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Want a bank loan? Get yourself more Facebook friends — but make sure they pay their bills on time.
Banks are beginning to look at user accounts on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites to determine if an applicant is loan-worthy, raising privacy concerns as well as questions over whether a person’s online friends, likes and dislikes can actually measure their financial stability.
Everything a person does publicly on their social-networking accounts can be found by market researchers if the user’s privacy settings allow it. Researchers are now looking at a person’s online conversations, the groups they join, products they look at and even who their friends are to determine loan-worthiness.
“The presumption is that if your friends are responsible credit cardholders and pay their bills on time, you could be a good credit customer,” reports WTOP News in Washington, DC.
“Lenders say having a wide network of friends can expedite getting a loan, while discrepancies between your loan application and your Facebook wall information can raise red flags. Negative comments about your business also can impact your creditworthiness,” WTOP reports.Story continues below…
At the forefront of this effort is a California-based startup called Rapleaf, which specializes in “provid[ing] social data about a company’s audience,” the company’s Web site states.
According to a report at CreditCards.com, Rapleaf turns “conversations you have in your network into consumer profiles called social graphs. These graphs provide companies with insight into behavior patterns: what you like and dislike, want and don’t want, do well and do poorly.”
Pretty much everything you and your network reveal may be compiled, including status updates, “tweets,” joining online clubs, linking a Web site or posting a comment on a blog or news Web site.
Joel Jewitt, a Rapleaf vice-president, told CreditCards.com that he sees a trend away from the traditional use of general demographic data — age, gender, address — to the use of specific data culled from the Internet.
CONSERVATIVE CONNECTIONS
Rapleaf’s founder and CEO is Auren Hoffman, a prolific Silicon Valley entrepreneur who in 2001 co-founded Lead21, a conservative business advocacy group with links to the Republican Party, particularly to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration in California. He writes an occasional column for the Huffington Post.
Hoffman gave a clear indication of how he views the value of social media to banks in a Tweet last fall: “If you don’t know what your customers are doing online, then you don’t know your customers.”
One of Rapleaf’s initial bankrollers was John Thiel, the founder of PayPal and an investor in Facebook. Thiel was also involved in conservatives’ efforts to fight the influence of community organizing group ACORN. He reportedly donated money to John O’Keefe, the videographer who taped ACORN workers offering advice on how to operate a human smuggling and prostitution ring. (In a lawsuit filed against O’Keefe, an ACORN worker has accused the filmmaker of entrapment.)
BUT DOES IT WORK?
Not everyone in the business community is jumping on the social-media bandwagon. Aside from privacy concerns, some bankers see Facebook, Twitter and the like as irrelevant to lending decisions.
“It’s difficult to make a judgment about an individual’s credit based on the people around them,” Gregory Meyer, community relations manager for California’s Meriwest Credit Union, told CreditCards.com. Social media “is a great way to keep up with what my 10-year-old nephew is up to, but it doesn’t have a place in the credit process.”
Consumer advocates are more vocal in their opposition.
“It’s rotten,” says Linda Sherry of Consumer Action. “It’s really not something they should be doing. They may be gaining information from people who are naive and [don't understand] how their profiles are set. It verges on privacy violation.”
Privacy advocates have long been warning of the dangers of leaving online information exposed. They suggest a number of steps to minimize exposure, including changing your privacy settings so that only people known to you can access your data, and eliminating online friendships that could reflect poorly on you.
http://rawstory.com/2010/01/banks-tracking-borrowers-facebook-twitter-report/

Rapleaf is a Web 2.0 start-up company based in San Francisco, California founded by Auren Hoffman and Manish Shah. Today, Rapleaf's database of consumer information helps businesses segment customers, understand consumer penetration across social media[2], and investigate fraud[3].

