Michael Leahy remembers the first time he met his former wife, Patty Onorato.\n“She was beautiful,” he said. “I thought that when I met the woman of my dreams, somehow she would meet all of my needs, including my sexual needs.”\nUnfortunately, Leahy had already been addicted to pornography for more than 10 years when he met Onorato, he said. The sexual addiction escalated into a full-blown affair and ultimately ruined his marriage of 15 years, he said.\nLeahy made the conscious decision to make a change in his life a year after the divorce. \n“It wasn’t until I was contemplating what I would write in a suicide note to my boys,” he said. “I’m sitting there as this 40-year-old guy who lost my job, my wife and my kids’ respect. I came to the end of myself and only then noticed that I really needed help.” \n \nUsing spirituality to battle the addiction\nIn a continuous battle against the addiction, Leahy has been in recovery since 1999, he said. Part of his recovery entails speaking out about the potentially harmful consequences of pornography. In a partnership with Campus Crusade for Christ, known as CRU, he has visited more than 100 college campuses and spoken to more than 300,000 students, he said. Tonight he will continue his tour by presenting “Porn Nation – The Naked Truth” at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. at Alumni Hall in the Indiana Memorial Union.\n“(Leahy) is incredibly transparent on issues that a lot of people would find difficult to talk about,” said Tony Arnold, media relations director of Campus Crusade for Christ. “Advertising tells us that ‘porn is the norm.’ No one understands that better than today’s college student.”\nIU’s chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ became interested in bringing Leahy to campus after hearing about his appearances at Purdue and Michigan State, said Mindy McClanahan, who works in north campus outreach for CRU. \n“He addresses the issue of sexual addiction through spirituality,” McClanahan said. “It’s an issue that students face.”
Stopping the problem early\nLeahy, who has also been featured on ABC’s “20/20” and “The View,” mainly focuses his presentations on young adults because he said he sees college students as people of influence. The ages of the students allows him to talk freely and openly about his own sexual experience, which started when he was just 11 years old, Leahy said.\n“It was an accidental thing that I saw at school,” he said of the image, which was a topless young woman. “I could literally draw a picture of it right now. I never forgot it.”\nLeahy said he realized two things that day. One of those was that he liked porn. The other was that he felt a real guilt and shame about what he had seen, almost as if he had stolen something from the woman.\n“I grew up thinking sex was a dirty thing, like stealing a look at someone,” Leahy said. “I turned to pornography as my sex educator, and through that I learned about what it meant to be a man.”
The dangers of Internet porn\nBecause 11 is the average age of a child’s first pornography experience, the Internet is becoming a dangerous tool for children whose parents do not talk to them about sex, Leahy said. His concern is that the cycle of addiction happens much more quickly.\n“Internet porn is like the crack cocaine of sexual addiction,” he said. “It is so incredibly addictive because it’s available, because it’s affordable and because it’s so anonymous.”\nAccording to the Family Safe Media Web site, there are about 4.2 million pornography Web sites, comprising more than 12 percent of total sites on the Internet.\n“It gets really hard to find out where the solution is,” Leahy said. “We have to be talking about it, and we have to create an environment where we can talk about it.”\nArnold said he thinks Leahy’s presentation does just that. It asks college students to make their own conclusions about an issue not commonly discussed.\n“This goes far beyond a classical stereotype of porn in a sleazy theater in a bad part of town,” Arnold said. “It shows students how porn affects their lives. You might not agree with what he’s saying, but it will cause you to think.”\nAfter speaking to such large audiences over the years, Leahy said he likes to think that what he discusses in his presentation is helpful to students, even if that only means they have a new way of looking at the issues surrounding pornography.\n“There are different students that will benefit in different ways, and in most cases it will be very personal,” Leahy said. “There are students out there really struggling with this stuff, and I want to give them strategies and steps for being healthy.”
