Two dads and criminal defense attorneys talk about the realities of Child & Intimacy Crimes, the recent CNN "grape" academy article and provide tips for parents to help their kids tell if they're being hurt or abused. More information at www.longandsimmonslaw.com
Matt Long: Hey, everybody. This is Matt Long with Skeptical Mystics. And on this episode, I sit down with another criminal defense attorney. We both specialize in child and intimacy crimes, and we're both dads. We talk about the realities of those crimes and the recent CNN article about the rape academy.
We also provide just a little bit of advice and tips for parents to help keep their children safe and protected and to empower them to tell if they ever find themselves in a situation where they're being hurt. Knowledge is power, especially as it relates to our kids.
Aaron Reed: Sup Aaron? How you doing?
Matt Long: I'm good. We have a
Aaron Reed: weird job. We do. I would agree with that.
Matt Long: I mean, you see people at their worst, at their weirdest. Yeah. And that includes, I'm gonna say civilians, regular people, but police. Yeah. Prosecutors, judges.
You see, especially in some of the cases that we handle, it's an interesting peek into humanity.
Aaron Reed: It is. There's a lot of different dynamics and different cases and different people, different personalities, and it all kind of intersects, and you have to manage all that. It's very demanding, but rewarding
Matt Long: job. I
Aaron Reed: wouldn't do anything else, to be honest with you.
Matt Long: But I brought you in because I've been in the child and intimacy crimes
Aaron Reed: Yep.
Matt Long: World for, man, twenty some twenty some years now. And it's a different area, and you're another another attorney who works in that area.
Aaron Reed: It's not an area of the law that's for everybody.
Matt Long: Right.
Aaron Reed: It really isn't. And to do it at the level that I think we do it at, that you do it at, that the people that we know do it at, it takes a lot. Yeah. It does.
Matt Long: And give us your firm name.
Aaron Reed: So I work Katz and Reed. We're based in the Biltmore area, kinda not far from your office here, probably four or five miles from your office here on 16th Street, just off the 51, and me and Duane Katz have been partners now for four years.
Matt Long: Uh-huh.
Aaron Reed: And then he hired me back as an employee back in 2018.
Matt Long: So,
Aaron Reed: yeah, I've known him for a while
Matt Long: now. Yeah, and Long and Simmons, been doing this for ten years in private practice, but before that I was a prosecutor and worked in sex crimes, child crimes, computer crimes. There was a transition and the idea of, always ask the question, right? Yeah. Well, how do you do what you do?
And so I wanna pose that question to you. Do you get that question a lot? How is it that you represent the worst of the worst?
Aaron Reed: Yeah, how does it impact? Various forms that question is something that I think every defense attorney's had at some point, but to me I always tell people the same thing, that my job is to police the police. My job is to try to find the truth in a given situation, whatever that might be. And my job is to help a person accused of a crime navigate the system. And that's what our country has allowed to happen.
And if you're charged with a crime, if another person's charged with a crime, would you wanna navigate that by yourself? Would you wanna do that alone facing a government that has endless resources? Would you wanna do that or would you want help? And that's how I always like to answer that question because people, they like to ask it sometimes in a condescending way. You're kind of a scummy guy for representing scumbags, but at the end of the day everybody's a human.
Everybody deserves their rights, they deserve to have someone there to help navigate those rights, and that's what I do. Mhmm. Period.
Matt Long: You know, was talking to someone the other day, they asked me about, oh, so you're on the other side now. I said, guess that's one way to look at it, but I don't really view that because there's just evidence.
Aaron Reed: Right.
Matt Long: There's not really the state's evidence or defense evidence, there's just evidence.
Aaron Reed: Something that happened.
Matt Long: And you're doing the same thing, making the same analysis. As a defense attorney, you can't just sling bullshit. Yeah. And if you sling, if you try to sling bullshit, if you try to just
Aaron Reed: lie Yeah, or I don't.
Matt Long: You lose credibility and that's not gonna help anyone. So you gotta make the right arguments.
Aaron Reed: You gotta make the right arguments. You have to be knowledgeable enough to find them, right? To make But I like that, what you said. Prosecutors, defense attorneys, we go against each other. Whatever the adversarial nature of it is, but the goal for everybody, regardless of who you are, is to figure out what happened.
And if you can't do that as a defense attorney, or if you don't have the wherewithal to do that as a prosecutor, or the ethical backbone to do it as a prosecutor, then you shouldn't be doing it. Oh. And you, as a former prosecutor, you've had to navigate a lot of different types of cases, types of crimes, types of things, and child and intimacy crimes are something that you've had a lot of experience with, and you've gotten to see how it operates from both sides and how prosecutors should probably behave in certain situations, and how they shouldn't.
Matt Long: And as you were saying, know, you're there to challenge police, but I identify, people ask me, actually a defense attorney, was in court, and they said, Are you a prosecutor? I said, No, I'm the opposite. They said, Oh, are you a defense attorney? I said, No, that's not the opposite. I said, I'm a prosecutor hunter.
Aaron Reed: I like
Matt Long: that. I'm looking That's at what they've done improperly, unfairly, incompletely. And it's the same thing with police because prosecutors are an extension
Aaron Reed: Yeah, adjacent.
Matt Long: Of what the police investigation
Aaron Reed: And
Matt Long: when the allegations are so serious, the truth doesn't matter. Sometimes that seems to be the case.
Aaron Reed: I would say more than sometimes. And, you know.
Matt Long: That
Aaron Reed: can't Which is scary.
Matt Long: That can't be the way. No. It just can't be the way.
Aaron Reed: That's not the way the system's designed to be.
Matt Long: I wanna talk a little bit about child and intimacy crimes in the news today.
Aaron Reed: Sure.
Matt Long: And did you see the CNN article that came out?
Aaron Reed: Yeah. The Rape Academy. Yeah. I did. I read that.
I was very, first of all it was interesting that CNN infiltrated that the way I that they thought that was kind of interesting.
Matt Long: Yeah, what jumped out to you?
Aaron Reed: Well, see me, I think the fact number one, the scope, the worldwide nature of that kind of thing, and the discussions behind it, but it is a weird intersection between going too far and having this fetish and trying to figure out what's over the line and what's not. And I don't think those are always very clear. I think it's difficult for investigators to probably find those answers in those kinds of cases, in those kinds of contexts. But yeah, thought that was very interesting. I know you had read that article as well.
What did you think about Well,
Matt Long: first of all, that it highlighted something that we deal with a lot, which is Telegram. Yeah. Is that Telegram is an app where there's a group of people we'll get on, and it's something that we are seeing a lot of crimes happening on the app.
Aaron Reed: That encrypted kind of thing.
Matt Long: Yeah, and what it is is you got a lot of people wh...