Investors
Rapleaf was initially self-funded by Hoffman and Shah[4]. Peter Thiel of The Founders Fund led a seed round of $1.0 million[5]. Other angel investors[6] in the round include Eric Di Benedetto, Aydin Senkut, Jeff Clavier, and Ron Conway, all with a background of venture capital-backed technology companies.[5]

History, products and services

Hoffman and Shah met at UC Berkeley's Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology[7] in spring of 2004. The two worked on a project prior to Rapleaf from February 2005 to November 2005. They formed Rapleaf in April, 2006 though work began in November 2005.
The company's first product, Rapleaf, is a meta-reputation system that allows users to create reviews and ratings of consumer transactions, which they then contribute to multiple e commerce websites. On May 15, 2006 eBay removed a number of auction listings where the seller had included links to Rapleaf, claiming they were in violation of its terms of use. Business commentators have had mixed opinions about this move.[8].
On January 26, 2007, Rapleaf released "Upscoop," a service that allows users to search for and manage their contacts by email address across multiple social networking sites.[9]. In late August 2007, Upscoop began e-mailing entire contact lists that are provided by their users when they login.
On July 10, 2008, Rapleaf changed its interface so that it no longer allows anonymous or registered users to search by email addresses. Instead, the service only allows a registered user to view their own reputation and the websites (social and business networking) to which their own email address is registered. There was an immediate negative backlash by companies and individuals who had been using Rapleaf to both manage reputations and investigate the authenticity of people.
Today, Rapleaf is primarily a B2B firm that helps companies analyze consumer lists to plan online marketing campaigns[10], find influential customers for customer relationship management[11], and manage fraud[12].

In the cozy Facebook social network, it's easy to have a sense of privacy among friends and business acquaintances.
But sites like Rapleaf will quickly jar you awake: Everything you say or do on a social network could be fair game to sell to marketers.
Rapleaf, based in San Francisco, is building a business on that premise. The privately held start-up, whose investors include Facebook-backer and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, runs two consumer Web sites: Rapleaf.com, a people search engine that lets you retrieve the name, age and social-network affiliations of anyone, as long as you have his or her e-mail address; and Upscoop.com, a similar site to discover, en masse, which social networks to which the people in your contact list belong. To use Upscoop, you must first give the site the username and password of your e-mail account at Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL.
By collecting these e-mail addresses, Rapleaf has already amassed a database of 50 million profiles, which might include a person's age, birth date, physical address, alma mater, friends, favorite books and music, political affiliations, as well as how long that person has been online, which social networks he frequents, and what applications he's downloaded.
All of this information could come in handy for Rapleaf's third business, TrustFuse, which sells data (but not e-mail addresses) to marketers so they can better target customers, according to TrustFuse's Web site. As of Friday afternoon, the sites of Rapleaf and Upscoop had no visible link to TrustFuse, but TrustFuse's privacy policy mentions that the two companies are wholly owned subsidiaries of TrustFuse.
According to TrustFuse's Web site, "TrustFuse has pioneered a unique e-mail address based approach to Internet data measurement. (It) provides a framework to learn about new customers, better market to these customers and...to better predict buying behavior." It continues: "We perform deep searches on people to enrich data on your users. And then we put the pieces of the puzzle together to give you the full picture."
In other words, Rapleaf sweeps up all the publicly available but sometimes hard-to-get information it can find about you on the Web, via social networks, other sites and, soon to be added, blogs. At the other end of the business, TrustFuse packages information culled from sites in a profile and sells the profile to marketers. All three companies appear to operate within the scope of their stated privacy policies, which say they do "not sell, rent or lease e-mail addresses to third parties."
And that's right. Marketers bring TrustFuse their own list of e-mail addresses to buy access to demographic, behavioral and Internet usage data on those people, according to the company's privacy policy and sales documents.
Rapleaf CEO Auren Hoffman said the company does not use e-mail addresses and profiles developed by Rapleaf and Upscoop to deliver services for TrustFuse. Rather, TrustFuse's clients, which he said include presidential candidates and Internet widget companies, will bring it a list of e-mail addresses of their clients so that TrustFuse can perform fresh Internet searches on those people. Hoffman said TrustFuse will typically help clients understand which social networks their clients use so that they can market to them there. For example, a presidential candidate might want to know if his or her supporters are on MySpace.com or Facebook so they can approach people in that environment, he said.
"They say to us, 'I already know about her, but can you tell me these one or two other facts about her,'" Hoffman said. In effect, TrustFuse is a matching service between the marketers' e-mail lists and the online behavior of the people on those lists.
That said, TrustFuse's own privacy policy leaves open the possibility of connecting Rapleaf's information to TrustFuse's marketing material. According to the policy, dated August 1, 2007, "Information captured via Rapleaf may be used to assist TrustFuse services. Additionally, information collected by TrustFuse during the course of its business may also be displayed on Rapleaf for given profiles searched by e-mail address."
Apart from the unusual TrustFuse business, Rapleaf is among a new generation of people search engines that take advantage of the troves of public data on the Net--much of which consumers happily post for public perusal on social-networking sites and personal blogs. The search engines trace a person's digital tracks across these social networks, blogs, photo collections, news and e-commerce sites, to create a composite profile. Unlike Google, which might link to the same material over pages of search results or after trying different combinations of keywords, these sites attempt to "normalize" personal data so that it's easily digested by the searcher on one page.

