140: Revenge Bytes

27:08And you know what? I sympathize with him too because the person holding his dick pic for ransom is breaking the law. They are scamming him, extorting him, harassing him. And I don't like that. I don't like harassers getting away with their bullshit no matter who the victim is. The victim is irrelevant. It's the criminal who should be blamed and punished for this. Sorry, I kind of lost the plot there. This topic of online harassment is a sensitive one for me. I feel like it's gotten way out of hand. Every day I go online and I just see this kind of stuff and it's like a kick to my heart every time.

27:42Stop harassing people, okay? We've got better things to do with our time. If you're a harasser, just stop. I don't care why you think your actions are justified. Just stop. Find a way to make a positive impact on someone's life, not a negative one. Let it go. Let's work on making the world a better place, not a worse place. So we were hiding it from our parents. And not that our parents aren't, like, they wouldn't. they're supportive parents. It's not like we're from like a strict, you know, Catholic family that's going to shun us and send us away to boarding school, you know, but it was still just that embarrassment factor of like, we're, we'd like to think we're, you know, educated, smart women and we somehow got ourselves in this situation.

28:40Yeah. And I can't imagine wanting to show my dad this is what's going on out there. Like, it would just be the most awful experience. Exactly. Like, no matter how cool your parents are, it's just not the conversation you want to have with them. So how did they become aware? So, I mean, they kind of became aware when they were getting unsolicited images of myself. I don't think ever my sister, but definitely of me. but they were in the same situation. It was like, we'll just delete this, not knowing the seriousness of it because we didn't tell them the seriousness of it. So my dad's like, yeah, I just deleted the couple of things he sent me because it was awkward.

29:27So he kind of didn't even tell us that in the beginning. Man, how awful that must have been to be a parent and see someone send you a nude photo of your daughter. but then for Madison to find out later that her parents already saw it but were too embarrassed to say anything about it it's such a messy situation to figure out for everyone okay so Madison and Christine have this steaming pile of bullshit they're dealing with now yeah it was and it was just because I don't think that am I allowed to say that it was fucked up? yeah

30:09I'll be able to talk more smoothly if I can say what's on my mind. Absolutely. I think this one is rated R to begin with from the get-go. Yeah. So at that point, Christine, Dana, and I were getting very good at creeping the dark web and finding information on ourselves to do takedowns and just kind of clean stuff up. So we had successfully figured out how to take down images from these websites. So we were doing it pretty quickly. What's the language you use to tell them, hey, I want this removed? DMCAs are the language. Ah, it's interesting, right? Most nudes that get leaked like this are selfies.

31:07And the thing is, is if you took the photo, you automatically have the copyright to that photo. You don't have to go register it with the copyright office or anything. It's automatically your copyrighted work. So if someone uses a photo you took without your permission, that's a copyright violation. So tap on the sign, point to the law and say, hey, it's illegal to post this without my permission. Take it down. And a lot of sites do. Of course, it really helped that Christine was studying law and knew this stuff. And she wanted to be extra careful here and make sure both her feet were firmly planted in the law and it was on her side.

31:39So she asked the photographer who took her photos Can we transfer the copyright to me? And she did. She went through the U.S. copyright office to get the copyright of her nip slips transferred to her so she could have more power at getting this removed. Like during this time, I had like multiple employers because it literally has spanned over like an eight or nine year period at this point. Managers had been called and harassed on my behalf. So they had seen LinkedIn or Facebook where I worked and they would like call and like harass and ask for like my current boss at the time and kind of be like, do you know what's on the Internet of her?

32:21and like just like the typical harassment, but doing it to my bosses at the time. I don't know. It's just awful in like every corner because there's like no, there's no escaping it, right? No matter where you end up going, you go on vacation, you're harassed on vacation. You go to work, you're harassed at work. At home, you're harassed at home. We eventually had gotten and told my parents because Christina and I had like a mental breakdown one day and just started bawling, crying and talking to our parents about it. What triggered the breakdown? Just because it was nonstop, right? Yeah, I think it was just like nonstop and we were trying our hardest and we were, you know, emotions were high, stress was high.

33:08And when you went to tell your parents, did it feel like you were telling them, like you didn't know they knew? No, and they knew to an extent, but they had no idea how bad it had been because they only saw what they had gotten. So they didn't know how bad it actually was. Yeah, because I just imagine, oh my gosh, this is what's been going on. And they're like, yeah, we've been getting messages. We didn't feel comfortable enough to talk to you about it. Yeah, exactly. That's how that conversation went. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, and then other than that— That just fuels it, right? Because you're already at a breakdown, and then you're like, what?

33:58You've seen it, too? They know you're—ah! Like, you just even—it's worse. It's not better. Yeah, no. Not at all. Now, because Christine is a lawyer, of course, she wanted to use the legal system to sort this out. So I helped, well, so my sister went into the sheriff's department in Melbourne, Florida, and was turned away. And this is also around the same time that Florida's non-consensual pornography law is enacted. So it's not only, you know, harassing, stalking a federal crime. It's at this point actually illegal in the state of Florida, this exact thing. And if you read the statute, it is in layman's terms.

