Tag: child abuse

Inside an Abusive Anti-Porn Camp for Teens

When Cameron was growing up in the 2010s, he was preoccupied​ with two things: that he was gay, and that there would be dire consequences if his parents and community found out. He lived in a small town in Utah, where over 90 percent of the residents are Mormon. “They are very strict about gender roles and sexuality,” he says.

But Cameron didn’t want to keep his secret to himself. In 2014, when he was 14, he came out to a close friend via text message. Soon after he sent the message, his parents went through his phone and discovered it. “They immediately confronted me about it,” he says. “I was barely ready to tell one person. I was not ready to have that conversation with my parents.”

That conversation was just the beginning. “There was probably about a year there where it was just absolutely brutal—where every day it was coming up around the dinner table,” says Cameron, identified here by a pseudonym at his request. “I can remember my mom picking me up from school and being like, ‘You realize that you’re taking away everything that I thought I could ever have, right? You realize that because of this, I’m never going to have grandchildren from you.'”

His parents’ disapproval was devastating enough, but Cameron says things got worse when the news spread throughout the community. Anonymous accounts started sending Cameron homophobic messages on Facebook. “All gays of the world should be strung up and drowned in the ocean,” he recalls one of them saying. Even scarier were the random people who showed up at the family’s doorstep to confront his mom.

“It was, honestly, really, really terrifying….Everybody around you hates you and essentially wants you purged from the earth,” Cameron says. Around this time, he attempted suicide.

In spite of the harassment, he managed to go on a few dates with guys when he was 16. Nothing panned out, but his parents found out about it. Around the same time, they found some gay porn on his phone. They started locking him in his room at night, forcing him to pee in Gatorade bottles.

During this time his father told a co-worker who was in his late 20s about Cameron. Soon the man “started reaching out and being very schmoozy,” Cameron said. “I was so alone. Everybody hated me….And here’s this person.” He was giving Cameron the attention he craved. They began having sexual encounters. Cameron says the relationship was consensual, yet “you’re under the age of consent, and there’s no way to justify pedophilia. But he was always just really, really nice.”

Once again, his parents found out. They confiscated his phone, so he could no longer talk with the man or look at porn. They also pressed charges, and the man was sent to prison for a year. Cameron was sent to his own prison of sorts: STAR Guides Wilderness Therapy, which bills itself as “the country’s premier wilderness treatment program for teens with technology, pornography and sexual addictions.”

These camps say they can change teens’ lives by helping them overcome severe mental and behavioral issues. STAR Guides claims the camp “provides a specialized ‘unplugged’ environment to reset and re-balance the physical, mental and spiritual health of youth…under the guidance of highly trained therapists and professionals, we provide a setting where youth can feel safe and supported when working through sensitive pornography or sexual issues along with trauma, free of fear, embarrassment or shame.” And some parents and teens testify that STAR Guides was a positive experience. “You gave me my daughter back, and helped her how she needed,” one parent said in an exit interview. A teen said the program was “extremely helpful and life-changing”; another said, “I found myself.”

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Project Veritas releases tape in which Ashley Biden appears to claim ownership of infamous diary

Investigative news outlet Project Veritas on Monday released an audio recording in which Ashley Biden appears to confirm her ownership and the authenticity of a diary that fell into the outlet’s possession.

Veritas first obtained the diary after tipsters called the outlet, claiming they obtained the diary and other materials that the president’s daughter left in a room. They also claimed that the diary contained damaging allegations on the then-presidential candidate.

While the outlet maintains that it obtained the diary through legal means and ultimately opted against publishing its contents, the Department of Justice investigated the matter on claims the diary was stolen and subsequently raided the homes of three Veritas journalists.

The audio recordings, previously unreleased, include the original voicemail that the tipster left to Veritas as well as the conversation the outlet had with Ashley Biden.

“So I heard you have a few of my belongings,” Biden says to the Veritas journalist in the phone call on Oct. 8, 2020.

“There’s a diary here…” the journalist states. Biden then directs them to hand over the materials to one “Eric” and subsequently indicates a preference for not involving Secret Service in the matter.”I am Ashley Biden. It is my stuff,” she states on the call. Biden also confirms her ownership of a bag with luggage tags.

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Billionaire Raped Teenager Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Mansion: Lawsuit

A billionaire raped a teenager inside Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion in New York City, according to a new lawsuit.

Leon Black, the billionaire, raped the girl when she was just 16 inside Mr. Epstein’s residence on the Upper East Side, the civil suit alleges.

The girl, whose name has not been made public and is using the pseudonym Jane Doe, was allegedly instructed, and did, on multiple occasions give Mr. Epstein a massage that included sexual intercourse.

