While you're out of town, someone comes into your home and rifles through your family photographs and home videos, including ones you took of your children playing, swimming and dressing up. The intruder selects only ones that show your children naked, and turns them over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Next, federal agents search your house, confiscating hundreds more photos and videos. Days later, as you step off the plane in Albuquerque, you're arrested on child-pornography charges and hustled off to jail. A prosecutor presents certain of the photos and videos - minus the children's testimony - to a grand jury that doesn't share your views or lifestyle. And, the next thing you know, you're facing a lifetime in prison.

This is exactly what happened to Mark Rendleman.

Since last October, his life has become a tangled nightmare.

     On Feb. 29, citing a need for more time to prepare, the state filed a motion to postpone Rendleman's criminal trial until July. The former art professor, 49, is charged with several counts of sexual exploitation of - and criminal sexual contact with - three children over the course of five years. One of the children is his youngest daughter, and the other two (a boy and a girl) are the children of a former fling: the mother of his oldest daughter, Tiffany Mia Barbosa, 24. Barbosa herself is charged with several related counts against the children, now, ages 14,13 and 10. Both she and Rendleman (above) have pleaded not guilty.

     As a result of the investigation into possible sexual abuse, Rendleman also is facing three federal counts of possession of an unregistered firearm. (Three rifles seized in the search of his Embudo home were illegally fitted with homemade silencers. Rendleman has said he used them to shoot beavers.) All told, he is looking at a maximum sentence of more than 200 years.

     This isn't simply a tale of a family ripped apart by allegations of child abuse. It's also a story of the changing nature of family values, the fine and wavering line between art and pornography and what happens when the law is drawn into family business. Rendleman's many supporters insist he has done nothing wrong. They cite his history as a prolific artist and photographer, claiming he made the photos and videos in an artistic spirit. They say the family snapshots on which the prosecutions case is based never were intended for distribution.

     Leslie Drobbin, the mother of Rendleman's 10-year-old daughter and alleged victim, dismisses the content of the photos and videos as "child's play . . . it's kids being silly, playing games, making up skits," she said. "I was never troubled by it."

     Not everyone would take that attitude. Although a viewing of a handful of the photos shows images as commonplace as most parents' bathtub shots of their kids, others require a judgment call.

     Two grand juries made vastly different judgment calls on the images' artistic value. On Oct. 14, a Santa Fe county grand jury dismissed 25 out of 27 possible criminal counts against Rendleman. A week later, a grand jury in far more conservative Rio Arriba County indicted him on 30 counts.

     Rendleman currently is under house arrest, released on a $1 million property bond and electronically monitored by an ankle bracelet. (Both he and Barbosa, through their lawyers, declined to be interviewed for this story, as did state prosecutors and law enforcement involved in the pending case.)

     Rendleman's supporters, like Drobbin, decry the fact that the artist now is enmeshed in a legal system whose main concern is prosecuting alleged child abusers, not judging what's art. It's a situation they blame on almost entirely on Elizabeth Stewart the mother of Barbosa and the older two alleged victims.

     The Reporter has learned that Stewart herself has been arrested twice in connection with Rendleman: once for breaking and entering at his Santa Fe home and battering him, and most recently for contacting him against court orders. At a March 3 arraignment hearing, she was returned to the Santa Fe County Detention Center (where she has been in custody since Feb. 2) and ordered to post a $250,000 cash bond to leave.

     Although Stewart insists she only was trying to protect her children, as far as Rendleman's supporters are concerned, calling in the FBI was both unwarranted and tragically shortsighted. They insist that the photos and videos were made in a healthy family environment -- one that was simply uninhibited in matters of nudity. And the children were doing fine, they say, until Stewart's allegations plunged them into the center of a sordid criminal case.

     Mark Rendleman hails from an old, slightly bohemian Santa Fe family. His father, "Doc" Rendleman, was a respected local physician and his mother, Mimi, is remembered as a noted beauty and sometime nude model. After graduating from military school, Rendleman moved to California and found success as an artist. In 1983, he returned to Santa Fe to care for his ailing parents. In addition to carving out a second, lucrative career in real estate, Rendleman served for 15 years on the board of the Center for Contemporary Arts -- often donating his own money to keep it afloat -- and, in 1992, raised almost $70,000 to help found the Teen Center.

     Not surprisingly, Rendleman's immediate family is atypical. Of his three daughters by three different women, Barbosa -- his and Stewart's child -- is oldest.