34:40It is absolutely for this exact situation. And so she gets turned away and I'm like, oh, that's bullshit. So I'm going to compile, you know, information for them. I'm going to print the statute out for you. I don't live near her at this point, but I try to go in there with her when I'm in town one day. But I want to say it was like a weekend or a holiday and that division just wasn't open. So I was like, I'm going to leave this binder with you. You're going to go in there and get someone to listen to you. Ultimately, she went in there and they did not listen to her. And I remember sending them an email after the fact and being like, hey, I would be glad to come bring a training to your officers on this new law.

35:27Clearly, they don't understand the law. Please provide training and I'm a newly sworn in lawyer that would be happy to help you and train your officers with this new law. They did not like that email. and assured me that their officers were trained in doing their job. Oh, how frustrating. I mean, when she said Madison was turned away, the police didn't even take her name or any information about the crimes she was reporting. It sounded like they absolutely did not care for her at all. But these sisters were tough and smart and weren't going to accept no for an answer. We're going to take a quick break here, But stay with us, because when we come back, they start taking matters into their own hands.

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37:42The two sisters, Madison and Christine, had been getting harassed by someone or a group of people for years, and it just kept getting worse and escalating to the point that they were experiencing mental breakdowns and were having a really hard time functioning. This harassment was seeping into every aspect of their lives and it was nonstop. They were capturing everything they could and documenting it all, looking for clues as to who would be doing this. But they weren't making any progress to solving this. But they were very tuned into this activity, watching it closely. What he's posting, because how you have, again, it's so hard to explain this.

38:23And we were so involved in the 4chan world for so long. It sounds crazy to normal people who probably most... I wouldn't know about this if it weren't for this. So on 4chan, it's anonymous. But then a lot of times they would take their conversations offline to KIK, K-I-K is the platform messaging system. Again, an anonymous messaging system. And I'm mansplaining this to someone who does this for a living. So I'll stop now. Okay. So KIK. I do want to add a few things about this. I did a whole episode about Kik. That's episode 93. And what I learned from doing that episode is Kik is a magnet for awful behavior.

39:02It's just a chat app like Discord or Slack. But what I've seen is that there's just no content moderation. So chat rooms can become full of illegal activity, open to the public for anyone to find and join in. Why this app isn't banned from the Google or Apple store still is a mystery to me. But it's very clear that Kik has a lot of problems and is basically a scourge of humanity. So when this person was posting nude photos of Christine and Madison to 4chan, he was sometimes including his kick username, you know, in case someone wanted to friend him. So, you know, we were trying to tie those screen names that he's leaving.

39:39So the screen names that are attached to what he's posting on 4chan, we're seeing what those people are posting. We're saying, hey, kick me at insert kick name here, finding the ones that are connected to those specific kick names. because again, it has to all be the same person. This particular person had a very weird way of typing in which there were three periods and it's all spaced out. Not like a typical dot, dot, dot. It was like dot, space, space, dot, space, space, dot. And just very odd. Like that's not how people typically talk even on the internet, especially on the internet. So we're using all these little clues to kind of figure out, all right, as a whole, let's zoom out.

40:17What is this person interested in? What are they posting? Well, this is a nice little path to investigate, right? You've got a Kik username now Well, going on Kik, you can't really see what he's up to there But they were pretty familiar with searching 4chan So they looked through 4chan for that Kik username And this opened them up to a huge trove of posts that he had been making to 4chan Of course, they had to drive through this filth to make sense of it But what they discovered was that he wasn't harassing just the twins. He was posting nudes of other women, too. We find it's, you know, the same five women and girls, because some of them are underage at the time.

41:04Hmm, interesting. He seemed to be obsessively posting nudes of the same five women. He didn't have a wide array of nudes that he was posting. He was focused about it, zoomed in to only five women, harassing each of them almost in a cycle, going through each of them and then back around to the first, making each of their lives hell. This is interesting because what's the correlation here, right? Are these five women connected in any way? To start with, the sisters didn't know any of these other victims. But this started a whole new investigation into each of these women. It actually helped that he was posting their phone numbers and socials.

41:51Some were in Florida, near Christine and Madison, actually. But some were in New York. They had some ideas who might know all these people, but they weren't sure. I mean, it seemed like someone they should know personally, but all the people who they suspected, there's just no way it could be them. But still, the data they got from this Kik user was massive to their investigation. Yes. So it was just a huge break. And so it was me, Christine, my sister, Dana, and then my friend John. All four of us were working on this at this time. So once that kind of happened and we got the Kik usernames kind of sorted and figured out that we could cross-reference it, I was like, oh my gosh, back to the Snapchat from, you know, at this point, I think that was probably four or five years prior.

42:43Like it was a long time ago. And I went back to it. And the, when I, when I took the snap of it, which was right after I got the message of, oh, what a beautiful sunset. It was the last person that had viewed my snap. And I didn't even think that like oh I was so quick at snapping it the second that he messaged me that it it makes sense that it was the last person that saw it because he went on there saw it messaged me hey beautiful sunset I immediately went on snapped the screenshot of who saw it and that all probably happened within like a minute so it makes sense that I'm like at that point I'm like duh this is the person.