There doesn't appear to be anything illegal about what these companies are doing. No one's sifting through garbage cans or peeking through windows. They've merely found a clever way to aggregate the heaps of personal information that can be found on the Internet. Indeed, in an age where Web sites offer to "pretext" or steal phone records and do complicated records checks for a modest fee, what Rapleaf and sites like it are doing seems modest.
But the average social-network users might have a hard time understanding how this business might affect their life. "The business model of Rapleaf is sufficiently opaque for the average user to have no clue," said John Carosella, vice president of content control at filtering company Blue Coat Systems.
Just ask Dana Todd, a co-founder of Internet ad agency SiteLab, who was concerned about her own profile on Rapleaf, which included many social networks she didn't remember belonging to.
"It's my growing horror that everyone can see my Amazon Wish List. At least I didn't have a book like 'How to get rid of herpes' on there, but now I have to go through and seriously clean my wish list," she said.

Privacy advocates, of course, have complained about aggregation of personal content like this for years. Put this information in the wrong hands--of say, a stalker--and you could have a problem. In the hands of a government, it's a means to spy; in the hands of a hacker, it's an opportunity for identify theft; and in the hands of a marketer, it's a potentially lucrative business.
That's particularly true because this coalesced data could be personally identifiable--tied to names, e-mail, physical and IP addresses and other details on the person's habits. At a time when the heat is on search engines like Google and Microsoft to regularly purge personally identifiable and search history data on users, sites like Rapleaf are amassing detailed profiles from publicly available data.
"There's no question we've entered an era where people are simultaneously living their lives online. But there's a naive quality here that these sites have set up. The sites appear to be cool, but what lurks underneath is a powerful force designed to stealthily observe and collect data about you, and develop a marketing campaign to get you to behave the way they want," said Jeff Chester, director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a Washington-based consumer advocacy group.
For this reason, the Center for Digital Democracy will ask the Federal Trade Commission at a November hearing to formally open an investigation into privacy issues at social-networking sites.

"Clearly, a (privacy) standard is necessary," Chester said.
--Jeff Chester, director, Center for Digital Democracy

Rapleaf's data businessRapleaf was founded in 2006 by two University of California at Berkeley graduates, Manish Shah and Hoffman, a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur. With the tagline "it is more profitable to be ethical," Rapleaf launched in May 2006 as a system that helps keep track of your reputation as you buy and sell things online.
It drew attention as a viable open reputation system that could rival eBay's closed one for making decisions like hiring a babysitter, buying goods on Craigslist or working with a job candidate. Shortly after it launched, the company raised nearly $1 million in an angel round of funding led by Thiel, former Google employee Aydin Senkut, Web 2.0 financier Jeff Clavier and well-known angel investor Ron Conway.
Rapleaf broadened its focus over time to be more efficient, Clavier said, and launched its people search engine this summer. "Reputation is used in e-commerce, but the concept of people search is actually broader. It's an aggregate profile, using your e-mail as a proxy," Clavier said. "It allows you to build it without the need for people to contribute. Here you bypass the issue: I'm just going to go on the Internet, and find information on hundreds of millions of people and aggregate that."
So how does Rapleaf make money off this? Neither Rapleaf CEO Hoffman nor Clavier would say in early discussions, but when later discussing TrustFuse, Hoffman said that the company isn't making money yet. He said that TrustFuse has only been experimenting with clients for the last couple of months and doesn't charge much for its services. "First you work out the technology, before you work on monetizing that technology," he said about Rapleaf.
Sites like Rapleaf are also trying to be social networks, urging people to become members and claim their identities across multiple networks so they can manage their reputation and privacy. In fact, Hoffman says Rapleaf is designed to help people protect their privacy.
"We're helping you manage your privacy. You might not even know there's all these things about you out there. We're learning all this stuff about you. And now you can manage all this information," Hoffman said.