After learning the girl would follow instructions, Mr. Epstein often handed her off to other men to do the same, according to the suit, including at Mr. Epstein’s homes in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Palm Beach, Florida.

In 2002, the girl was transported to Mr. Epstein’s New York City home, where she was introduced to Mr. Epstein’s “special friend” Mr. Black, according to the suit. Mr. Epstein was quoted as telling the girl to give Mr. Black the same kind of “massage treatment” that she had given him.

Mr. Black allegedly violently assaulted the girl before raping her. He is accused of laughing at the girl’s attempts to flee from him.

The suit is not being linked because it contains graphic descriptions of what allegedly occurred.

“Although Epstein trafficked Plaintiff to other men, both before and after Black, she was never again taken to NYC. The violent and sadistic nature of Black’s rape left an indelible mark on her, both physically and psychologically. Plaintiff suffered internal abrasions in her rectum that continue to cause her pain,” the suit states.

“Sadly, Ms. Doe’s experience is one more in a long line of despicable and heinous experiences inflicted on a minor trapped in Jeffrey Epstein’s web—a web that extended to a group of powerful and influential men, including Leon Black,” it also says.

The suit was brought under a New York law that enables victims of sexual abuse to bring claims by the end of 2025 for older incidents.

It asks the court for damages.

“This is a frivolous and sanctionable lawsuit. Mr. Black has never met this individual. These vicious and defamatory lies, masquerading as allegations, have been intentionally manufactured by the Wigdor law firm as part of the firm’s vendetta against Mr. Black for vigorously and successfully defending himself over the past two years. Wigdor’s prior case against Mr. Black was recently thrown out by the Court and this one will be too,” Susan Estrich, a lawyer representing Mr. Black, told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.

In response, Jeanne Christensen, a lawyer with Wigdor who is representing the plaintiff, told The Epoch Times in an email: “Black’s conspiracy theories and finger pointing are an obvious attempt to shift the focus away from his heinous acts. I do not think anyone will be fooled by such nonsense.”

Mr. Epstein, a convicted sex offender, was set to go on trial for sex trafficking of minors and other charges when he died in 2019. His death was ruled a suicide.

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Stanford researchers find Mastodon has a massive child abuse material problem

Mastodon, the decentralized network viewed as a viable alternative to Twitter, is rife with child sexual abuse material (CSAM), according to a new study from Stanford’s Internet Observatory (via The Washington Post). In just two days, researchers found 112 instances of known CSAM across 325,000 posts on the platform — with the first instance showing up after just five minutes of searching.

To conduct its research, the Internet Observatory scanned the 25 most popular Mastodon instances for CSAM. Researchers also employed Google’s SafeSearch API to identify explicit images, along with PhotoDNA, a tool that helps find flagged CSAM. During its search, the team found 554 pieces of content that matched hashtags or keywords often used by child sexual abuse groups online, all of which were identified as explicit in the “highest confidence” by Google SafeSearch.

There were also 713 uses of the top 20 CSAM-related hashtags across the Fediverse on posts that contained media, as well as 1,217 text-only posts that pointed to “off-site CSAM trading or grooming of minors.” The study notes that the open posting of CSAM is “disturbingly prevalent.”

One example referenced the extended mastodon.xyz server outage we noted earlier this month, which was an incident that occurred due to CSAM posted to Mastodon. In a post about the incident, the sole maintainer of the server stated they were alerted to content containing CSAM but notes that moderation is done in his spare time and can take up to a few days to happen — this isn’t a giant operation like Meta with a worldwide team of contractors, it’s just one person.

While they said they took action against the content in question, the host of the mastodon.xyz domain had suspended it anyway, making the server inaccessible to users until they were able to reach someone to restore its listing. After the issue was resolved, mastodon.xyz’s administrator says the registrar added the domain to a “false positive” list to prevent future takedowns. However, as the researchers point out, “what caused the action was not a false positive.”

“We got more photoDNA hits in a two-day period than we’ve probably had in the entire history of our organization of doing any kind of social media analysis, and it’s not even close,” David Thiel, one of the report’s researchers, said in a statement to The Washington Post. “A lot of it is just a result of what seems to be a lack of tooling that centralized social media platforms use to address child safety concerns.”

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Former pastor charged with killing 8-year-old girl who was walking to Bible camp nearly 50 years ago

An 83-year-old former pastor has been charged with the kidnapping and murder of a neighboring pastor’s daughter in 1975, Pennsylvania officials announced Monday.

The suspect, David Zandstra, was arrested on July 17 in Cobb County, Georgia, where investigators say he confessed to killing 8-year-old Gretchen Harrington nearly five decades ago when he was a pastor in Marple Township, Pennsylvania, according to the Delaware County District Attorney’s office in Pennsylvania.