43:28Like, it has to be. What was his first name? Christopher. Christopher. They figured it out. They unmasked their attacker. It had to be Christopher. All the signs pointed to him now. And the creepy part was, they all knew Christopher. I mean, she had been friends with him on Snapchat for years, which is why he could see the photos there. And where do you know Christopher from? We knew him from college. He was my brother-in-law, Dana's fraternity brother at the college that Christine, Dana, and I went to. Wait, Dana, this is one of your friends? Yeah, that's correct. What was your relationship to him back in the fraternity?

44:19You know, he was a close friend. He had been to my house that I grew up in in Connecticut and met my parents. We went to concerts together. I knew his family. I had Fourth of July out on Long Island with his dad and his brother. He wasn't my best friend in the world, but certainly he was closer than most. He was a good friend of mine, and I'd known him for over a decade when this had all happened. He went to our wedding. He was at our wedding. What? It's insane. with one of his other victims. So having that history with him and then saying, wait, is it him? What is your gut feeling out of that?

45:02I remember the night that we figured out it was him very vividly. This one will stick out to me for the rest of my life. I was getting home from a trip as an airline pilot, and I got a call from Madison, and I don't ever receive phone calls from Madison. And we don't call, we text. So if I get a phone call, something's wrong. And I pick up the phone and she's like, I think we might know who it is. And I'm like, really? She's like, yeah, I'm pretty sure. And I was like, well, spit it out. Don't make me wait. And she goes, Yankee. I'm like, come on, no fucking way, right? First of all, one of my close friends.

45:45Second of all, I didn't even think he was intelligent enough or tech savvy enough to even figure out how 4chan worked. If you knew him well, I mean, it had to have taken a while to figure it out. This is, we are not dealing with a rocket surgeon here. So I couldn't, I told her, I was like, no way. And mind this, Jack, it had been years where anybody in the room could have been the guy. And there were accusations flung at just about anybody in our life. You know what I mean? It's this guy, it's that guy, it's this guy, it's your best friend. Yeah, and I remember Madison telling me things like, just walking around the streets, like, why is that guy looking at me that way?

46:21Is he the guy? All these kind of just weird feelings. Can you imagine? You know what I mean? If those are your photos on the internet and every single person in your life is a suspect, it's got to be horrible, right? So I had heard them postulate that it could be one of my friends several times. And I always said, no, no. And I did exactly what I did on that night. I said, there's no freaking way. It's not him. One, I don't think he's got it in him. He's not that malicious. Two, I think he's too dumb to even figure all this out. But it kind of rattled around in my brain and I couldn't sleep that night.

46:54So I got home and I started looking up the kick names. I started connecting the kick names. And that's what you can do on 4chan. You can't do it even on 4chan because it disappears within two hours. But the 4chan archive sites, you can search them. And that's how we sort of tied him to all these posts was he had about five or six kick names. And I just searched the kick names. And all these random women would come up, including my wife and her sister. And then there was one that stuck out that night and it was a girl, a young girl looked to be 13, 14 years old in a Catholic school outfit that was posted by the same user as the ones who are as the user that was harassing my wife and my sister-in-law.

47:36And I downloaded the photo. It was not a nude photo. It was just a girl. It was a girl and the text attached to it was horrifying, something like I want nudes of this girl or I want to rape her or something. And so I download this photo and there's an embroidered crest or logo on her school uniform. And it's kind of pixelated, but I enhanced it and I sharpened it and I sharpened it and I finally was able to make out the words on this photo. And it turns out it was a Catholic girls middle school in Daytona. um so i said hmm okay well i know he's got family in daytona maybe this maybe there's something here so you jump on facebook and within 10 minutes i was able to find the girl's name uh and her mom and dad's name and they were mutual friends and and identified family members on his facebook page that was his little cousin um and that's kind of when it all came when it all hit like holy shit It's him.

48:38And then once you had that key piece of information, you keep going back through the other women that he's posting on the 4chan site. And you cross references to Facebook, mutual friend, bang, mutual friend, bang, mutual friend. And there it was. We knew who it was that night. And I just, I absolutely couldn't fucking believe it. Yeah, I imagine a long stare out the window of like, why did I have this person in my life at all? Oh my God, and the guilt. Can you imagine? If the twins had never met me, they'd never meet this guy. You know what I mean? You imagine just the weight of guilt. I invited him to social functions all the time.

49:19He was a bit of an outcast and an outsider. And I'd invite him in just because he was a friend of mine and almost like a sympathy invite to stuff. And I was the one who introduced him to my wife and my sister-in-law. And he, in turn, you know, tried to destroy their lives. There's a lot of guilt involved with that. Wow, they did it. They figured out who the asshole was. And they were all kind of shell-shocked by it. This guy who was at their wedding did this? What a monster. You think you know someone, but then this happens. But Christine, being a lawyer, she wanted more evidence and kept going through the kick posts.

49:58We found this random post that had nothing to do with any of the girls or women, but it was a photo that was what we assumed to be his house. We actually reached out to his fiance at the time and was like, hey, do you know, like, are you still with this person? Like, is this your house kind of thing? And she's like, yeah, that's my house. And she kind of confirmed for us that that was like where she had lived with him. So we had that as a clue as well. Okay. All right. They've really got this guy nailed now. All of the harassment, all of the nudes, all of the nightmare was stemming from this one person.

