On the evening of August 15, 2002, just days before new students were due to arrive for the fall semester, an e-mail titled “Distressing News” went out to the community of New York Law School, in lower Manhattan. Because of the alarming heading, many professors clicked the e-mail open thinking it might announce the death of one of the faculty.

“I’m saddened to report to you that I learned this afternoon that our colleague, Professor Edward Samuels, was arrested on charges relating to possession of child pornographic images,” the dean of the school, Richard Matasar, had written. “The Law School has placed Professor Samuels on paid administrative leave so that he may attend to his defense . . . Our hearts go out to Ed and his family as they face the difficult time ahead.”

Several faculty members promptly called each other to report that a hoax had been perpetrated, and at least one called the dean to warn him that a hacker had infiltrated the system. The following morning, however, the story was splashed across the pages of several newspapers, including the New York Post, which proffered the irresistible tabloid headline: PROF PORN STUNNER—STAFF FINDS XXX KID PIX ON HIS OFFICE COMPUTER.

Indeed, computer technicians at the school had happened upon pornographic pictures of young girls while trying to fix Samuels’s computer, the papers reported, and a police search of his apartment on the Upper West Side had yielded 159 disks of illegal images. Later reports would detail the gruesome and disturbingly cruel nature of some of the photographs—young girls being raped by adults or dogs; babies being sexually assaulted; young children bound and whipped. Samuels had more than 100,000 pictures, the largest stash ever seen by the Manhattan D.A.’s office.

Colleagues were staggered. The balding, diminutive Samuels had been, for 26 years, a highly respected member of the faculty and a dedicated copyright scholar and professor. He was described as quiet and thoughtful by peers and was popular with students. As one longtime faculty member put it, “You always hear ‘the last person in the world,’ and I’m not saying I can think of someone else who would have done this, but this totally blew you away.”

By the following Monday, when staff and faculty were back at school, no one could talk of anything else. “We were all looking at each other and going, ‘Can you believe it?’ ” one professor said. Staff members who were friendly with the technicians who’d discovered the porn confirmed the information for incredulous professors.

“It made me sick,” recalled Joan Argento, who had been Samuels’s assistant for five years. “There were times when I had my daughter at work and he said, ‘Hi, honey, how are you?’ It just made me sick.”

But if staff members were appalled, for Samuels’s faculty colleagues and friends the discovery posed a much more complex dilemma. Even after he pleaded guilty to possessing 100 images, many of them remained torn. And when the two computer technicians who had discovered the pictures were later fired, there was a conspicuous lack of interest in rallying to their defense.