     Rendleman and Stewart never knew each other well. Although Stewart says the relationship between her and Rendleman lasted four months, he has (in court records) characterized it as a "one-night stand." When, in 1999, Stewart moved from California to Santa Fe, it was the first time she and Rendleman had daily contact with each other.

     Barbosa, on the other hand, had a close relationship with her father. She had been visiting him since about age 9, and moved to Santa Fe in the mid-9o's.

     In 1998, Stewart agreed to let her youngest son and daughter move to Santa Fe to live with Barbosa. The children had been visiting her and Rendleman every summer for years. In Embudo (where Rendleman also has a house), they played with his other children, skinny-dipped in the river, and ran around in the elaborately sculpted caves that Rendleman had spent years creating in the foothills behind his house.

     It was during these summers, 1995 through 1999, that the nude photos and videos were taken: some by Barbosa or in her presence -- and some in the presence of Stewart herself. Although none of his supporters has seen all the photos and videos in question, they are unfazed by the fact that state District Judge Michael Vigil has called some of the images "very disturbing."

     In Rendleman's defense, his friends cite similar works by acclaimed photographers jock Sturges and Sally Mann, whose images of nude children are commonplace in Santa Fe's galleries and bookstores. For many, even those artists' works are uncomfortably explicit. (The recent Sturges exhibit at Photo-Eye Gallery, for instance, featured nude, prepubescent girls gazing, in arguably suggestive ways, at the viewer.) Still, in liberal Santa Fe, such works are generally accepted as within the bounds of artistic expression.

     Rendleman's Embudo neighbor, photographer Lisa Law, says that she herself has "a zillion pictures of nude kids." Adds Kenney, a self-described "free spirit": "Any of us could be in that cell."

     Rendleman's friends also point out that the children's own testimony largely seems to exonerate him. The Santa Fe county grand jury, which indicted Rendleman on only two counts, heard Stewart's children testify that the evidentiary photos and home movies were their own ideas, not Rendleman's, and that he never asked them to pose nude. By contrast, the Rio Arriba county grand jury indicted Rendleman on 30 counts after a hearing at which none of the children -- only state and federal investigators -- were called to testify.

     Drobbin calls the case pending against Rendleman and Barbosa a "travesty" -- one she believes happened because Stewart wrongly called in the FBI and an overzealous legal system took it from there. "Must parents think twice about snapping a photograph of their child running around, or just being themselves?" she asked. "Do we . . . want to be judged as to whether that photograph we snapped was appropriate?"

     "Those kids were totally comfortable around him," said Law, who often saw Rendleman around the children. "They loved him, loved the attention." Although Stewart knew of Rendleman's practice of videotaping and photographing her children in the nude, she insists she was shocked to discover, last fall, what some of the images entailed.

     In person, Stewart is a slender, well-dressed blonde. She says the fact that Rendleman and Barbosa are being prosecuted isn't her fault, but Rendleman's. He's the one who "coerced" Barbosa into taking exploitative photographs of her half-siblings, Stewart says. "If she would just come forward and admit that she's a victim," she says, "the true predator will come out, and that's her father".

     According to Stewart, the whole thing began last fall when her youngest daughter, after watching an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show about pedophiles, called her aside and told her of certain nude photos and videos Rendleman had taken. Although Stewart says she previously had seen "about 50 percent" of the images in question, she claims that the two videos her daughter then showed her were more troubling.

     Upon viewing them, said Stewart, "I was devastated . . . If he had just videotaped them skinny-dipping, that's one thing. But in some, he had zoomed in on their genitalia."

     (Sources confirm that some of the photos depict close-ups of children's genitals. A defense exhibit, however, shows a succession of Rendleman's photographs taken throughout the course of a day. In a few, as a child gets dressed, her genitals are clearly exposed -- but others in the roll show her clothed, eating breakfast, etc. The defense contends that, in such photographs, context is everything.)

     Court records indicate that, in early October, Stewart called an FBI agent and reported that Rendleman had taken nude videos and photos of her children. She also accused him of child molestation. (Stewart denies she actually placed the call, but not that she made the allegations.) At some point, while Rendleman was away in Brazil, she removed photos and videos from his Embudo home and turned them over to the FBI.

     Rendleman's supporters believe that Stewart had questionable motivations for launching the investigation. In an unpublished letter to the New Mexican, Kenney, Levy, and Robert Althouse layout, their view that she did so because Stewart "has a scheme, perhaps to make money. I do not know her true intentions, but I guess that she seeks a profitable settlement, and I pray that she doesn't fool the jury or the judge."

