I worked with a grad student who got arrested one Saturday evening for driving over to the next town to meet a 12 year old girl he had been sexting with for two months. I was university staff, and he was a TA. He had, among other things, sent her a nude picture of himself sporting an erection, and had a dildo, some lube and condoms in his car when we went to meet her. Of course, since about the third text he had been talking to the kid's mother, then a police sergeant. So as soon as he pulled into the parking lot where they were supposed to meet, they arrested him.

He was married, about 30 years old and about 3 years into his PhD in geology. He actually showed up the Sunday morning after he was arrested to be one of the TA's on a weekend undergrad field trip. The professor sent him home and told me "Thank God it was Sunday at 7a.m. and none of the undergrads had bought a paper!" So, six months later they threw out most of the charges because it was pretty blatant entrapment. At that time it was the height of the latest oil boom in Texas, and oil companies were offering 5 figure sign on bonuses and starting salaries of $150,000.

After the arrest he was immediately fired from his TA job, his thesis supervisor dropped him, he got booted from grad school, his wife divorced him, and he has to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. Texas Public Safety Department has a website where you can look up sex offenders, and every few years they update his picture. He has aged badly. Last time I checked he had a shitty on-site oil field job, the kind where you live in a trailer next to an oil rig in the middle of nowhere reading seismic charts for six months at a time, then move somewhere else. What a fucking stupid, sleazy way to ruin your life.