Off-track: Patrick Naughton (Photos left, Rex Rystedt; right, Rex Rystedt, courtesy Wired magazine)

CRIME
A High-Technology Crash

A fast-track digital career at Disney blows up after an arrest for soliciting a 13-year-old on the Web

By Brad Stone

It was, of course, an arrogant thing to say. But this was the bold, booming world of Seattle high tech, and Patrick Naughton was very rich, very powerful — and only 34 years old. "The decisions I make change the world — and I've never made a wrong decision in my life," a colleague recalls Naughton recently boasting at a meeting.

He wasn't all wrong. Naughton had indeed changed the world, launching Sun Microsystems' efforts to create the popular Java programming language in the early '90s. He later published two books about Java. He moved on to Seattle as technology chief at Starwave, an important early Internet player funded by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. There he helped establish such Web heavyweights as ESPN.com and ABC.com. More recently, he was a star at Disney, running the company's family-oriented Web network. He was on the fast track, and he knew it. But his decision making, as recent events revealed, turned out to be quite flawed.

At 9 p.m. on Sept. 16, Naughton, who lives in Seattle, showed up at the Santa Monica Pier near Los Angeles. It's a historic spot known for beautiful sunsets, children's rides and ice-cream cones. He was looking for a 13-year-old girl with a green backpack — they'd agreed, over the Internet, to meet there, and then, presumably, to have sex, according to an FBI affidavit. But suddenly Naughton was surrounded by agents of a sexual-assault task force made up of FBI and local authorities. He was charged with crossing state lines for the purpose of engaging in a sexual act with a minor. The 13-year-old girl in question, whom Naughton had allegedly met and wooed in an online chat room, actually turned out to be a male FBI agent. According to authorities, Naughton waived his Miranda rights and handed over his laptop, which he told agents contained sexually explicit images. Now he faces a career in ruins — and perhaps federal prison.

At Infoseek, soon to become a full subsidiary of Disney, his bosses immediately put out a press release: "We are shocked and disturbed... Patrick Naughton is no longer an employee of Infoseek." While the company rushed to distance itself from Naughton — his name was swiftly purged from all official Web pages — former colleagues described how he had won the faith of Disney executives, including CEO Michael Eisner, who had handpicked him to run Disney's new Web portal, the Go Network. "This is an incredible embarrassment for everybody involved," says one insider. It's also a special nightmare for Disney, perhaps the most maniacally image-conscious corporation in the world, obsessed with its child-friendly brand name.