A few months ago (Mar 2017), Ben Stein was publicly accused of having groomed a 12-year-old girl, taken photos of her, and asked to have sex with her. It seems that the victim, Morgain McGovern, came directly to Voat to let us know about her charges (which dated from 1986-87) and her concerns about pictures of young girls on Stein's current Facebook. Morgain (if it was her) later deleted her account. The original charge remains up on her blog, however, so she has not gone entirely silent. It seems appropriate to look again at Stein's published record.

The earliest blurting-out that I could find was in SPIN magazine for Dec 1999. Stein was asked to compare Washington D.C. call girls with Hollywood call girls (he answered that he prefers Hollywood); then the interviewer noted that Stein would be very good in the role of Humbert Humbert, from Lolita, to which Stein replied, "Oh, God, would I ever! You know me so well! How do you know me that well?"

A little further on, Stein qualified his answer, saying, "I do love little girls, but I don't love them that little. I like them, I'd say, early to mid-20s." But then when he was asked who he would like to play alongside in the role of Lolita, he answered, "Christina Applegate. I worked on Married ... With Children once and just fell madly in love with her." At the time (fall 1994), Applegate (b. Nov 1971) was only 12.

Stein wrote two pieces for American Spectator in October 2006, referring to the charges brought against Congressman Mark Foley. In the first, which was subsequently taken down, Stein took a tone of outrage against the Democrats for picking on poor misguided Mark:

The Representative Foley “scandal” is really worthy of a whole book on hypocrisy. On the one hand, we have a poor misguided Republican man who had a romantic thing for young boys. He sent them suggestive e-mail. I agree, that’s not great. On the other hand, we have a Democratic party that worships (not likes, WORSHIPS) a man named Bill Clinton who did not send suggestive e-mails as far as we know, but who had a barely legal intern give him oral sex kneeling under his desk in the Oval Office while he talked on the phone to a Congressional Committee Chairman, took great pleasure in putting a cigar in her orifice and then smelling it and tasting it, and having her fellate him when in the sacred seat of power of the world’s leading Republic.

This drew some hostile commentary (which was perhaps why it was taken down). His second American Spectator essay, also in October 2006, was much more cautious and measured, and instead of blaming the Democrats, he blamed whoever is in charge of dressing America's pre-teen kids.

Obviously, it’s not easy to have a lot of sympathy for Mark Foley. He did some extremely questionable things, and he’s being heartily punished for it, with more to come, most likely.

But he has raised an interesting issue long overdue for national discussion. The media and the pundits are acting as if something brand new happened when a grown up discovered the sexuality of teenagers. They’re acting as if teenagers are innocent little children who never heard of sex until they got e-mails from a Member of Congress.

The truth is just the opposite. This is a nation that is absolutely drenched in juvenile sex. I am not sure exactly when it happened, but it sure was going on when I was a teenager and that was a long time ago in the days of James Dean. The problem is vastly more prevalent now. ...

Look at fashions for young girls. They are getting dressed like Parisian streetwalkers from the 1950s. Little girls are getting dressed by the fashion industry as if they were little hookers.

This is classic deflection, normalizing and minimizing pedophilia by continually talking about side issues rather than the central point. In a long life of speaking and writing, a public intellectual like Stein might have made one or two random remarks like these without them having any deeper meaning. Every writer and celebrity has off days. But then we have Morgain McGovern's report that her mentally ill and much-arrested mother knowingly tried to "pimp her out" to Stein in 1986-87, in exchange for money and a positive write-up in Stein's newspaper column. This would have been immediately after Stein's rise to fame for his role in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

The statute of limitations may have passed on the original crime, but there is nothing saying that Stein should get a pass in the court of public opinion. McGovern has added that since her original Mar 2017 post, several other victims of Stein have come forward.

Will the American Spectator disavow its remaining Stein essay on the subject of pedophilia? Will his friends in Hollywood and Washington, D.C. acknowledge that these are serious charges, and that even Stein's own remarks on the topic now make him sound like a creep and a child-rape apologist?

This is one more story about Hollywood pedophilia that is not going away.