50:46And yeah, he was able to get others to join in on the harassment. But if it wasn't for him, nobody else would be harassing these women. And just knowing this is such a relief in a way. You're dealing with the darkness and anonymity of the internet. And you have no idea how many people are behind your harassment. But now it's clear it's one guy, Christopher. And they know everything about him. But he didn't know they were on to him. And so he kept up his harassment campaign, calling bosses, sending nudes to their friends, and asking others to join in. I think like the nature of online, like, cyber harassment is that like, you don't have anywhere to run to.

51:27So like, if you're getting like, bullied or like physically harassed, you're like, okay, I can at least run home and like, retreat to my room and, you know, be depressed in bed, but you're constantly being harassed. And you can't forget anything at home because it's just nonstop being harassed. Do you know that some women have killed themselves over this? Yes. One of the victims, she actually tried to kill herself as well. So one of the girls, she had a really rough time and tried committing suicide as well. Wow, that is awful. and I like this is what I mean feel like I definitely can like I don't want to say like oh I was definitely suicidal but there were definitely like times when I was like is this like worth it like and then like I don't know I was just very down and you know it was it was just really rough and then getting my twin sister involved like there were actual days where I was her life would be better without me in it.

52:47I could definitely see how it's so easy to get so depressed in a situation like this.

53:00So I feel like there's a meeting now, right? You, Madison, and Christine are like, okay, we know what's going on. We know who it is. What's the plan going forward? Am I picturing it right? No, that's exactly correct. And it was a super delicate situation, right? Because we'd already had very limited success with law enforcement to care, to give a shit about what's happening. But we decided as a group that our only real shot to get some attention here is in numbers, right? And we know that there's five-ish other women and girls who are being harassed at the same time. They must be going through hell themselves.

53:45In order to get any sort of prosecution, he, one, we didn't want him to wipe his hard drives. And two, we didn't necessarily want him to stop immediately and go into a hole. So we had to be kind of, we wanted to be behind the scenes on this. But we had to also ban the other women together without them tipping him off, really. So that was our next move, was to figure out how to do that. Yeah, and to tie this back to the post about the back porch, so his current fiance, again, one of the victims, you know, occasionally he would post weird things, like nudes of himself even, without a face.

54:26Just different fetishes or desires. shares. And I think in this particular case with the back porch, so his fiance at the time, that's their shared home, her testimony is kind of important at that instance of like, hey, confirm this is your back porch. And so we really wanted to loop her in, but she's his current fiance. Can we trust this person? And you try to think of how you would react in a situation, but not knowing the person on the other end, we don't personally know her. We didn't know any of these women. So we didn't know how they were going to react to any of this. So we weren't really quite sure when to, or if we should even loop them in.

55:09So ultimately we eventually decided, you know, we all need to band together. Like individually they're not, they don't care, but if we can band together, show that this is a bigger issue than just, you know, one person getting harassed and this is an issue for society as a whole, maybe they'll take us seriously. So at that point, that's kind of when we reached out to them on any social media platform or contact information that we could find and kind of filled them in at that point. Two of the girls had previously caught him as well. And this was before we had gotten in communication with the six victims.

55:56and so one of the girls was one of his ex-girlfriends from college so she obviously like knew where the photos came from she like was fairly certain it was him and she felt close enough to the father his name's john she felt close enough to reach out to him and be like hey like chris is like doing some really bad things like he's posting my pictures you know there's thousands of posts like he needs to stop like I'm getting the police involved but like can you please help me and he promised her that he would talk to him would get him into counseling wouldn't help him like just please don't you know press charges same thing happened to another victim that was a family friend up there she actually narrowed down that it was him after just how he uses like punctuation he would use like three dots and a space which I was like wow you you like thought of that that's like actually like so good and she literally narrowed it down by that and then called him out on Facebook Messenger and they and they as in uh Chris and his dad and brother both named John they convinced her not to press charges if he promised to stop and she says you have to get help.

57:16I've been a family friend for a very long time. I feel for you. I love you and your family. I need, I want you to get help. At this point, she didn't know what the extent of it was to other people. She thought she was the only one. So she felt horrible when we all got a hold of her and was telling her what was going on. But, and obviously wanted to like be in our group and help. So we actually had all of the confessions of him confessing it and his brother confessing that he's known that he does this and we'll get him help. And fast forward, they've never got him help. He continued to harass innocent women and children for years and years to come after that.

58:06So they got all the victims together on the same page, six total. And they were all really sick and tired from being harassed by this guy. And they were shocked to find out Christopher was the one behind it because they all knew him. There were a few other women that we didn't, that we didn't never even reached out to that he was efforting nudes of them to at the same time. But we didn't even, we had enough at that point. So Christine created quite a compelling folder of evidence for each of the women to take into their own police departments and hand it to the police. I compiled essentially a binder of like facts and circumstantial evidence that connected.

58:45Because again, we don't have legal evidence at this point too. This is all kind of circumstantial evidence at this point. When we looped in the other girls, we did again have screenshots of some confessions and things like that. So pretty substantial circumstantial evidence, but circumstantial nonetheless, no subpoenas at this point or anything like that. So, Dana and Madison and I compile, you know, this little revenge porn for dummies kind of, like knowing our experience going into the sheriff's office, knowing that this is going to be a fight. Let's be armed with the law at least. Let's be right.

