Teen accused of 'sinister' Facebook sex extortion plot An 18-year-old male student from Wisconsin has been accused of posing as a female on Facebook in a plot to trick at least 31 male classmates into sending nude pictures of themselves and then using the images to blackmail them into performing sex acts. Anthony Stancl of New Berlin was charged Wednesday with five counts of child …
Yep, it's too bad the victims can't come forward without fear of being prosecuted for producing and distributing child pornography. And if this has been going on for over a year, some of them must have sent him pics while he was 17, so they would have made pornography available to a minor.
Hopefully this case will make at least a few people think about how the seriousness of sexual assault charges severely outweighs strictly pornography-related offenses.
I think you might add "rape" to his felony rap. I doubt those kids actually wanted to engage on sex.
This is interesting, as it seems that this "kid" was able to use both the threat of making their pics public (embarrassment) and the "child porn" nonsense laws against them.
Also, it serves as a warning to those who send nekkid pics to a "girl".
can anyone see where this is headed ? The accused is clearly a malicious predatorial individual, but the victims in this case are, if precedent are followed, equally screwed, having distributed images of themselves.
Jesus...... precedent is likely to kill this case and ensure a genuine predator gets off a richly deserved hook. Alternatively hat's going to happen ? compel the witnesses to give evidence, then jail them if they do for kiddie porn, jail them for contempt if they don't ? The witnesses need a vastly experienced lawyer, and they need them now.
FFS..... Is this American justice in action or what ?
When will you people learn to read, sex acts <> rape, neither does "engage in sex".
>it seems that this "kid" was able to use both the threat of making their pics public (embarrassment) and the "child porn" nonsense laws against them.
Ok, you can read a little and have correclty deduced the former but where in the article does it say he threatened to use child porn laws against them.
What id does seem like is that this is a case where child pornography laws can be effectively used against someone who appears to be a rather unsavoury character.
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...as appears to be the American way they innocent victims in this case distributed child porn and will no doubt be going on a sex offenders register post haste.
Or at least that is what happened to the kids in the other case that occured a few months ago and was updated recently (which rather worrying took the prosecutors a long time to consider, ponder and otherwise mull before deciding it was be awesome to prosecute them)
Do we next read about a deal where this evil predator is now going to be getting a lesser sentence after doing a deal because of the precedence that appears to be playing out in other case :[
Icon, out of respect for Justice, which died a long time ago..
We are still in the dark ages on this one.
My daughter aged 15 ended up with a police caution for dealing with one of these creatures herself.
If the school staff had been at all aware of what was going on or had any real caring about the well being of their pupils, they would have stopped the sexual harassment themselves, before it turned bad.
But hey, they weren't aware of the problem, and when it did blow up in their faces, cracked down on the girls for sorting it out in their own way, (giving the guy a good trashing in public, in front of the girls who had been sexually harassed.)
My daughter got the police caution, NOT the guy sending photos of his dick to 14 year olds.
Sheesh, Way to go, eh ?
ALF
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"The allegations are the latest graphic example of the heap of trouble waiting for naive teens who send sexually explicit images of themselves over the email or text messages."
What sort of outcome did they imagine? Who sends "sexually explicit" pictures of themselves to complete strangers over the internet? Naive is not the word. Utter idiots springs to mind.
Also nice to see that the US justice industry is remaining calm with only possible 293 year sentence.
These 300 year sentences just make a mockery of the law... especially as it will come down to 6 months after appeal, and probably get out of prison after 3 months for 'good behaviour' along with a much widened back passage... 18 year old boy in prison for sex crimes... he is going to be someones bitch real quick (well, that or dead).
I dunno what that is, though coercion itself can be a difficult concept in borderline cases. If I tell my ex-girlfriend, who doesn't have anywhere to spend the night, that she can stay with me, but only if she gives me a blowjob, is that coercion? What if I put off the deadline for repaying a debt in return for sexual services, when the person doesn't have the money to pay immediately?
Perhaps it only counts as coercion if I threaten something illegal. So, if I threaten that I'll scratch someone's car (criminal damage) if they don't sleep with me, is that rape? Personally, I can't see why threatening to scratch someone's car should be a more serious crime than actually scratching someone's car. In the former case I give them a choice: if they choose to sleep with me it's because _they_ think that sleeping with me is less bad than having their car scratched.
Back to the sex extortion case. If publishing the photos/videos is not illegal, then I am perfectly entitled to do so, and I am perfectly entitled to accept a bribe of sexual services in return for not doing so, surely, at least in jurisdictions where prostitution is not illegal. If publishing the photos/videos is illegal, then threatening to do so should not, in my opinion, be a worse crime than actually doing so.
Of course, when sex and Americans are involved, don't expect any kind of logic to apply.
"If I tell my ex-girlfriend, who doesn't have anywhere to spend the night, that she can stay with me, but only if she gives me a blowjob, is that coercion?"
Yes.
"What if I put off the deadline for repaying a debt in return for sexual services, when the person doesn't have the money to pay immediately?"
Yes, that's coercion too.
"In the former case I give them a choice: if they choose to sleep with me it's because _they_ think that sleeping with me is less bad than having their car scratched."
That's trivializing the issue.
"If publishing the photos/videos is not illegal, then I am perfectly entitled to do so, and I am perfectly entitled to accept a bribe of sexual services in return for not doing so, surely, at least in jurisdictions where prostitution is not illegal."
And that's extortion, which is a separate felony in the United States. Unless you're arguing that extortion shouldn't be a crime, I fail to see the point you're trying to make.