His confession came after investigators presented him with new evidence gathered early this year, which came from an interview with a confidential informant and a diary entry the informant wrote in 1975 when she was a 10-year-old girl, the district attorney’s office said in a news release.

Zandstra has been charged with criminal homicide, murder, kidnapping of a minor and the possession of an instrument of crime, the release said.

“Justice has been a long time coming, but we are proud and grateful to finally be able to give the community an answer,” Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer said in a statement.

This case has “haunted” members of law enforcement and the small area of Marple Township since Gretchen went missing, Stollsteimer said. The girl was last seen walking to summer Bible camp on August 15th, 1975, the release said.

The camp was held at both the Trinity Church Chapel Christian Reform Church – where Zandstra was a pastor – and the Reformed Presbyterian Church – where Gretchen’s father was a pastor, the release said. Gretchen’s father became concerned when she failed to appear at his church, the release says, and it was Zandstra who then called police to report Gretchen’s disappearance.

Investigators noted there were inaccuracies in Zandstra’s early statements and they had questions about how the pastor knew so much about what Gretchen was wearing that day, even though she never arrived at camp, according to a newly released criminal complaint.

At the time, Zandstra denied knowing anything about the disappearance, the complaint said.

Two months later, Gretchen’s skeletal remains were found in nearby Ridley Creek State Park. Her cause of death was homicide, and the medical examiner said Gretchen suffered “two or more blunt impacts to the skull,” according to court documents.

Nearly five decades went by as the case laid dormant. Ultimately, an interview with a woman who was friends with the suspect’s daughter in the 1970s – and her diary entries from that time – led to a pivotal break in the case.

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Alleged serial rapist, a former State Street VP, granted special allowances to attend concert, family trips

Ivan Cheung, an alleged serial rapist and former State Street executive, was reportedly granted allowances to let him take trips and spend time with family this summer.

Cheung was arrested last year and charged with four counts of aggravated rape, four counts of aggravated rape of a child, and two counts of aggravated statutory rape tied to four incidents dating back to 2003, 2005, and 2006, police said at the time.

He was released on $200,000 bail with conditions a few weeks later. Cheung was ordered to remain in Massachusetts, surrender his passport, stay away from any accusers or witnesses, and wear a GPS monitoring bracelet.

“Mr. Cheung’s family is important to him, and he is important to his family,” a motion filed by his attorney states, according to The Boston Herald. “The very limited modifications he seeks in his bail conditions will permit him to spend quality time with his entire family before his eldest son departs for college.”

Cheung requested to stay out past his curfew on Aug. 1 for a fishing and crabbing trip to Cape Cod, on Aug. 5 to attend a concert with his wife, sister, and brother-in-law, on Aug. 12 to sleep over at his sister’s home with his wife and their two children, and on Aug. 23 to move his son into college housing within Massachusetts, the Herald reported.

He was initially arrested when investigators linked him to evidence collected from the most recent attacks by getting a DNA sample from a cigarette butt he had discarded, The Boston Globe reported.

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Why Do Neo-Nazis Keep Getting Arrested For Child Sexual Abuse Material?

Last June, according to court documents, Jared Boyce crammed himself into the back of a U-Haul with his fellow members of Patriot Front, a white supremacist group, to protest an LGBTQ pride event in Idaho and slur attendees as “groomers.” Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the hateful crew wearing matching khaki pants, it’s unlikely Boyce knew this would result in him eventually being sentenced to a year in prison for sexual exploitation of a minor. 

Once the group pulled up to the event, they were all promptly arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit a riot. Less than a month later, police seized Boyce’s phone. While they weren’t actively searching for illegal sexual material on it, they found 22 photos of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. According to court documents, these photos “involve children from toddlers to prepubescents performing sexual acts on adults or other children, as well as images of children exposing their genitals.” The 28-year-old had also, police found, sent a picture of his penis to a 16-year-old girl. 

“Don’t believe the media,” Boyce reportedly told his mother following his initial arrest. “We were just there because they’re grooming kids.”

Boyce plead guilty to nine felony counts of sexual exploitation of a minor earlier this year. The Patriot Front member is hardly the first person connected to neo-Nazi groups to be caught with CSAM.

In just the past few months, at least two neo-Nazis in the UK were sentenced to time in prison for having or distributing CSAM. Luca Benincasa, a 20-year-old from Cardiff who was a cell leader for the neo-Nazi group Feuerkrieg Division, was sentenced to nine years for possession of documents likely to be useful to a terrorist, being a member of a banned group, and possessing indecent photos of children. 

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Trans former NH lawmaker faces federal charges for allegedly using daycare connections to generate child exploitation images

The first openly transgender lawmaker in the US is facing federal charges in connection with sexual exploitation at a Tyngsborough, Massachusetts daycare center. A teacher at the daycare who assisted the lawmaker in obtaining sexual pictures of the children has also been arrested and was charged in June. In a press release, the Justice Department referred to trans-identified male Stacie Laughton as “a New Hampshire woman.”

