Woman In Gary Hart Sex Scandal Survives In A New Life And Career -- Donna Rice Hughes Crusades Against Online Pornography
DALLAS - She was a very young woman. He was an older married man. It was a sex scandal with presidential implications.
A decade later, the woman in question is speaking at one of the country's largest Southern Baptist churches, talking - somewhat ironically, she admits - about the dangers to children of pornography on the Internet.
No, it's not a Psychic Hotline prediction of Monica Lewinsky's future.
It's Donna Rice Hughes' present.
Today's headlines resonate deeply with Hughes, the young woman at the center of the 1987 scandal that stopped Gary Hart's presidential candidacy in its tracks.
But Lewinsky may yet have hope: Hughes, now in her 30s, says her experience has taught her that good can be found in even the most traumatic, embarrassing situations.
After the Hart scandal, she says, "All the advisers, all the lawyers were saying, `You might as well take the money and run, Donna. Your life's over. Your obituary's written.' But I didn't believe that.
"I turned my life back over to God and this is where it led me, after seven years of silence. . . . Who'd have thought it? Me, talking about such a dark, ugly, sexually stigmatized issue?
"But that's the purpose God had for me," she says in a pre-lecture interview at Prestonwood Baptist Church, where she spoke recently before 150 people at the weekly Christian Action Luncheon.
The appearance was part of a tour for Hughes' new book, "Kids Online: Protecting Your Children in Cyberspace," written with Pamela
Campbell.
"I wanted my pain to count for something, to be used for something bigger than me," Hughes says.
"And now I'm dealing with politics and the media, the same things that caused me all that pain.
"It's like getting back up on the horse that threw me, but it's been a wonderful experience. I'm just incredibly grateful that God has given me this platform to benefit others."
Hughes is now vice president of marketing and public relations for the nonprofit organization Enough Is Enough, a Fairfax, Va.-based anti-pornography group.
She says she became aware of the proliferation of Internet pornography shortly after going to work for Enough Is Enough in 1994.
"Someone showed me what you could get online, and I was just stunned," she says.
"Kids have free and easy access on the Internet to pornography and obscenity that their adult parents couldn't get in a porn shop."
The book addresses exactly what's out there, on both the World Wide Web and in newsgroups, the two places Hughes says children are most likely to encounter sexually oriented materials, either intentionally or accidentally.
At last check, she says, typing the word "sex" on a basic Internet search engine produced more than 420,000 documents - all free and available to be accessed by anyone, adult or child, with a mere mouse click.
Kids Online also addresses the technophobia some parents may experience creating a "safety net" for children that includes online access at home, school and the library.
It includes appendices with topics such as printed and online resources, sample "house rules" for cybersurfing and "8 Questions About Software Solutions at Libraries."
She's not advocating a "put on the blinders" attitude toward the Internet in general.
"The benefits to kids of computers and the Internet far outweigh the risks. If they didn't, we could just throw it away and forget about it," she says. "But there's an awful lot of good there, and they need to learn about computers to have marketable skills later in life.
"My point is that parents need to understand the implications of going online and allowing their children to be online. They need to know what the risks are in order to deal with them."