59:22Let's have the laws printed out and referenced in front of us. They have to listen to us, right? So we compiled this little binder. We had background. We had each individual victim and a snippet of their backstory. We had any potential law that I saw that could potentially be violated from each jurisdiction, including federal. Yeah, let's back up. I want to pause there for a second because that's fascinating to me because that's your wheelhouse. I bet you spent a lot of time doing that. Can you just talk about what you think he was doing that was against the law? Again, I'm a very, very young attorney at this point, like first year, right?

1:00:04So, you know, I think I'm hot shit, but I don't really know that much. But I did take, you know, internet law and social media law and things like that, that interested me in law school. And you have that base, you know, knowledge at least of where to find the law at least. So I was familiar with the Florida statute because again, that was just, it interested me and I thought it was a move in the right direction. Okay, so this Florida statute, enacted in 2015, section 748-049, states that the crime of sexual cyber harassment is committed when a person publishes a sexually explicit image of another person along with personal identifying information of the depicted person to a website without the depicted person's consent for no legitimate purpose and with intent of causing the depicted person's substantial emotional distress.

1:00:57Boom. Perfect. He definitely violated that one. But she did her research. She didn't want to rely on just one statute. Since he was posting nudes of underage girls, he was also violating child pornography statutes. Since he was calling people's bosses and parents and stuff, why not throw in stalking too? Hell, there's even an aggravated stalking statute, which is a felony charge. And if he was stalking a minor, that would constitute as aggravated stalking. But Christopher was living in New York state. So maybe all these Florida laws don't even matter. So Christine studied the laws in New York to figure out which ones he violated there.

1:01:32She found statutes like sexual performance by a child, extortion, unlawful surveillance, dissemination of unlawful surveillance imagery, and stalking. Okay, so those are the state laws that she thinks he violated. But are there any federal laws that she can point to? There's no federal law for revenge porn or sexual cyber harassment or anything like that. But there are prohibitions against cyber stalking and cyber harassment. Great. Yeah, just keep going. So you bring this whole body of knowledge to them. You slap it down and say, here's the circumstantial evidence that we have on him. Here are the laws that we think he's breaking.

1:02:11And here's the guy. Here's the dude that's doing it. You guys don't even have to go out and find who it is. We already did it. Just please do something. Okay, and what'd they say? So Dana was actually there with me too. You know, I march in with my little binder. And again, I hope that most people don't ever have to go report a crime like this. But when you go, obviously you don't want to call 911. You go into the police station. You go in with your best lawyer outfit too. Yes. Yes. I was probably honestly coming back from work. So I already had my lawyer uniform or costume on, you know. Okay.

1:02:49So you don't call 911. You go, what do you do? You go into the, I mean, theoretically you could call the non-emergency line, but you know, you go into the police station. There's a desk with a police officer who is either hopefully new or did something really bad to get this position because you're just sitting behind a desk, right? And, you know, you walk up and they're like bored. They're just sitting there. And you're like, I'd like to report a crime and fill out a police report. And then they depose you. They absolutely depose you. Well, what happened? Well, I actually have this whole thing together.

1:03:26So you can just read it if you want. In fact, I made a copy here. Here's a copy. Flipping through it. This isn't a crime. How'd they get the photos? You know, you hear all of it. And I'm like, where are your credentials? Like, can you just hand this off to a detective and let them make the decision on whether this is a crime or not? Like, not to be rude, but I don't really trust your judgment when your job is to sit behind the desk. Like, they don't even trust you out on the street with a gun, bud. Like, get this to the real detective, please. So ultimately, we were there for probably over an hour begging them just to let me fill out a police report.

1:04:03Just for the opportunity and privilege to fill out this police report. So I imagine that they just say, oh, here's a form, fill it out, and then goodbye. And they're not going to do anything. But they wouldn't even let you fill the form out. No, and that's what shocked me too. I'm like, at least give me the form. So ultimately, I demanded that I have the form. And so he was just done with talking to me, I'm sure, and gave me the form to fill out. Okay, so that was your experience. How did the other women do? Six of us go into police stations scattered all over the country, two in New York, one in Central Florida, one in Daytona area, Madison and Melbourne and me in Manatee County.

1:04:52And two of us came back with police reports, too. What? Wow. This is so frustrating. Police. Hello, police. What are you doing? How are you turning away these women who have brought you every shred of evidence to make an arrest and pointed to the guy and said, there he is, officer. This is an open and shut case. And you're doing nothing. Come on. I'm so mad right now. I, look, I gotta, I need like a minute. Like, just putting my headphones down. I'm walking away for a minute.

1:05:35um so it made its way to a detective and ultimately the detective looked at it and was like yeah we're not capable of handling this I'm going to send this to the local FBI office so my uh Manatee County Sheriff's Department is the only one out of the six that actually did the right thing and move the file to the proper jurisdiction. If it were anybody else, like they might even still just be sitting there as local police reports, which is insane to think about, right? Yes. Yeah. There's so many levels of frustration here. And shout out to the FBI because they are amazing once you can actually get to them.

