If you think you know all there is to know about Neil Goldschmidt's teenage victim -- or if you're still uncertain about which level of hell truly deserves the man -- I urge you to read Margie Boule's long-awaited profile of the torment he inflicted upon the girl.



For the moment, let's shelf the debate about how many of Goldschmidt's disciples knew about the abuse and profited from remaining silent about it, and focus on the dimensions of the crime we're dealing with here:



• If the woman, who died Jan. 16 at the age of 49, is to be believed -- and it is Goldschmidt who has been lying about this statutory rape from the very beginning -- she was all of 13 when Neil first had sex with her. It was her mother's birthday party. Goldschmidt invited the eighth-grader to play ping-pong with him in the basement, then begged her for a hug. That hug turned into oral sex. And, yes, you better believe Goldschmidt was on the receiving end.



• Goldschmidt -- then mayor of Portland -- would call the girl, and rendezvous with her, in the afternoons after she got home from school. He always knew when her mother wasn't home. He knew this because her mother worked for him.



• At 14, the girl enrolled at St. Mary's as a freshman, but she often left school early: "He'd pick me up by the fountain," a block from the school, she said, "in the black car. He always had a driver."



(Wouldn't that driver have been a Portland police officer?)



• After her freshman year, she dropped out of school. She was 15 and already coming apart at the seams. Yet Goldschmidt wasn't done with her. He knew he was destroying her, one day at a time, yet the sex, she said, would continue, whenever Neil was in the mood, for another dozen years.



(Goldschmidt said the "relationship" lasted nine months when he rushed to confess to The Oregonian back in 2004, hoping to undercut Willamette Week's revelations about his sustained abuse.)



• And finally this: In 2004, speaking about the rape the woman suffered in Seattle at the age of 27, Goldschmidt said, "I subsequently learned she was just brutally assaulted, and bad things happened up there for which she's probably blameless, in the sense that she didn't invite it -- I mean literally ask for it. But she was always putting herself in circumstances like that."



Like when she agreed to drop down into her mother's basement and play ping-pong with the mayor of Portland, Neil?



Read that quote again.



"Probably blameless."



"I mean literally ask for it."



Evil has a face. Evil has a voice.



-- Steve Duin