He said Rapleaf has about 50 million profiles, which include people's associations with Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo, Classmates.com and Amazon.com's Wish Lists, among other networks. Hoffman said the company soon plans to add blog searches to its database, among other coming features.
To illustrate the power of Rapleaf, CNET News.com did a search on Hoffman. From his profile page, you'll find out he's a 33-year-old single white male originally from New York. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 1996 with a degree in industrial engineering and operations research. He has profiles on 17 different social networks, pens a blog, and is linked to 11 e-mail addresses. (Eight are kept private on Rapleaf, but that domain has been in use since March 2005.)
From these links, you can find out that he's founded and sold three companies, including enterprise software firm Bridgepath and lead-generation company GetRelevant, which Lycos bought in 2002. He's also an investor in ad firm Brightroll and is an adviser to Pacific Research Institute, a nonprofit political group. From MySpace, you'll find he's an Aries who likes "anyone who stands up to the Man." And his Amazon Wish List shows that he wants a self-inflating travel pillow and the book More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics.
One big question about Rapleaf is how it obtains access to people's social-networking profiles, considering that sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn don't publish their members' e-mail addresses as a matter of policy. When asked, representatives from these social networks said that they do not have partnerships with Rapleaf, nor other search engines, to provide access to e-mail addresses.

Kay Luo, director of communications at LinkedIn, said it plainly: "People are exposed because they're out there on the Internet, but they're not exposed because of anything we did."
Rapleaf's Hoffman said that the company finds profiles through the e-mail search at certain sites, including MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook and Amazon. MySpace, for example, lets visitors find a profile by e-mail address or first and last name. But for other sites, Rapleaf employs a "secret sauce," according to Hoffman. It's not always easy either. Hoffman said the company hasn't figured out how to crack into accessing members on Digg, for example, even though it would like to.
According to Upscoop's privacy policy, the company "is able to obtain and may display information on a person or e-mail from other sources that are at our discretion. This information obtained from other sources is publicly available. Information may also be extracted from private social-networking sites and online communities based on special access." Hoffman said the company has no special access, however.
Security experts say one technique used to find people on social networks could be joining the social network and then ferreting e-mail addresses by deducing naming conventions at big companies. Employees at Google, for example, have addresses with the person's first name and last initial, with @google.com. By understanding naming conventions, an automated crawler could scour a social network for profiles by trying out various combinations of names.
Ali Partovi, CEO of the social music service iLike, said he considered hiring Rapleaf/TrustFuse to figure out how many of its Web users were also on Facebook and other social networks, so iLike could cross-market to those who weren't. But he ultimately decided against using the service because it meant divulging the e-mail addresses of his own users.
"One of the reasons we decided not to work with them is because it would violate our privacy policy. Our privacy policy wouldn't allow us to give a third party access to our e-mail database," he said.
Clavier said Rapleaf is only working off what's already available. "What's interesting is that when you read about what Wink, Rapleaf and others have been doing, it's suddenly like, 'Oh my God, this is a lack of privacy.' But it's only aggregating what's out there. It used to take several Google searches to find the information--now it's a one-stop shop."

