversations with 23-year-old "Mark," Katie raised the issue of age difference.

"Don't you think that our age difference is a little weird?" she wrote one October night on AOL. But he dismissed her concerns.

"No, no, Katie. In other countries no one would even care. Americans' views are distorted when it comes to older and younger people and their involvement with each other. I mean, in France this would be perfectly acceptable."

"But we are not in France, Mark."

"Well, I am not concerned about it, so you shouldn't be either," he said.

"I figured that if I was truly mature, I would be unfazed, too," Katie writes in the book.

In her epilogue, she urges parents to listen carefully to their daughters. "Every girl says she is doing fine. But if you just spend the time, you might hear the rest of the story."

Contributing: M.J. Zuckerman