1:06:20Yes. So the FBI are like, wow, this is a lot of work is done here, but this is circumstantial evidence. We're going to get direct evidence. So they start subpoenaing some of the emails and stuff, right? No. So, okay. That's the interesting part of, I mean, it's a legal nerd interesting part. I'm sure you all have different parts that you find more fascinating than others. Let's get nerdy. I love it. But that's what's so frustrating about the lack of police intervention and law enforcement intervention is when you're in law enforcement, you have an inherent authority really with probable cause to pull subpoenas.

1:06:59So let's back up a second. They finally get the police to open this police report. But this whole time they were trying to collect as much evidence as they could on this guy. Now, one thing the police can do is send a subpoena to 4chan or Kik or any of these websites and say, hey, we want the information on this user. and those sites have to comply with U.S. law if they're based in the U.S. and so they would give the police this user's data without a fuss. But if Christine wants information on a user, these sites are not going to give it to her. She doesn't have the subpoena power that the police have.

1:07:29However, she's got a trick up her sleeve to get that power. I can file a lawsuit and then open Discovery and then have the subpoena power to, you know, get subpoenas from different people or entities and things like that. So what Madison and I ended up having to do is file a lawsuit. This was a civil lawsuit, which they actually opened up before they even knew it was Christopher. They were so frustrated that the police weren't helping them. And they were like, fine, we'll get the subpoena power ourselves. It's going to take some extra money and time. But they had to do something about this guy.

1:08:04Now, here's the problem. They didn't know his name when filing the civil suit. So they just filed it against John Doe. Basically, they were going to use the courts to be able to issue subpoenas to identify their harasser. But there's another problem. Soon as the subpoena comes through, the site will likely inform Christopher that there's a case against him. And he'll get to see who's filing it. So the sisters didn't want to put their names as the victims of the case and instead wanted to file it anonymously. Which I think should also be fine since they're the victims. Courts should protect victims in cases like this, right?

1:08:38The court declined our request to do that. So we had the decision at that time on whether or not we wanted to drop it or refile the complaint with our legal names in there. And just knowing that that was going to be on the Google forever if you Google our names and you can go in and look at all the fun drama of the case because the docket's there. Whereas the other victims in the case are protected. In the criminal case, you'll notice it's everyone's initials, and that's to protect victims of a crime. That's another whole level of frustration is that they denied you to be anonymous or just the initials of the lawsuit because, yeah, that opens you up to all kinds of other problems.

1:09:28Correct. Especially when you're the victim. Oh, gosh. Yeah. And again, like through the civil process, you're treated almost like you're a gold digger looking for money or something. Like everyone, like opposing counsel, the magistrate judges, everyone is like acting like this is the most ridiculous case. And that it was just very frustrating. And it was just very eye-opening on, again, like being a young lawyer and just seeing it from the other side on how the system really is not set up to help you at all.

1:10:13By this point, Christopher was well aware of what was going on. He knew, they all knew it was him. And they were talking about it too. Like, I think his dad was telling everyone, okay, let's all calm down. I'll talk to Christopher and get him to stop. I'm sorry. But promise after promise was broken. He wasn't stopping. He kept at it. He even apologized. and admitted to it a few times, but then kept doing it. He somehow was addicted to harassing these women. Even with lawsuits, even with criminal cases open, he just went and stopped. Luckily, they were able to get the FBI's attention on this. So I do want to stress that the minor, the 14-year-old, is so incredibly important to the story.

1:10:58I'm not sure. Or, you know, obviously the Manatee County Service Office did it, you know, the right thing by forwarding it to the FBI. I don't think anybody would have given a shit if the minor wasn't involved. Yeah, that's part of it for sure. Everything, everything, you know, obviously all these women went through some horrible things. I mean, his ex from college tried to commit suicide multiple times over this. That's horrible. he was photographing his fiancee in their private home and then posting it on the internet to get off to it this is awful right and what they did to my wife and my sister-in-law who had who were just out minding their own business and had no nothing to do with this guy is horrible but i don't think anybody ultimately would have given a shit really if this girl was not involved the The posts were abhorrent.

1:11:48I mean, he was basically trying to hire someone on 4chan to rape her and video it and then send it to him. And I think that's what ultimately got the attention to the case. Oh, yikes. What a mess at every turn. So thank goodness the FBI was looking into this. We've got a monster on the loose. Go get him. Yes. So they basically had to recreate all of our subpoenas that my sister and I had done. So on the civil side, we were sending out subpoenas on our behalf on the civil side. So that's how we had all of the information to bring to the police stations. so we obviously gave them that information but from an investigative standpoint they still have to recreate them but it had pretty much already been done so it was like a good start for them.

1:12:46They don't tell victims much so I don't know if they found more in their search but they definitely recreated our subpoenas of the different IPs and IP addresses. And then eventually got to make an arrest. Arrested. Oh, thank goodness. I don't think I can handle any more problems. And actually, the arrest wasn't even that big of an event. His lawyer convinced him to go down and turn himself in because this will look better to the judge. So he did. He went down to the police station himself, turned himself in, and then they just processed them and let him go back home. But at least the perp is recognized, identified, and court dates were set.

1:13:25and listening to them talk, I don't think there was a way for him to stop on his own. He was just too far gone into all this. But what's amazing are these two sisters, they were relentless about fighting back because Christine was a lawyer, so she knew what avenues to go down and what laws to wield in order to fight this. Like, the average person isn't even gonna know that you can open a civil lawsuit to get the courts to issue subpoenas, you know? And then to use that information, open a criminal case at the same time, and the fact that they didn't wanna just have one case open, but they had six different women all trying to get cases open on this guy.