     But Rendleman's supporters blame her for the fact that he is on trial at all. Their concern is that innocent family photos taken by an artist with atypical attitudes toward nudity have fallen under the microscope of a rigid criminal , justice system.

     In addition to potential financial motives, they cite Stewart's psychological history as reason for her to misrepresent what happened to her children. "This is a very, very mentally ill woman," said Barbosa's attorney, Dan Marlowe. Stewart's two youngest children had spent the past year living with Barbosa -- Marlowe and others claim -- because Stewart herself was psychologically incapable of taking care of them. Stewart admits she was voluntarily hospitalized in California in 1998 "for severe burnout, major depression and anxiety (According to a Nov. 24, 1999 letter written by Cron, there is "reason to believe that she has been hospitalized at least four times for psychiatric reasons." He also claims she is on psychiatrist-prescribed medication.)

     Stewart herself has said she is receiving disability payments for mental health problems. Rendleman's friends claim they have long known about Stewart's mental instability. It's why, Drobbin says, Rendleman himself feels no anger toward Stewart. "He feels badly for her," Drobbin said. "We would all like to see her get some help."

     Stewart responds that Rendleman's supporters have made discrediting her their main focus. "Understand that someone has to be the scapegoat," she said in a recent interview. "If [Mark's supporters] think that's the position that will best serve them, they can try. It doesn't even affect me . . . I have no animosity or hostility toward Mark."

     Court records attest to a slightly different story. On Nov. 23,1999 Stewart was arrested at Rendleman's Santa Fe home on charges of breaking and entering and battery of a household member. In his Nov. 24 letter to District Attorney Henry Valdez, Cron describes the incident as follows: after attending a court hearing to revoke Barbosa's bond, Stewart "informed her psychologist that she was going to kill MIA Barbosa and then commit suicide . . . The psychologist was so alarmed . . . [she] called Mr. Rendleman's residence [where Barbosa also was living] to advise him of the death threat to MIA" Within minutes, writes Cron, Stewart was smashing a tall plate glass window by Rendleman's front door. While he was on the phone to 911, she entered through the broken window and began attacking him "with various objects she could use as weapons."

     A police report of the incident states that Stewart was "screaming incoherently" during the attack, in which Rendleman suffered minor injuries; he later was taken to a hospital for treatment.

     Six days later, Stewart was released on bond under an order not to contact Rendleman. On Jan. 26, she called him. (According to court records, the call was to ask the whereabouts of Barbosa.) On Feb. 2, Stewart was returned to the Santa Fe County Detention Center for violating the conditions of her release.

     (In a strange twist, Stewart's former husband, Ronald Stewart, also recently was booked into the Santa Fe County Detention Center on an outstanding California warrant for a parole violation. According to Stewart's fiancé, Tony Bearhorse, Ronald had come to Santa Fe to try and take custody of his and Stewart's children. State police records indicate he was arrested Feb. 19 at OfficeMax, after an unidentified person called the police and informed them of his whereabouts and outstanding warrant. Bearhorse has been caring for the children since Feb. 2.)

      Since his Oct. 28 arraignment, Rendleman has been allowed to see his 10-year-old daughter only three times. Because he's under house arrest, his friends say, he is unable to make a living as a Realtor. And, whatever the outcome of his July trial, he is facing a possible 30 years in prison on the federal weapons charges. Still, Rendleman's friends say, he isn't t bitter, but characteristically philosophical and calm. "He is an extraordinary man, a highly ethical man," said Levy. "He is kind, generous, and honest -- the kind of person you're fortunate to know"

     As for the three alleged victims, their lives hardly have been improved. According to Drobbin, Rendleman's youngest daughter "misses her father." Although the child is coping well, Drobbin says she worries about the impact the ordeal will have on the girl.

     Meanwhile, Stewart's two younger children have been in Bearhorse's care for weeks, since both their parents have been in jail. Since October, they also have been barred from any contact with their sister and longtime caretaker, Barbosa.

     "They're basket cases," Law said pityingly. "They're the ones who are being hurt the most."

     Stewart has maintained she only called the FBI to "protect my kids from any further harm." Yet, in a recent interview, she seemed to realize the unforeseen consequences of her actions: namely, the painful ordeal that both her young children and her daughter MIA continue to suffer. "If I could make this all go away tomorrow," Stewart said, "I would."