Good morning, y’all. I was flipping through the channels and two items caught my eye. First, they just announced that July 2015 was the hottest July ever. It’s true I may be as crazy as a bedbug about some things, but by golly I knew it was hot. I stand verified and validated!
The other item to catch my eye was all the goings on about this Subway character, Jared Fogle. Normally, I’d have some pity for a fellow who had come from nothing, built himself up and then dropped lower than he started. Not this time. If you’ve been living in a cave, or Alabama, for the last fifteen years, you might not have heard his story. Let me recount it for you. While Jared was in college he weighed about 425 pounds, which I would call a blivit, super-sized. Apparently, he found he was unattractive to the fairer sex, age not-specified at this point, and Jared set about losing weight. The marketing story recounts that Jared ate two Subway sandwiches a day, a turkey with veggies and an all veggies, and that was the sum total of his daily calories. He took to walking everywhere he went and through diet and exercise reduced down to 200 pounds. All good to this point. His college dormmate sent his story to Men’s Health magazine where it was noticed by Subway. Subway took a chance and made an ad with Jared including before and after photos to prove his claim. The ad implied to all of us viewers who struggle with our size, that we were just two Subways a day away from a perfect BMI.
Subway ran about 300 ads using Jared as their spokesman, including ads with photos of his 61 inch waist pants. Logic would dictate that the ads were successful, and Jared came out of the decade with a net worth estimated at 15 million dollars. Still all good to this point.
Now we are starting the phase where Jared “wants to give something back”, and he starts his Jared Foundation. The Jared Foundation was a nonprofit designed to raise awareness of childhood obesity. I’ve heard no indication that Jared used his foundation to put himself close to children that had self image issues. I don’t know that we can say the same about his friend and director of the foundation, Russell Taylor. Taylor was arrested earlier this year after a lengthy and extensive investigation of the child pornography underground. Taylor was also charged with the exploitation of children for sexual purposes, which is where we catch up with Jared.
Taylor was using children for his own sexual pleasure and filming the encounters. Somewhere along the way Jared received a lot of the files and expressed a desire to participate. Taylor then acted as Jared’s pimp and located underage girls for Jared, who was willing to travel out of state to have sex with a minor. Part of Jared’s indictment says that Jared asked his victims to recommend other girls who might be interested. He even offered a finder’s fee, inducing children to violate other children.
The sentencing is still on going and will likely max out at 10 years and 1.5 million dollars in restitution to the victims. Jared will also likely lose at least half of his assets to his wife who announced her intention to divorce Jared right after the trial.
I am not in favor of capital punishment, but I get close when it comes to pedophiles. There is a special initiation ritual that “baby fondlers” go through in prison, and it’s not a one time ceremony. I expect that Jared will be initiated many times, and, at some point, will wish he had gotten the chair.