Stacie Laughton, 39, has been federally charged with one count of sexual exploitation of children and aiding and abetting by the US Attorney’s Office District of Massachusetts. Lindsay Groves, Laughton’s former girlfriend, was the alleged teacher at the center who helped Laughton, a former NH lawmaker, gather the images and has been charged with child exploitation.  

Groves allegedly used bathroom breaks for the children, such as diaper changes, to take pictures of the children in the bathroom and would send the photos to Laughton.  

There were over 2,500 text messages between Laughton and Groves on the phones obtained by the prosecution. These included at least four sexually explicit pictures of children between three and five years of age.  

According to the Boston Herald, in one alleged text from Groves, she said to Laughton, “I want to do this with you with one of my kids.” The text was in conjunction with a picture focused on the genitals of a prepubescent boy.  

Laughton allegedly responded, “I also need to be honest I mean yes that picture was hot of that little boy but you probably have gotten the picture by now that I prefer little girls (sic), but he is cute.” 

Other texts allegedly talked about the couple hooking up with each other as well as with children.  

Groves was employed by the daycare from 2017 up until June of this year, according to the Boston Herald.

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Bloomberg ‘Sound Of Freedom’ Hit Piece Written By Pro-Pedo Contributor

Following the release of the “Sound of Freedom,” Jim Caviezel’s anti-child-trafficking film, a chorus of mainstream hit-pieces came out denouncing it as a “QAnon” conspiracy flick.

But one author of a recent SoF hit-piece in Bloomberg isn’t just against the movie, he’s a pedo-defending freelancer who used to work for an organization working to normalize pedophilia.

Meet Noah Berlatsky: he’s just your average liberal mainstream media news contributor. Ironically, Berlatsky’s latest criticism of the drama focusing on the grave yet glossed over issue of child trafficking lambasted the movie with vitriolic scorn for perpetuating dangerous tropes, whilst he himself turned to the truly tired trope of accusing the movie of packaging together various QAnon conspiracy theories and being a movie made for alt-right boomers. There’s just one problem…Berlatsky has a sordid history of advocating for the normalization of pedophilia.

In 2021, Berlatsky was named the communications director at Prostasia, a non-profit organization which has dedicates itself to a self-avowed mission of protecting children from sexual abuse. While that on its face sounds antithetical to advocating for the normalization of pedophilia, a deeper look into Prostasia’s published content shows it merely masquerades under the guise of acting in the interest of protecting children from sexual abuse in order to promote a much more perverse ulterior motive.

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Nobody is Torturing Children to Harvest Adrenochrome

There is a certain relatively small, but enthusiastic percentage of the population that are prone to believe in conspiracies. Having been someone who has put in some time debunking conspiracy theories over the years, I can tell you a little bit about their patterns of thought and the way that they argue. Usually, conspiracy theorists have such a poor understanding of the subject that they’re talking about that it seems like magic to them and thus, anything seems possible. On occasion, after being dragged over and over again for their conspiratorial beliefs, they’ll learn a little something about what they’re talking about, but their knowledge is often badly flawed because their goal is to “prove” their conspiracy theory right, not to actually get to the truth.

Their style of argumentation is usually illogical and incoherent. They tend to throw pretty much anything against the wall to see what sticks and then insist that you disprove every single thing they come up with, while completely ignoring the much larger piles of evidence supporting some mainstream belief they’re trying to undermine.

If you talk to 10 conspiracy theorists, they will typically all have different arguments supporting their beliefs. Disproving the pillars of their argument has no impact on them because their beliefs have no real logic or structure to them. If you disprove one of their key pieces of evidence, they just move on to the next. They also almost universally ignore the fact that theories don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re measured against competing theories. If I say the world is round and you say the world is flat, then how both competing theories handle questions and statements like, “If the world is flat, where’s the edge?” or “People have looked at Earth from space and we see that it’s not flat,” matter a lot. They do not look at it that way. They believe what they believe, and no amount of contrary evidence is going to change it.

It also must be noted that conspiracy theories often rely heavily on a “them” that you’re supposed to believe are capable of anything. This leads to statements like, “Of course, they’re behind (insert horrible thing here)! You don’t think that the ‘Republicans/Democrats/Jews/Karl Rove/Bushes/Clintons/George Soros/Rothschilds/Illuminati/Big Pharma/white supremacist Martians from Venus/whoever’ are capable of that? Are you naïve?”

After reading this basic rundown about how conspiracy theorists argue things to get you prepared for the aftermath of sharing this article everywhere someone promotes this idea (hint, hint), let’s start to talk about adrenochrome.

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