Asshole of the Week

This week's dishonoree reminds this Phillyist of fictional tragedies from Shakespeare's Lavinia to the can full of dead women from The Wire. If our world and city were slightly less screwed up, then that's where these stories would safely remain—trapped on the page, stage, or screen—safe from our real lives. Instead, we get this guy.

Andrew Mogilyansky, Bucks County man, dual Russian-American citizen, and all-around asshole was sentenced yesterday for traveling to St. Petersberg in order to have sex with teenage girls. Orphaned teenage girls, one fourteen and two thirteen year-olds. For this, he and his attorney arranged a plea bargain, and he is being sentenced to 78-97 months in prison and $5,000 payments to each of the victims for mental health treatment. This comes out to something between six and eight years.

The defense attorney, Jack McMahon Jr, claims his client is "a good guy" and "not a pedophile." The Daily News article makes here in parenthesis that "he is married and has several young children." What light this is meant to shed on Mogilyansky's non-pedophila, this Phillyist doesn't know. Those children unfortunately provide no evidence that Mogilyansky hasn't been having sex with other children. They're merely trapped with the knowledge of their father's monstrous behavior.

And it is potentially even more monstrous. Our guy is potentially involved with the flourishing sex-tourism industry, his three victims recruits into "Berenika," a business that bought children for prostitution.

What is this crap? Who says six and half years is appropriate punishment for this misery-spreading behavior? Why are people such assholes?

Image credit: Flickr user atul666