The following day, June 4, was Richard Matasar’s birthday. He went out for drinks and snacks with members of his staff—his assistant Harry Althaus, DeJohn, and associate dean Joan Fishman. DeJohn took the opportunity to broach the subject of what they had found. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” Matasar told him, realizing the situation could be sensitive. “But don’t tell me who it is yet.” On June 5, Matasar and DeJohn sat down together to discuss the issues. Were the pictures on the computer of a professor who did research in the area? Matasar wanted to know. Was there a possible explanation? Alas, there was not, and later that day, Matasar and DeJohn took a look at three of the images. One of them could have been a family photograph taken on a beach, Matasar said. But the other two he described as being “on the other side of that line . . . whatever that line is.”

As Perry would later explain, the images were very sexually provocative. We have a real problem here, thought Matasar.

After stories detailing the violent content of some of the photos appeared in the tabloids, Samuels phoned several of his colleagues to assure them that the rape images the authorities had found at his home were not the images he intended to amass; he was only interested in the ones of naked children. As Jonakait speculated, it’s possible he inadvertently received harder-core porn than he wanted while downloading a whole magazine about children. Law-enforcement sources confirm the nature and amount of the images they saw, but some colleagues remained doubtful. “I was skeptical about the accuracy of press reports, and I continue to be somewhat skeptical about what the D.A. said,” Matasar says. “Professor Samuels said, ‘Regardless of what you heard, don’t believe what you read, that wasn’t what I collected or what I was interested in.’ He wanted me to know and wanted people in our community to know that the worst of what was reported was not what he was doing.

“He wasn’t trying to say ‘I’m a good guy,’ ” adds Matasar. “He was trying to say ‘I’m not that guy.’”

Exactly which guy Samuels is became a puzzling issue. One of the school’s longest-serving professors, he had grown up in Paragould, Arkansas, and come east to Yale and then Columbia before arriving at New York Law School, his first and only academic posting. “He always rolled up his sleeves to chair committees,” said James Simon, the Martin Professor of Law, on the faculty since 1973 and a former dean. “He was very conscientious and dedicated.”

In the past few years, Samuels had also started doing his bit to help raise the school’s profile. He was finally building a reputation as a significant scholar. Part of the explanation for his newfound energy, some said, was that Samuels’s two children—Richard, a Tufts graduate who now works with a tech firm in Massachusetts, and Claire, a student at Brandeis—were gone, leaving him more time to work. His wife of more than twenty years, Marcia, an editor at John Wiley & Sons, was also spending more time at work.

In 2002, Samuels filed an amicus brief on an important copyright case before the U.S. Supreme Court that established him as one of the top authorities in his field. He also kept up with the technological advances that have affected copyright law over the past few years, and his 2000 Illustrated Story of Copyright, a user-friendly overview that included drawings, caricatures, and photographs, devoted two chapters to computers and the Internet. Curiously, it even featured a photograph of Samuels’s home computer setup, the place where police presumably found his stash of porn, a Power Mac outfitted with a miniature video camera, a scanner, and two printers.

If Samuels’s colleagues were shocked by the charges, so too were students, some of whom said he had a winning teaching style. He “tried to make things fun,” one said, by bringing props related to the cases under discussion, like Mickey Mouse figurines or pictures he had taken of the Grand Canyon, and actively helped students find internships and jobs.

With the staff, however, he seemed to have been more aloof. Argento, Samuels’s former assistant, said that in the five years she worked for him, Samuels never once walked into her office, located about twenty feet away from his, to say good morning. She estimated that they had four or five conversations in five years. Her work for him was limited to faxing and copying. Though she had the password to every other professor’s computer, she never had Samuels’s password, and she never did anything that would have meant using his computer. She was baffled to find herself thanked in his book. “We chalked it up to ‘He’s a weird guy,’ ” she said.

During the first lengthy faculty meeting after Samuels’s arrest, a number of issues surfaced, among them how the technicians had found the images. “There was a lot of ‘You mean anything that’s on my computer, anyone at school can see?’ ” one professor remembered. “People tried to divert it to ‘What are our privacy rights?’ and the dean was put on the defensive, not because the majority of the faculty felt this way but because they were the most vocal.”

Samuels remained on leave until the investigation was complete. But some staff and faculty members complained that he appeared to be unrepentant, using his “leave” to update his Website and advance his research. Though he often showed up after-hours in the office, he also popped in on regular workdays. And shortly after his arrest, he’d arrived in the IT department to work on a computer, only yards away from the technicians who had discovered his secret.

“It was very uncomfortable,” one longtime faculty member said. “He came to a meeting where hiring of faculty was discussed, and people would say, ‘We may have an opening in copyright, depending on what happens with Ed,’ and Ed was sitting right there.”

In an open meeting held soon after with faculty, Matasar asked for a show of hands on who was uncomfortable with having Samuels around. Not a single hand went up. Yet several faculty members said that a silent majority of professors were appalled and uncomfortable with the situation.

“Most professors were being very professional with him, looking at it from a legal standpoint,” said Argento, who left the school in February. “I told them, ‘I’m not asking you from a legal standpoint, I’m asking you from a personal standpoint: Did that turn your stomach?’ ”

If the staff had felt uncomfortable with Samuels’s presence, what came next ensured they would feel downright queasy. On Tuesday, October 22, Dorothea Perry and Rob Gross were fired. Neither had been in trouble before the Samuels job. Perry, who had worked at the school for twelve years, had received her evaluation from Collegis the previous November, and her work had been rated “excellent.” Gross, who had been there since 2001, had received an evaluation three months before the Samuels discovery that read “fully competent plus.” “I knew I had been punished for Samuels,” Perry says. “When I was fired, I told them, ‘I know you have children. I know all of you have children. How could you do this?’ ”