HACKENSACK, N.J. - Jennifer Santangelo of Lyndhurst, N.J., was walking home from school one day, wearing her blue and white uniform, when a 31-year-old man said hello and began chatting with her.
He was nice, she said. He gave her a box of pens and offered to let her into his nightclub for free, she said, if she handed out fliers for him.
Santangelo, then an eighth-grader at Sacred Heart School, had never been in a nightclub before. So she gave out some fliers in the coming days, threw out the rest and showed up at the club. The man let her in, she said.
The two exchanged phone numbers, began meeting frequently and soon were in a relationship that Santangelo said ended in 2004, a few months after her 18th birthday. She went to the police several months later.
Their secret love affair involved sex about twice a week, Santangelo told detectives in a sworn statement. She said the relationship was punctuated by five pregnancies - four abortions, one miscarriage - and, later on, countless fights that led to a hostile breakup.
Joseph Picolli, 38, of Rutherford, N.J., was arrested and later indicted on charges of having a sexual relationship with an underage girl. The indictment also charges him with having sex with a friend of Santangelo's when she, too, was 13. He faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted at a trial that is scheduled to begin April 17.
Santangelo, now 20, is on probation for drug possession, a habit she blames on her troubled adolescence. Her relationship with her family is strained, if not shattered.
Although she believes she once loved Picolli, she said she feels used and betrayed.
"I wish I'd never met him," she said. "He took me from an innocent 13-year-old into what I am today. I was still playing with dolls at 13. He totally had me brainwashed. I was in his web and I couldn't get out."
The Record ordinarily withholds the identities of alleged sex crime victims. In this case, however, Santangelo agreed to an on-the-record interview.
"What I had to go through, I don't want that to happen to another girl," she said.
The crime Picolli stands accused of is more commonly known as statutory rape - a "consensual" relationship between an adult and a child under the age of consent.
In three New Jersey counties, for example, between 15 and 33 percent of sex-crimes cases involved statutory rape. Prosecutors believe such numbers represent only a fraction of cases in which a minor is involved in a sexual relationship with an adult. Although many studies show that teens are having sex at a younger age than before - often with older men - authorities say such cases are rarely reported because the relationships usually don't involve force or coercion.
"They come to our attention only when someone is bragging about their relationship or the parents find out about it, or a hospital calls us when a teenager is delivering a baby," Baglivi said. "Otherwise, these kids are not coming forward on their own."
Most states, including New Jersey, allow 13- to 16-year-olds to have sex with partners less than four years older. Perhaps in an attempt not to interfere with high-school dating, the law allows a 17-year-old boy, for instance, to have sex with a 13{-year-old girl - in effect, condoning the younger teen's exposure to sex.
However, the same activity, if conducted a day after the male's 18th birthday, becomes a second-degree crime that carries a prison term of up to 10 years, lifelong parole under Megan's Law and civil liability for personal injury.
Such a distinction is not meant to protect teens from sex - but, rather, from exploitative sexual relationships with older partners, legal scholars say. What the law does, they say, is enforce societal norms condemning sexual relations where the age disparity is, as one put it, "just not right."
"It's the law's way of saying, `Pick someone your size,'" said Michelle Oberman, a law professor at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, Calif., who has written extensively on statutory rape laws.
Prosecutors sometimes refrain from aggressive enforcement, saying the law could subject undeserving defendants - a 20-year-old college sophomore, for instance, who went to bed with a 15-year-old girl thinking she was a year older - to harsh punishment.
"I don't think the law was intended for such defendants," Baglivi said.
Prosecutors prefer to resolve such cases through plea agreements, offering deals with no jail time when the age disparity is not that great and the defendant doesn't seem predatory.
"Sometimes we don't even charge in such cases," said Del Russo. "If we do charge, our plea offers are going to be benevolent."
In the case of older defendants, however, the pick-someone-your-size rule kicks in.
"When the defendants are in their 30s and 40s, that almost always entails a prison term," Baglivi said.
Del Russo agrees.
"Depending on the quality of proof, that would be dealt with harshly," he said. "I think there is a consensus that with older partners, there is clearly a mismatch - a social, emotional and sexual mismatch."
Statutory rape is at least as old as 1275, when common law in England outlawed sex with anyone younger than 12. At different times in subsequent centuries, the age of consent in America fluctuated from 10 to 21.
When the New Jersey criminal code was drafted in the late 1970s, some proposed 13 as the age of consent. Public sentiment, however, was resistant.
"The people ... were shocked by the fact that the criminal code allowed women to consent to sexual activity at the age of 13," reads a note in the state criminal code explaining the law's history.
A balance was then struck, setting the bar at 16 but also allowing 13- to 16-year-olds to be sexually involved with a partner less than four years older. More than half of the states today have settled on 16 as the age of consent.
"Virtually every community on the planet has the notion that a certain portion of the population must be off limits to sexual activity, under the premise that they are not capable of making decisions about sexual conduct," Oberman said.
