Bob Rowan, who admitted stealing a string of 21 ceramic penises from a domestic-violence-awareness exhibit at the Boulder (Colo.) Public Library last November and replacing it with an American flag and a note signed “El Dildo Bandito,” pleaded no contest May 9 to second-degree criminal tampering.
“I want it to go away,” he said in the May 13 Boulder Daily Camera. “It’s been hard for me and my wife.” Rowan, who had initially rejected a similar plea agreement at his January arraignment, received a one-month deferred sentence that bans him from the library and keeps him away from the artist who created the work.
“I’m still appalled to think those things should have been in the front window,” Rowan said. “I’m not against pornography, but not in the front window for children to see.”
Boulder County Judge Thomas J. B. Reed said, “The library is a wonderful place where they don’t have to hold everything he agrees [with] in them. They’re better places because they don’t.”
Posted May 20, 2002.