The home porn videotape, a VHS-C tape of their stepfather’s birthday party gone wild, was sitting on mom’s bedside table. The Penthouse magazine was still in a black plastic wrapper in the parent’s bathroom with the preprinted label addressed to Amber Goettig. This evidence came out in a Concord courtroom Thursday and Friday in a probation violation hearing for a sex offender that was anything but typical.

The story of Amber Goettig Benitez Holt is news because she’s an unusual registered sex offender. She is unusual because she seems so normal. She is a hairdresser, mother of three and a sex offender. She is unusual because of how she violated her probation: as a swinger. She is also news because of what her case says about the probation system and its monitoring of sex offenders.

Amber Benitez had sex with a 15-year-old girl in Concord in 2002 after throwing one of a number of parties in her home where she provided alcohol to teenagers. In 2003 she pled guilty to taking indecent liberties with a minor, a lesser felony, and was serving the last of three years on probation when her ex-husband, Victory Kelly Benitez, got the home porn tape from his 13-year-old stepson and took it to assistant District Attorney Paul Holcomb. Holcomb turned the tape over to the probation office in the basement of the Concord courthouse. In the first of a number of surreal screenings, three women who worked as probation officers gathered around a TV and watched 25 minutes or so of home porn tape. The prosecutor played the tape again in open court, turning the TV toward Judge Erwin Spainhour, who slumped against his palm impassively stating more than asking, “We’re not going to have to watch all of this are we?” They didn’t.

It’s easy to view the scene as either comic or naughty or both, an ink blot test of our own sexuality, be it puritanical or prurient. But it was far from funny or titillating by the end of six hours of testimony and arguments. “Tragic” was the word Judge Spainhour used. “Tragic” not because of the impact on Amber or her husband or her ex-husband or her mother, but “tragic” because of her kids.

Concord Police Detective Laresa Cook, who investigated the original felony, sat in the witness box and read aloud the statements of some of the teens at the party where Amber first had sex with a girl almost half her age. One said, “Amber had bought tequila” and “everyone was drunk.” Another said at one of the parties, “The oldest boy woke up and was crying.” He would have been 9-years-old at the time.

The first time Victor Benitez told me how his now 13-year-old stepson was affected by the discovery of pictures of his mother having sex, Victor’s lower lip trembled and his eyes watered and he said nothing for a moment. He then said his son “…has been affected by this.”

Amber and her husband and her mother blame Victor Benitez for all this. And me. Amber’s mother sent me an e-mail saying the children are “…caught in a cross fire of your broadcasts and their father’s need to destroy his ex-wife at any cost.” Victor is thousands of dollars behind in child support. He signed over primary custody of the oldest boy last month and said he didn’t fight the custody battle. He said he didn’t have the money for attorneys.

As for me, I took an uncomfortable elevator ride with Amber’s husband Mitchell Holt and her mother after the first day of testimony. As the doors opened on the first floor they asked me “not to put their children in danger again.” I told them I didn’t know what they meant. They said a strange driver ran Amber off the road after our first television report. In that report I identified her license plate because it was similar to her “handle” on the swingers’ web site, MYRAGINREDHEAD.

In a tearful three sentence statement before sentencing, Amber stood and told Judge Erwin, “It’s very hard to see my husband’s and my personal, private things exposed. We have tried to take every precaution. I’m sorry.”

Sorry didn’t cut it with Judge Spainhour. He meticulously laid out the good and the bad. The mitigating and the damning. The good? That probation officers said Amber was a “good client and a model probationer” and had been to treatment and complied with their demands. On the flipside, “The defendant has absolutely and totally disregarded the orders” of the court when it came to not possessing porn. Not to mention morphine.

“She has got to pay the price,” Judge Spainhour told the courtroom audience of attorneys, deputies, probation officers and clerks. “For 90 days she’s going to have to think about how much fun all of this was.”

Amber sobbed. Her mother sobbed. Her husband looked down.

“It is a tragic situation for their children, “ the Judge continued.

Amber had entered the front doors of the courthouse for a previous hearing arm-in-arm with her mother and husband. She left the courtroom through a back door arm-in-arm with a female deputy, almost leaning on the deputy. Her knees seemed weak.