Between Corey Monteith’s tragic death and Naya Rivera getting charged with domestic battery, things aren’t going so well for some members of the Glee cast.
But the worst of all has to be where Mark Salling’s life has taken him.
And he has now entered his guilty plea for possession of child porn.
Back in October, Mark Salling finally agreed to a guilty plea for his child porn charges.
According to the terms of his plea agreement, he’ll serve from 4 to 7 years in prison, followed by 20 years of supervised release.
Obviously, he’ll have to register as a sex offender and enroll in a counseling program.
Considering that prosecutors had found about 50,000 images of prepubescent children on his personal devices and reportedly discovered a video of a 5-year-old girl performing a sex act, he’s getting off lightly.
He could have faced 20 or more years in prison.
Considering that the little girls whose photos and videos he had in his possession will never get to have normal or healthy childhoods, many feel that Salling should rot behind bars.
The legal process works much more slowly than it does on television, folks.
Mark Salling agreed to the plea deal in October, shortly after the former Glee actor reportedly attempted suicide.
He’s entering the plea now, in December.
And he won’t be sentenced until March 7th.
It would be unorthodox for him to receive a sentence beyond the plea agreement that he made with prosecutors, since usually sentencing following a plea deal is mostly a formality.
But there’s always a chance of a dramatic upset if a judge determines that a plea is, for example, too lenient. Or perhaps if new evidence of further wrongdoings is unearthed.
That’s still very unlikely.
4 to 7 years is a long time to have your entire life on hold, and there are some people who would argue that child pornography is a “victimless crime.”
We have to believe that the children who were victimized on camera would disagree.
Any sympathy we might have for someone whose brain has a few crossed wires that cause a blurring of their nurture instincts and their sexual attraction goes away the moment that they participate in the victimization of actual children.
(The same way that we stop feeling sorry for someone whose instincts for food and sex are blurred the moment that they start, you know, eating people)
If it helps quash any lingering vestiges of sympathy for Salling, he allegedly responded to news of Ed Westwick raping his girlfriend by breaking up with her instead of, you know, confronting him, comforting her, or suggesting filing a police report.
Anyway, Mark Salling will spend time in prison.
We hope, however, that the time that he spends in mandatory counseling after his release will help him to combat his urges.
Given that he had tens of thousands of these horrifying images, we’d say that he developed a wildly unhealthy compulsion.
But since he’s dated adult women, we have to assume that he could one day lead a healthy sex life.
Assuming, of course, that any woman would have him.
