Larry Brinkin

Larry Brinkin
Criminal charge	Felony Child Pornography Possession
Criminal penalty	Six months jail, five years probation
Criminal status	Convicted

Larry Brinkin, born 1947, is a homosexual, homosexual rights activist, lawyer, and a former director of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, who was convicted of pedophile offenses in 2014.

Career

Brinkin is generally considered a “gay rights pioneer,” and a champion for “equal rights” for the Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual and Transgender community. As a lawyer, he was widely credited for starting the "gay marriage" legal campaign, and he brought the first cases for novel interpretations of marriage-related discrimination that eventually led to legalizing what became defined as "same-sex marriage" in the USA. Brinkin retired from SFHRC in 2010, and San Francisco declared the first week of February as "Larry Brinkin Week." At the time of his retirement, he earned more than $135,000 per year.

Links with Pedophilia

In 2014 Brinkin, 67, was convicted on charges of possessing and distributing child pornography. The case started in June 2012 when San Francisco police acted on a tip from the Los Angeles Police Department, about an AOL e-mail exchange between a Los Angeles user and a certain <zack3737@aol.com>. Police linked the AOL address to Brinkin's IP address, proving he was owner of the account and paid for the AOL service with his credit card. They then searched Brinkin's home and found that on his computer he had literally thousands of extreme pornographic images of small children that he was getting and sending to other pedophiles, who added comments of their own to indicate excitement. Brinkin had made online comments of a coarse explicitly nature that left no room for doubt about his enjoyment. Some of the comments were also described as racist. Brinkin had a “toolbox” of child pornography, which included thumb drives, at the home where he lived with his partner, Wood Massi, who says he had no idea he was married to what was widely condemned as a "deviant".

Conviction

When first arrested, Brinkin pleaded not guilty. For two years, what were described by right-wing activists as "friends in high places" allegedly shielded him from prosecution and from media coverage, blanking out all information about his case from the internet, except on small inter-personal networks.

When his trial finally came, Brinkin pleaded guilty. The evidence was reported as being too damning, as the messages were sent from his e-mail address, and from his IP address over a number of years. The prosecution showed the court items found by police at his home including computers, USB sticks, videos, VHS tapes, and a floppy disc, with pedophile content. The photographs and films were paid for with his credit card. He was convicted in January 2014. It was considered remarkable that he only got 6 months in jail. Brinkin’s "very generous" pension from the city of San Francisco was not terminated. The proceedings of the case were condemned by critics as suffering from what they called an almost total media blackout. Nearly all news of Brinkin’s conviction was said to have been kept off internet search engines.