The owner of Brushstrokes says his partner and former co-owner of the gay retail outlet was molested 40 years ago and images from that incident led to his arrest earlier this year on child porn charges.
Mark Jackson (photo left) told Fenuxe on Thursday that an unidentified man sent Thomas Schloeder (photo right) a file with hundreds of images, many of which were of Schloeder being molested four decades ago. That's what local police and federal authorities found when they raided the Brookhaven home that Jackson and Schloeder share, Jackson claims. On Wednesday, Schloeder was sentenced to 8 years, 1 month in federal prison, fined $75,000 and will have to register as a sex offender when released.
Tom plead guilty, but in reality the only thing he was guilty of was not calling the police about the photos because of the deep shame he felt about being molested.
Jackson, in a two-paragraph statement provided to media outlets on Thursday, said that “neither Brushstrokes nor Mark Jackson had any knowledge of Schloeder's offenses.” On Thursday, Jackson told Fenuxe that although Schloeder suffered a “complete meltdown” after receiving the images that required a two-day hospital stay, he did not know about the child porn images until the November raid.
I didn’t know anything about these images until November 15 when police burst into our home and forced us to the ground.
In a Facebook post on Wednesday, Fenuxe claimed that Schloeder was “indicted on a technicality” and suggested that an anti-gay conspiracy was fueling the case against Schloeder. In a Facebook message provided to Project Q Atlanta, Fenuxe Publisher Tyler Calkins told a reader on Wednesday that “the City of Atlanta and the state of Georgia have actively tried to shut down Brushstrokes and Capulets for many years now.” He offered no proof to substantiate those claims. Jackson picked up on that theme in his interview with the gay glossy.
We hired the best attorney we could afford who explained to us that because we’re openly gay men who own an adult business that we would be paraded around in a courtroom circus, our business would be destroyed, and at the end of the day Tom still had the images on his computer, so he was going to prison.
When Schloeder pleaded guilty on May 2, the 14-page plea agreement detailed the case and said he collected more than 600 images of child porn, with some of the material portraying “sadistic or masochistic conduct or other depictions of violence.” He also made more than 100 of those images available to others over several months, according to documents in the case. The plea agreement does not include any mention of Jackson's claims that most of the images were of Schloeder being molested.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's office in Atlanta said Thursday that they are reviewing Jackson's claims about the case. On Wednesday, Jackson declined to speak with Project Q. Schloeder reports to prison in August, according to Jackson's statement to media outlets.
[Fenuxe]
