Molester of Child Actors Gets 10 Years

A Tarzana man who admitted molesting child actors left in his care was sentenced to 10 years in prison Wednesday after three of his victims and their parents tearfully pleaded that he be kept behind bars for as long as possible.

“I’m sorry for all the people hurt by this,� said Van Nuys Superior Court Commissioner Sherman Juster before he sentenced Joseph Christian Fontana to the maximum term possible under an agreement the defendant reached with prosecutors.

“If I sent him away for 100 years, it wouldn’t undo the harm,� Juster said.

Fontana, 32, pleaded guilty Jan. 7 to sexually molesting two boys and a girl who were child actors he cared for as a “set sitter.� The sexual encounters occurred over a five-year period that ended in 1986, authorities said.

Police said seven other people have complained of sexual improprieties involving Fontana, but no criminal charges have been brought because the statute of limitations has expired in all but one case.

That case involves a boy in Largo, Fla., and police there say their investigation is continuing.

Fontana sat with his shoulders hunched and his head bowed as the teen-agers he molested years ago described how the incidents affected their lives.

“I realize what he was doing to me was wrong, but I couldn’t tell anyone because this was a man everybody trusted,� a 16-year-old girl said. “He just violates everything about the word trust. Right now, I’m trying to trust other people, and it’s hard.�

An 18-year-old boy who said he is getting on with his life begged Juster to “please keep him away from me.�

Calling Fontana “a predator and a deviant . . . a manipulative individual who betrayed these people,� Deputy Dist. Atty. Lloyd M. Nash urged Juster to impose the maximum sentence.

But defense attorney Jim Barnes, calling Fontana “very charming and intelligent,� asked the court to put his client on probation and confine him to a minimum-security treatment facility instead of state prison.

That suggestion outraged parents of the victims.

“What we are dealing with is an irresponsible, deceitful man,� one of them said. “Chris has repeatedly preyed upon vulnerable single mothers who have no financial or moral support from fathers, with the sole intention of having his perverted way with children who looked up to him and trusted him.�

In one case, Fontana dated the mother of an 11-year-old boy. He moved into her home in 1981 and then regularly engaged in sexual relations with her son, according to a probation report.

Fontana, whose parents both were attorneys, was an aspiring but unsuccessful actor who supported himself with money he earned from “set sitting.�

He told probation officer Dennis L. Abrams that he “regrets the sins of his past� and has been “born again.�

But in a report recommending the maximum 10-year sentence, Abrams wrote that, as Fontana “piously spouts his new-found religion, he still continued to show little or no awareness of the tremendous devastation he has wrought.