Swarens: Jared Fogle — the monster next door

Jared Fogle was sold to us as the genial guy next door with an inspiring story. A story about a morbidly obese young man who lost more than 200 pounds, earned a new life, and won fortune and fame. All by eating fast food.

That image, of course, was a lie.

Fogle, in truth, was a monster.

A monster who trafficked in child pornography.

A monster who, according to court documents, bought and raped — no other word for it — teenage girls.

A monster with the shamelessness and audacity to text one of his victims, a 17-year-old, the day after paying to have sex with her, to ask for an even younger child the next time.

"The younger the girl, the better," was Fogle's request, according to court records.

Horrific. Vile. Revolting.

Words fail.

A friend of mine, a person of special insight and wisdom, uses a thought tool to help people avoid the type of decisions that can destroy a marriage and family, ruin a reputation, inflict lasting shame and pain on themselves and those they love. Picture, before you make the first step down a path you know you shouldn't take, the eventual consequences. Picture the potential devastation if your private choices became public knowledge. Then run hard the other way.

The sad thing is that many people, even if they think about such things beforehand, don't have the self-awareness or self-control needed to avoid their own destruction. Jared Fogle, lost in his sick impulses, certainly didn't.

Even sadder, is that Fogle isn't alone in committing these most horrific of crimes.

On an August night four years ago, I felt, for the first time, ashamed to be a man. Ashamed by the suffering that others of my gender were casually inflicting on the helpless and hurting.

I was on a side street in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, when I passed an open air bar filled with men from Western nations. Upstairs was a clearly marked brothel, in a nation where child sex trafficking is common and where men travel half way across the planet to abuse terrified girls and boys. Children as young, and in some cases even younger, than Fogle's victims.

Statistics on the number of child trafficking victims are notoriously shaky, in part because it's an underground economy that's especially difficult to measure. Too many activists fighting this scourge too often cite unreliable data.

With that caveat, however, the United Nations, in its 2014 "Global Report on Trafficking in Persons," found that child trafficking is on the rise, that children make up one-third of all trafficking victims, and that girls are twice as likely as boys to be sold. In most cases, they are sold for sex.

The evil of child pornography also has increased. In 2011, then U.S. Attorney Eric Holder reported "a historic rise in the distribution of child pornography, in the number of images being shared online, and in the level of violence associated with child exploitation and sexual abuse crimes. Tragically, the only place we've seen a decrease is in the age of victims."

So Jared Fogle is far from alone in his perversions. He's hardly the only one saying, "the younger the girl, the better."

The monsters in our midst often hide behind masks of normalcy. But the monsters are real nonetheless.

Sometimes that monster is a guy prowling the darkest alleys of the Internet. Sometimes it's the guy on our TV screens selling us sandwiches.

Contact Swarens at tim.swarens@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @tswarens.