Dragon Con co-founder and convicted child molester Ed Kramer might have put himself back on the route to prison with his international cyber travels.
Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter is investigating whether the 53-year-old Kramer violated his house arrest in Duluth by following — or being followed by — a 14-year-old girl in Australia on Twitter.
Porter is seeking expert advice and court orders for tweets and data from Twitter to determine if Kramer violated a court order by knowingly communicating with someone under 16.
‘I’m researching it —I don’t know enough about Twitter at this point to have an opinion,” Porter told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Thursday. “You can’t revoke his probation if he didn’t know he was violating his probation.”
Porter said Kramer has since made his twitter account private.
Kramer won a victory of sorts in December when he was granted house arrest for a 5-year sentence after pleading guilty to child molestation counts involving three boys ages 13 to 15.
He was indicted in 2000 and began a hard-fought battle, citing among other things his complex medical issues, to delay his trial date. In the plea deal he got five years to serve of a 60 year sentence. Because of credit for 26 months in jail he was required to stay in his Duluth home for 34 months except for medical appointments.
At the time, Porter predicted Kramer, who paid $100,000 each to three victims, would violate the court order and end up before a judge where he would lose his first-offender status and be subject to a maximum sentence of 60 years.
The prosecutor said he has plenty of help keeping up with Kramer. The charges against Kramer split the Dragon Con, Sci-Fi community in which believers in his innocence or guilt conducted “blog warfare” for years, Porter said.
Attempts by The Atlanta Journal Constitution to reach Kramer by telephone for comment were unsuccessful.
Kramer, who is no longer associated with Dragon Con, the popular Atlanta science fiction and fantasy convention he co-founded in 1987, may have a hard time leaving his Duluth home except in cyber space because of his health issues.
A variety of maladies, caused, he says, by a broken neck sustained during a 2001 jailhouse assault, has led to almost unprecedented delays. Each time Kramer appeared in court for hearings, he was seated in a wheelchair with an oxygen machine feeding air into his nose through a tube. His lawyers claimed the neck injury causes constant pain and affect his diaphragm, making it difficult for him to breath.
But in 2011, while on bond for the molestation charges, a makeup artist at a film site in Connecticut reported that Kramer was sharing a room with a 14-year-old boy who was acting in a low-budget horror film.
Krystal Phillips testified she observed Kramer, acting as the boy’s supervisor, attempt to follow him into a room where he was going to change his underwear and shorts.
“He’s 14, he doesn’t need help, ” Phillips said she told Kramer during testimony at a Gwinnett 2013 bond hearing. “It made me very uncomfortable, so I had the (production assistant) stop him.”
Phillips did some quick research on Kramer and, after discovering the allegations against him in Georgia, contacted authorities and he was extradited to Gwinnett where he was jailed until 2013.
Porter said he hopes to the Twitter information soon so he can assess whether Kramer again violated a court order and one which could put him in prison.
Even if the evidence isn’t there to bring a case, Porter has no doubt that the anti-Kramer faction will keep his office apprised of any violations — cyber or otherwise — they find.
“I have not doubt they are keeping an eye on him because they report everything he does to me and I appreciate it,” Porter said. “I don’t have time to watch every move he makes.”