"People are exposed because they're out there on the Internet, but they're not exposed because of anything we did."
--Kay Luo, director of communications, LinkedIn

See Also;http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10439850-52.html

Lydia Marie Hearst-Shaw (born September 19, 1984) is an American actress, fashion model, columnist, socialite and heiress to the publishing fortune established by her maternal great-grandfather William Randolph Hearst.[1] The 2007 Michael Awards recognized her as their Model of the Year.[2] Lydia was also given the award of the Best International Supermodel in Madrid on the 12th of November 2008.[3]

Modeling
Hearst has modeled for magazines such as Vogue and fashion designers like Puma and appeared in Puma's French 77 collection. In 2008 she posed in a range of retro-style satin and silk lingerie for Myla's autumn and winter collection [4]. She also appeared topless in the May 2009 issue of GQ Italia.[5]
Journalism
Lydia was a columnist for Page Six Magazine, which comes in the Sunday edition of the New York Post, and she appeared on the cover of the Sept. 30, 2007, issue of the magazine.

Acting
Lydia appeared in the CW hit show Gossip Girl as Lily van der Woodsen's posh interior decorator Amelia on the May 19th season 1 finale. Lydia was also feature in Tara Subkoff’s short fashion film for BeBe in 2008 as a paparazzi stalked starlet. [6] In 2009 Lydia starred in an independent film entitled The Last International Playboy written and directed by Steve Clark (May,2009). [7] Lydia also appeared in Miles Fisher's 2009 music video "This Must Be The Place".[8]
Biography
A daughter of kidnapping victim and publishing heiress Patricia Campbell Hearst and Bernard Shaw, she was born and raised in Wilton, Connecticut. Her father, who was her mother's bodyguard before the couple's marriage, is now the head of security for the Hearst Corporation.[1]
She briefly attended the Lawrenceville School.[1] Since graduating from Wilton High School she attended Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut where she majored in communications and technology before being discovered by fashion photographer Steven Meisel. Her first modeling assignment was for the cover of the Italian edition of Vogue.[1]
Her professional name is Hearst, rather than Hearst-Shaw, which is on her birth certificate.[1]
After shooting for Puma's French 77 collection for a limited edition book called "The Last Playboys Wear Puma" Lydia teamed up in a creative partnership between Puma and Heatherette to design a high-end limited edition handbag. She has continued her partnership with Puma and is set to release a New Holiday Collection and a line of athletic gear. [9]

The picture of her wielding a machine gun was one of the most infamous of the seventies, but now it is Patty Hearst’s model daughter Lydia who is striking a memorable pose.Newspaper heiress Patty became notorious after joining the American guerilla group that kidnapped her.More than three decades later, her 23 year-old daughter has been named the face and body of lingerie designers Myla and appears in a series of provocative poses wearing satin and silk underwear.

She started modeling four years ago and has since worked with leading photographers including Mario Testino and Mark Abrams.In the past year her career has taken off most recently at the “Fashion Oscars”, she was named “Supermodel of the Year”.Her ascent to stardom is a far cry from her mother’s. In 1974, Patty Hearst then aged 19, was kidnapped by left-wing US guerrilla group the Symbionese Liberation Army from her family home in California.

Her captors initially demanded for the release of jailed members of their radical group, and later for the Hearst family to distribute ?30 of food to every poor person in California.Neither was carried out and Hearst later claimed that she was kept in a cupboard for months.She shocked her family when she eventually joined the group and adopted the name Tania.The image of her holding the gun caused controversy in the seventies. She was later arrested with other members of the SLA after a bank robbery.

Despite claiming that she was brainwashed, Hearst was sentenced to seven years in jail. President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence after two years and later Bill Clinton eventually bestowed a presidential pardon.Hearst later married her former bodyguard Bernard Shaw in 1979. The couple are still married and have two grown up daughters.Initially she tried her hand as an actress but most recently has made her name as a dog-breeder.

The Hearst family name is one of the best known in the US. Her grandfather – press baron William Randolph – built up one of the largest magazine and newspaper businesses in the world.He was caricatured by Orson Welles in classic film Citizen Kane. Her father Randolph was valued at $1.8 billion shortly before his death in 2001 at the age of 85.Luxury lingerie brand Myla was founded in 1999 and is now worth in excess of ?25 million.source: dailymail.co.uk

I remember this case well and have followed Dorothy's phenomenal work through the years (decades actually) as she worked to expose the almost unspeakable injustice that was done to one Massachusetts family. This is an absolute must read and we are including her full editorial inside.

