When the Billboard music charts came out yesterday, rap-rock pioneers the Beastie Boys landed the number one spot on the Rock, Alternative and Hip-Hop Albums charts.
But when the Houston Press released their own list on Thursday, the big winner wasn’t the Brooklyn-based rap trio. It was a 41-year-old cleaning woman from Missouri City, Texas. And she’s a child molester.Houston Press, a weekly entertainment and news periodical that reaches a million readers each month, published their own chart this week. It was a list of “The 10 Hottest Women on the Texas Sex Offenders.” Over the span of three pages on their website, Houston Press contributor Richard Connelly chronicles the ten hottest women in the Texas Department of Public Safety’s sex offender list. Mugshots, full names and locations, crime and victim stats are posted, along with links to their database profiles, which include home addresses, shoe size and more mugshots, among others.As one might expect, however, the list has riled up readers across the Lone Star state and elsewhere.“This is completely horrible,” writes “Fla Mom of two” on the blog post. “The Houston Press has sunk to a whole new low.”Another reader, Rebeca Hadley, says “This crosses the line on so many levels.”After a backlash of criticism, though, Connelly says that his intent might have been to shock but never to offend.“Glamorizing or trivializing child rape? It did not cross my mind that I was doing that,” writes Connelly in a rebuttal posted hours after the list was published to the Web. “That was never the intent. I hope that would be obvious, but it seems not.”“This is classless, if not cruel. Commending these women in any way – let alone on their looks – is no way to bring respect and focus to the issue of sexual assault: it's a cheap, tasteless act to get attention for this site,” writes one commenter named Bee.According to Connelly, though, many are misinterpreting what he intended to be an exposé revealing that child molesters don’t necessarily fit the cookie-cutter “unemployed loser” stereotype that many often view them as. Connelly talked to two veteran child-porn prosecutors about how they do their jobs and learned that there is no set category to place the offenders in. No one walk of life can sum it up. Lawyers and doctors alike have been convicted of sex crimes in Texas. But so has document specialist Erin Bauman, age 31. And if you ask Connelly, she is pretty foxy.Was it an attempt to catch the reader’s eye? No doubt. Connelly openly admits it. But will he succeed in showing Texas and the world that the sexy data entry clerk down the road might be as guilty of sexual assault as the mustachioed man leering at lads from the train station bench? That’s the goal, says the author. In the meantime, thousands have shared the blog post on social networking sites and the comments continue to be rolling in.And the 28-year-old housekeeper from Denton, Texas? She’s young, she’s hot and she’s still on probation.