1:13:58It's just brilliant work by them. What's that saying you used to say? We'll solve any crime by dinner time. Dinner time just happened to be 10 years later, so we would have starved to die. Yeah, this took over 10 years. 10 years? Who in the world has the energy and drive to continue harassing the same women for 10 solid years? Apparently this guy, Christopher, did. So what happens to him? Well, he was arrested, right? Clearly, there was a ton of evidence of his crimes, including him admitting to his victims and promising to stop. So when he goes to court, there is no other option for him to plead guilty, which means no trial was needed.

1:14:42Skip all that since he's admitting to it. But there's still the court proceeding to figure out his punishment, a sentencing hearing. Clearly, this man has caused great harm to these women. but can the women influence what the judge decides the sentence should be? Hell yeah, they can. He fucked with the wrong ladies. Christine wanted all the victims to march into the courtroom during the sentencing hearing and voice themselves to let the judge know how much he hurt them because it's going to be up to the judge to decide the sentence and this is their only chance to make their voices heard. Before the court case, when was the last time you saw him?

1:15:26Oh, God, like my wedding. Okay. Yeah. And so then when you see him in the court, because you walk in there, you see his face. Do you have like a feeling? I really don't think I did. And if I did, I blocked it out because I think it had been so much time that if anything, I was just like, oh, he looks like shit, you know?

1:15:52Yeah. I think that's just... I said, I think my exact words were, oh, they're not starving him. He was very greasy. It was just, it was a weird feeling. It's terrifying in a sense because you're seeing this person in real life. His family is there in real life. You know you're going to have to go up and talk to the judge and give your case in real life, not knowing what the judge might think of the situation or even if he understands the situation in total. You know, it's a very new crime. So there's not a lot of examples of these kind of cases to kind of go forward. um we it's just scary all around you're you know have random other people you don't even know having to listen to your victim impact speech um it's just terrifying is like the only word i can think of was there was the was the judge was there any stupid questions the judge asked that you remember oh my gosh so the judge was asking so many questions and it was so scary because because they almost sounded like kind of like victim shamey kind of at first.

1:17:21And I was like, oh, my gosh, like, is like, is he going to like, is this is this is this the kind of judge that's going to be like, well, no, like, this is all your fault. Like, like, I literally had it in my mind. And I remember like being like a little defensive at some point of his questions because he was like interrupting my victim impact statement, which it was very long. but he was interrupting as he thought of questions. So I was like, he's not even letting me finish. And he's just like blurting out questions as I'm, you know, reading this victim impact statement. Like it was so terrifying.

1:17:58And then he ended up really just being just so confused at like the whole situation on like why he's doing this. And like he was actually just really upset about everything that he had done, but he showed it by asking a lot of questions and it was so nerve-wracking. And it's like in court, the judge was like, what's a nip slip? And I was like, it's exactly what it sounds like. Your nipple like pops out of the shirt or it's like whatever you're wearing. Victims gave their impact statement. It was fucking good. Christopher was realizing shit's not going well for him at all. He's allowed to talk after all of us.

1:18:39And so, you know, we had the whole dramatic him turning to us and apologizing to Dana first, by the way. So that was funny. But, you know, he turns to us in the crowd and like the United States Attorney and FBI agent are kind of like standing in between us. Like, do not come closer. Like, I'm going to dropkick you kind of thing. And the, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, like the dramatic effect and all of that. The judge said the range for sentencing is three to six years for cases like this. The defense attorney was arguing to give him the lower end of that. the prosecuting attorney was arguing, give him the higher end.

1:19:13I think I remember us all talking in the hallway and be like, dude, if he gets five years, we'd be over the moon. Because the victim impact statements took so long, they had to come back a second day just to hear the sentence. So the next day, they all come back into the courtroom, they sit down, they ask Christopher to stand up while the judge reads the sentence to him. And the judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison. it was like we all just were in there and i literally just like breathed heavy and like grabbed my fiance's hand and i was like oh my gosh like we did it oh yeah it was super dramatic dana did you cry when they announced the uh this the sentence i did yeah i think i think we all we all had our own range of emotions but i i certainly did And, you know, there was a lot going on there.

1:20:07You know, this was a person that I've known for almost two decades and cared for at one point. And then it was also a person who inflicted some of the worst emotional harm upon my family that you could even imagine. So, you know, that coupled with how long and hard and, you know, the nights we stayed up till four in the morning trying to compile all these things and put this case together and to get law enforcement to care for it all. you know, to see somebody that you once cared about, essentially have their lives ended in the same moment that, you know, a case that you've put so much effort towards to get somebody to care to end that person's life all happening at the same moment was was unbelievable.

