How Much is Raping a Kid Worth?

Orange County resident Robert J. Leek repeatedly molested a 12-year-old boy for almost three years but, despite his disgraceful, 12-felony-count conduct and the awful impact on the victim, he was given a relatively light punishment by a local judge: not even a lousy year in jail.

But the 39-year-old Leek is not happy with the justice system. He's now parading as a victim. In legal documents, he argues that it's unfair that he's been asked to pay for a large portion of his victim's post-rape medical and psychological expenses.

Leek said he was okay paying $50 a month if the total damages were going to be around $8,000. But now that the court has determined that the boy's actual crime-related expenses (the kid tried to commit suicide) were more than $41,000, the molester is balking.

This week, a California Court of Appeal rejected Leek's argument and ordered him to fork over the entire amount to the victim's mother plus 10 percent per annum interest since the Orange County District Attorney's office won 2003 convictions against him.

The justices should have tossed his 6-foot-1, 210-pound sorry ass back in jail.

–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly

R. Scott Moxley

CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.

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