"Its a nice house to have grown up in," Katie says, settling into the dark sitting room, a room decorated with gold lamps and some chinoiserie. She averts her eyes. Perhaps it would have been an entirely average house to grow up in, except for the troubles that began when Katie was 13. One day she entered a teen chat room on AOL, and all at once her adolescence became unlike those of her upper-class conservative teen peers.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
From Time Digital: She was 13 when a 40-year-old man started flirting with her online. Katie Tarbox tells what it was like to be the victim of a chat-room child molester
Katie Tarbox, the very picture of affluent teen
normality, shows off her familys two-story house
in the plush Connecticut suburb of New Canaan.
The 18-year-old stops only to look briefly in a
mirror and smooth down her already well-coiffed,
highlighted blond hair. Then she takes me to her
room, where a Gateway computer and a Sony
Vaio vie with her Laura Ashley bedspread set and
wicker furnishings. "The Vaio is such a beautiful
thing," she sighs. We go back downstairs and say
hello to cockatoo Agidore and Katies older sister
also blond and round faced with intelligent blue
eyes, back from Brown University for spring break.
"Dont Katie and I look alike?" she asks.