1:20:54I did. I, I didn't think I would, I would react that way. But I did. I was, I don't think I remember you crying I'm sure you did I remember Madison crying I remember Madison crying during her victim impact statement too um I think I like compartmentalized myself to be in like lawyer mode so I don't think I um got emotional at all I was just kind of like stone cold face but I was definitely you're just staring at his eyes like yeah I was just staring at him even when he was doing this whole thing um but yeah I think I definitely remember like feeling excited like wow you know this judge listened to us and was in utter shock and disbelief of how bad this was and I think it was just that validation even again like Dana was saying there's so much you know sweat and tears that go into this um from all aspects of it that it was just like validating more than anything that wow like if if putting in the correct venue like this you can make a difference and like they care.

1:21:58We made a difference, you know? Now, even though the sentencing range was three to six years, it's at the discretion of the judge to assign the sentence. And he apparently was so moved by the victims that he basically tripled the high end of the range and gave them 15 years. Incredible. 15 years in prison for cyber harassment. That's quite a bit, actually, Isn't that? Is that too much? Well, hold on. He spent 10 years harassing Madison, making her life hell. That's a long time for someone to suffer. And that's just one person. Well, what an ending, huh? The victims won one, finally. But sorry, that's not the end.

1:22:50The defense attorney found a problem in the ruling. some procedural error in the case. I think it had something to do with the sentencing range. They were saying the initial range was calculated incorrectly, which may have influenced the judge's decision on what to sentence him. This meant the case was reopened, and it meant a new judge had to come in and take a look at this case and issue a new sentence. So just when they thought that they had this wrapped up and the healing process could begin, The sisters and other victims were sucked back into the case. Scabs were ripped off again. The pain and fear was felt all over again.

1:23:31Yes. And so at this point, again, probably a character flaw, but we're just like, this is funny at this point. At least that's how I'm feeling. I'm like, this is terrible, but you got to laugh, right? Like, what are the odds? So, yeah, we had to go back and do a sentencing. and at this point you know I'm pregnant so we were hoping it wasn't in an inconvenient time but ultimately we had to go back almost a year later I believe Dana do you think that sounds right yeah it was uh just a touch over a year and and for sure Jack like um you know Christine's kind of a badass uh but for me personally I see this happen and I'm like oh you've got to be kidding me like this is how he gets off this is how he gets off we had the one judge who gave a shit and the guy who uh you know took all these factors into account and and understood what really happened here and and nailed him with the sentence that he actually deserved and now we're kicked back to another judge who's maybe not going to quite understand what actually happened here because they're all a million years old none of them you know that the last time they were on the internet was AOL.

1:24:43They don't understand what this is. It was so frustrating. All the victims had to travel all the way back to court and relive their traumas by reading their victim impact statements again. More crying, more emotions. Hell, I'd even say this retrial is re-victimizing the victims. so luckily the judge did agree with the original judge's decision that it was a horrible crime that he did not learn his lesson the only reason he wanted to show remorse was once he got caught and the judge saw right through him and gave him the same exact amount of time 15 years. Of course they were on edge waiting for a decision like this to be announced in the courtroom.

1:25:43So when it's spoken, it results in another emotional moment for the victims. More crying. Okay. So they won the criminal case against him again. But there was that civil lawsuit they had against him too, remember? Well, when Christopher saw that he was likely going to lose that civil lawsuit, he filed for bankruptcy. to avoid having to pay any fines or restitution that would be part of that suit. The sisters won that case, but since he had filed for bankruptcy, they didn't get any money, which really wasn't the point. The point of that case was just to give them the ability to gather evidence and to figure out who was behind this.

1:26:23But still, all this actually came to a big financial cost to the sisters. There were expensive lawyer fees. They had to travel to court to give victim impact statements. There were costs associated to getting subpoenas and opening a civil suit. And that's just a legal cost. How much time did they spend investigating this? Doesn't that add up to something? And of course, how much pain and suffering was caused. This was traumatic. So they mentioned all this in the criminal case and told the judge during the sentencing, like, hey man, this has been draining to us emotionally, but also our money. So when the judge sentenced him to 15 years, he also took all these costs into consideration.

1:27:05He had the 15 years, and then he also owed my sister and I money for our damages. We're probably never going to see a dime of that in our lives, but it was a nice add-on that they understood our struggles. I think that brings us to the end. Yeah. happy ending

1:27:32yeah it was really emotional and um the last sentence in my victim impact speech kind of summarized it and it was the lone wolf dies but the pack survives and like that quote like just gets me every time because like I don't think I personally could have won or survived without any of the other girls. And we're constantly going to have almost like the sisterhood of like a pack of wolves. And we didn't even know each other, but most of us didn't know each other before this.

1:28:27A big thank you to Madison, Christine, and Dana for coming on the show and sharing this emotional rollercoaster of a story with us. It's so inspirational. When nobody would help them, they became their own advocate and fought back. I love that. And they fought cleanly, too. That's the thing that gets me about this story. They didn't harass him back or do any of the things that he did to them. Instead, they trudged through the legal system to get justice. Amazing. I mentioned earlier I did an episode about Kik. That's episode 93 if you want to listen to it. If you thought this episode was awful, that one is worse.

1:29:02So, yeah, actually just skip that episode altogether. This episode was created by me, the Faded Raider, Jack Recyder. Sound design by the resurrected suspect, Andrew Merriweather. And this episode was assembled by the Slinky Drink, Tristan Ledger, mixing by Proximity Sound. And our theme music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. My New Year's resolution is 4K. This is Darknet Diaries.

1:29:51Thank you.