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

The story of the Amiraults of Massachusetts, and of the prosecution that had turned the lives of this thriving American family to dust, was well known to the world by the year 2001. It was well known, especially, to District Attorney Martha Coakley, who had by then arrived to take a final, conspicuous, role in a case so notorious as to assure that the Amiraults' name would be known around the globe.
The Amiraults were a busy, confident trio, grateful in the way of people who have found success after a life of hardship. Violet had reared her son Gerald and daughter Cheryl with help from welfare, and then set out to educate herself. The result was the triumph of her life—the Fells Acres school—whose every detail Violet scrutinized relentlessly. Not for nothing was the pre-school deemed by far the best in the area, with a long waiting list for admission.
All of it would end in 1984, with accusations of sexual assault and an ever-growing list of parents signing their children on to the case. Newspaper and television reports blared a sensational story about a female school principal, in her 60s, who had daily terrorized and sexually assaulted the pupils in her care, using sharp objects as her weapon. So too had Violet's daughter Cheryl, a 28-year old teacher at the school.

But from the beginning, prosecutors cast Gerald as chief predator—his gender qualifying him, in their view, as the best choice for the role. It was that role, the man in the family, that would determine his sentence, his treatment, and, to the end, his prosecution-inspired image as a pervert too dangerous to go free.

The accusations against the Amiraults might well rank as the most astounding ever to be credited in an American courtroom, but for the fact that roughly the same charges were brought by eager prosecutors chasing a similar headline—making cases all across the country in the 1980s. Those which the Amiraults' prosecutors brought had nevertheless, unforgettable features: so much testimony, so madly preposterous, and so solemnly put forth by the state. The testimony had been extracted from children, cajoled and led by tireless interrogators.
Gerald, it was alleged, had plunged a wide-blade butcher knife into the rectum of a 4-year-old boy, which he then had trouble removing. When a teacher in the school saw him in action with the knife, she asked him what he was doing, and then told him not to do it again, a child said. On this testimony, Gerald was convicted of a rape which had, miraculously, left no mark or other injury. Violet had tied a boy to a tree in front of the school one bright afternoon, in full view of everyone, and had assaulted him anally with a stick, and then with "a magic wand." She would be convicted of these charges.
Other than such testimony, the prosecutors had no shred of physical or other proof that could remotely pass as evidence of abuse. But they did have the power of their challenge to jurors: Convict the Amiraults to make sure the battle against child abuse went forward. Convict, so as not to reject the children who had bravely come forward with charges.
Gerald was sent to prison for 30 to 40 years, his mother and sister sentenced to eight to 20 years. The prosecutors celebrated what they called, at the time "a model, multidisciplinary prosecution." Gerald's wife, Patricia, and their three children—the family unfailingly devoted to him—went on with their lives. They spoke to him nightly and cherished such hope as they could find, that he would be restored to them.
Hope arrived in 1995, when Judge Robert Barton ordered a new trial for the women. Violet, now 72, and Cheryl had been imprisoned eight years. This toughest of judges, appalled as he came to know the facts of the case, ordered the women released at once. Judge Barton—known as Black Bart for the long sentences he gave criminals—did not thereafter trouble to conceal his contempt for the prosecutors. They would, he warned, do all in their power to hold on to Gerald, a prediction to prove altogether accurate.
No less outraged, Superior Court Judge Isaac Borenstein presided over a widely publicized hearings into the case resulting in findings that all the children's testimony was tainted. He said that "Every trick in the book had been used to get the children to say what the investigators wanted." The Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly—which had never in its 27 year history taken an editorial position on a case—published a scathing one directed at the prosecutors "who seemed unwilling to admit they might have sent innocent people to jail for crimes that had never occurred."
It was clear, when Martha Coakley took over as the new Middlesex County district attorney in 1999, that public opinion was running sharply against the prosecutors in the case. Violet Amirault was now gone. Ill and penniless after her release, she had been hounded to the end by prosecutors who succeeded in getting the Supreme Judicial Court to void the women's reversals of conviction. She lay waiting all the last days of her life, suitcase packed, for the expected court order to send her back to prison. Violet would die of cancer before any order came in September 1997.

