Three years ago, a 40-year-old man calling himself "Mark" used the Internet to convince a then 14-year-old Katie to meet him in a hotel room, where he tried to molest her. (He was later tried and convicted). The Web site, a supplement to Katie.com, Katie’s book about the ordeal, is part of the young woman’s attempt to educate parents and children about the sexual predators lurking in cyberspace.

“I’m actually rather upset with the fact that he feels the need to personally attack me again,” she says in a recent telephone interview.

In fact, Katie says the comments are representative of how people around her reacted back in 1996 - immediately classifying her as either a victim or a slut.

That scene - as sordid and unfortunate as it was - could have been far worse. The incident occurred while Katie was attending a national swim meet in Irving, X Texas, and Kufrovich had flown from Los Angeles, Calif. to the hotel where she was staying to meet her. As Katie tells it, the moment Kufrovich began to fondle her, an angry knock at the door stopped him cold. It was Katie’s mother and two brawny coaches, who had been tipped off to the rendezvous by a concerned friend of Katie’s.

One question the book attempts to answer is why Katie, who is from a stable family in one of the richest communities in America, agreed to meet this man at all (and why she appeared at his hotel door in pajamas and a raincoat). To do so, it immerses readers in the mind of the affluent, 13-year-old girl - smart but vulnerable, privileged but lonely. She’s a girl who had a personal trainer and never had to do chores, but who also had few close friends.

Though the book’s language is simple and sometimes reads like a note passed in class, the overall structure is succinct. The cast of characters in Katie’s life is quickly introduced - an absent and hated father, a cold and emotionally-distant stepfather, a domineering and workaholic mother, two well-adjusted sisters.

As Katie’s classmates begin dating, she longs to join in but is too busy with swimming and other activities (she was a nationally ranked swimmer and an honor student). And she feels like an outsider in her hometown of New Canaan, Conn. - “a town filled with beautiful people and I was pretty much the opposite.” When her older sister introduces her to America Online, Katie dreams of finding her soulmate in a chat room.

“On most days I’d spend a couple of hours online,” she writes. “Every time I met someone we’d exchange basic data and then search around for something real to discuss, but I would slowly realize we had very little at all in common.”

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of Katie’s story is that for months after the incident, she continued to daydream of seeing the man again. She still wanted to believe they had formed a bond, and that he understood her.

“In my mind, Mark was still my best friend, the one I had trusted. And despite everything, I still wanted to trust him,” she writes.

She does, by the end of the book, come to view Kufrovich as the bad guy.

“Gradually, the man who had been my friend, who had listened to me and cared for me so deeply, was fading from view,” she writes. “He was being replaced by the image of a manipulative, porn-obsessed, child molester named Frank Kufrovich. This was not my Mark. But he was the one who had created Mark.”

“Katie.com” turns out to provide an unusual perspective on pedophilia - a term that is so emotionally loaded for most adults.

“The word gave me shelter through clinical explanations, but it also came closer to what I had experienced. “Philia” - love - was somehow part of everything that happened,” she writes. “The friendship and the excitement were as real as the shame. I didn’t know if it was wrong for me to see it this way, but there it was.”

Though Katie’s observations are well written and thoughtful, there’s plenty in the book that is frustrating and contradictory, but that is probably more a reflection of a teenage perspective than an undeveloped writing style.

For one thing, Katie writes that her parents warned her “about giving out my real name and address or any information that would help a stranger find me.” Good advice. She tells her mother that she would “never take such a risk.” Just four pages later, however, Katie gives her phone number to a man with the nickname “Vallleyguy” - with three “l’s. It’s the very first time they’ve met, and he turns out to be Kufrovich.

Katie receives other warnings along the way, including her best friend’s attempt to physically stop her from visiting “Mark” at the hotel. But she believes that she is in love, and so she goes.

In the end, Katie’s message to parents is to pay more attention to their children. “Understand the world she lives in. It is more adult than you can ever imagine, and the pressures she faces would be difficult for any grown woman to handle.”

“Every girl says she is doing fine. But if you spend the time, you might hear the rest of the story.”

“There’s a lot of people who still blame me for this and don’t hold the right people accountable for these actions,” she says. “When people do that, they distance themselves from the incident. It removes them and it puts it away at a safe distance. They don’t want to confront that this could really happen to them.”

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Excerpts from Katie’s on-line guestbook

I can’t believe that alarm bells didn’t go off in your head the very instant Kufrovich introduced himself to you! Now you would lobotomize cybervillages in order to save them. Shame on you. It is professional victims like you who have driven me to believe that children under the age of eighteen ought to be prohibited from surfing the Internet, much as underage children are prohibited from driving cars or purchasing alcoholic beverages. Enough of your banal melodrama, already!
- Brendan D. Rau, Reston, VA.