That left Cheryl alone, facing rearrest. In the face of the increasing furor surrounding the case, Ms. Coakley agreed to revise and revoke her sentence to time served—but certain things had to be clear, she told the press. Cheryl's case, and that of Gerald, she explained, had nothing to do with one another—a startling proposition given the horrific abuse charges, identical in nature, of which all three of the Amiraults had been convicted.
No matter: When women were involved in such cases, the district attorney explained, it was usually because of the presence of "a primary male offender." According to Ms. Coakley's scenario, it was Gerald who had dragged his mother and sister along. Every statement she made now about Gerald reflected the same view, and the determination that he never go free. No one better exemplified the mindset and will of the prosecutors who originally had brought this case.
Before agreeing to revise Cheryl's sentence to time served, Ms. Coakley asked the Amiraults' attorney, James Sultan, to pledge—in exchange—that he would stop representing Gerald and undertake no further legal action on his behalf. She had evidently concluded that with Sultan gone—Sultan, whose mastery of the case was complete—any further effort by Gerald to win freedom would be doomed. Mr. Sultan, of course, refused.
In 2000, the Massachusetts Governor's Board of Pardons and Paroles met to consider a commutation of Gerald's sentence. After nine months of investigation, the board, reputed to be the toughest in the country, voted 5-0, with one abstention, to commute his sentence. Still more newsworthy was an added statement, signed by a majority of the board, which pointed to the lack of evidence against the Amiraults, and the "extraordinary if not bizarre allegations" on which they had been convicted.
Editorials in every major and minor paper in the state applauded the Board's findings. District Attorney Coakley was not idle either, and quickly set about organizing the parents and children in the case, bringing them to meetings with Acting Gov. Jane Swift, to persuade her to reject the board's ruling. Ms. Coakley also worked the press, setting up a special interview so that the now adult accusers could tell reporters, once more, of the tortures they had suffered at the hands of the Amiraults, and of their panic at the prospect of Gerald going free.
On Feb. 20, 2002, six months after the Board of Pardons issued its findings, the governor denied Gerald's commutation.

Gerald Amirault spent nearly two years more in prison before being granted parole in 2004. He would be released, with conditions not quite approximating that of a free man. He was declared a level three sex offender—among the consequences of his refusal, like that of his mother and sister, to "take responsibility" by confessing his crimes. He is required to wear, at all times, an electronic tracking device; to report, in a notebook, each time he leaves the house and returns; to obey a curfew confining him to his home between 11:30 p.m. and 6 a.m. He may not travel at all through certain areas (presumably those where his alleged victims live). He can, under these circumstances, find no regular employment.
The Amirault family is nonetheless grateful that they are together again.
Attorney General Martha Coakley—who had proven so dedicated a representative of the system that had brought the Amirault family to ruin, and who had fought so relentlessly to preserve their case—has recently expressed her view of this episode. Questioned about the Amiraults in the course of her current race for the U.S. Senate, she told reporters of her firm belief that the evidence against the Amiraults was "formidable" and that she was entirely convinced "those children were abused at day care center by the three defendants."
What does this say about her candidacy? (Ms. Coakley declined to be interviewed.) If the current attorney general of Massachusetts actually believes, as no serious citizen does, the preposterous charges that caused the Amiraults to be thrown into prison—the butcher knife rape with no blood, the public tree-tying episode, the mutilated squirrel and the rest—that is powerful testimony to the mind and capacities of this aspirant to a Senate seat. It is little short of wonderful to hear now of Ms. Coakley's concern for the rights of terror suspects at Guantanamo—her urgent call for the protection of the right to the presumption of innocence.
If the sound of ghostly laughter is heard in Massachusetts these days as this campaign rolls on, with Martha Coakley self-portrayed as the guardian of justice and civil liberties, there is good reason.