And I'd dearly love to know why so many people on this comment thread are so goddam anxious to exonerate an adult who procured sexual services from children under false pretenses and by dint of threats. Last I checked, that's one of the filthiest acts it is possible for a human being to perpetrate -- so why the chorus of specious defense from the cheap seats?
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I'm surprised how many people are defending his alleged actions. If he were forty everyone would be jumping up and down suggesting creative (and not so creative) execution methods. Yet I doubt his age would be much consolation to the victims.
Yes, 300 years is silly, but that's just the total sentences for everything he's been accused of added up. He may well end up serving some of those sentences concurrently (meaning only th longest really matters) but the only way he's going to be getting off without some serous prison time is if he's found not guilty.
And anyone who thinks the victims will be tried for CP too doesn't know the how the America criminal justice system works. We only punish the innocent when a guilty person isn't available.
However, this is a textbook example of how sexual predators (I'm not fond of the word, but it fits here), take advantage of the taboo around sex to control their victims. Ideally the teens shouldn't have felt "blackmailable" for doing something normal in the first place. But failing that, they should have felt they could safely go to the authorities, but obviously they didn't. They had already done something "bad", illegal in fact, and that gives a predator a huge amont of power over them.
Black mail
Extortion
Threatening witness.
Making bomb threats
And you think 300 years is excessive . just wait till the Feds get a hold of him. reco act will make those 300 years look cute See he will do that time concurrently , so he is actually looking at about 20-30 years . With Reco he could actually be sentence to a 100 years straight .
>> "300 years in prison for lying to and threatening to embarassing classmates?"
>>
>> Don't forget the bit about blackmailing them into performing sexual acts. Granted, 300 years does seem a little excessive but this guy deserves to go down.
Andy, he didn't forget about the blackmailing them into performing sex acts, he just came to the conclusion that being embarassed in front of class mates was worse than performing the sex acts - i.e. the same conclusion that the children who went along with this child (probably 16/17 when he started) came to.
There is a certain logical part of my brain that can't help but think that whilst you and I find it abhorrent, the children involved probably didn't - given that they would rather perform the sex acts than have photos, which they were happy to send to a complete stranger, shown to people they knew. Ofcourse - I'm not saying what the children believed was correct, often abused children don't realise they were abused until they are adult and have the capability to fully comprehend it.
@kain preacher, among others:
You're forgetting rape.
The ambiguity of the current legal culture fads is fascinating, but a lot of people aren't tallying the unambiguous worst aspect of this, which is?
A: Forcing kids into sex against their will.
There'll doubtless be plenty of hair-splitting over the complications of relatively minor potential crimes that led down to it (no bad thing), but the jurors might take strong exception to the last bit.
For those splitting ends *about* whether or not these really are particularly nasty cases of rape, drop an ounce or too of ye olde flippancy — "they're idiots for not seeing it coming" is as bad as the old "she was wearing a miniskirt" argument.
Drop it.
Aren't that uncommon, especially if the state in question doesn't have a sentence of life without parole(some have arcane laws about sentence lengths that escape possibility of parole all together). Plus, life without parole is one-size-fits-all - with multicentury sentences, you can tell at a glance just how evil they are(I hear Satan's is about sixty-eight times the lifespan of the universe).
Based on the fact that this guy has effectively raped several minors and threatened witnesses for telling the truth, I have no sympathy. If he spends the rest of his life in prison it will serve him right.
He is clearly exactly the sort of person that society could well do without and protecting everyone from revolting vermin like him (assuming of course that all this is true) seems to me to be entirely laudable.
I have never been a supporter of the death penalty but some people's behaviour puts them beyond the pale and society needs to be protected from them. I would say that long-term incarceration is appropriate in the case of clearly dangerous individuals and on the face of it, this guy falls firmly into that category.
...like the guy needs some serious counselling, not a life sentance in prison.
In any case, if you send nude/sexually explicit photographs and videos of yourself to someone who claims to be a woman without ever speaking to her on the phone or seeing her on webcam then you deserve everything you get when 'she' turns out to be male.
On a point of interest, if the perpertrator had actually turned out to be a woman, albeit a fat, ugly woman who no-one would ever dream of sleeping with, and she had committed the same crimes in order to have sexual relations with her victims, do you think she would be facing such harsh sentences? Methinks not.
You missed out some vital info. What age was the guy ? How did they get the photos? By internet or phone?
If your daughter broke the law, she rightfully got in trouble for it. Just because one person breaks the law doesn't mean that you can take the law into your own hands, exact revenge by breaking the law yourself and expect to get away with it.
She should have reported him over the law-breaking-photo instead of expecting the school to babysit, mind read and predict the future.
If she recieved this photo online and can't handle seeing one, maybe she shouldn't BE online. There are a lot of photos of d**** floating around.
Let me get this straight - kids are taught how to have sex, but no-one thinks to drill it into them that sending that sending nude pics of yourself to people you've never met might be a bad idea?
Teach SexEd in school? Sure! Teach modesty? No, no way - that would be supporting some religion, infringing on my free-speach rights blah blah blah.
So these kids were ok with sending pics, but were then too embarrassed to *not* have sex? Let's face it, they had very little to lose but their pride. Someone was trying to manipulate them using a photo and they thought having sex would fix it? No marriages were at stake, no custody battles or lawyers to pay. If you are normally too proud to admit you've made a mistake, this should surely be a wake-up call.
Ok, rant over.
Except to mention that the sentencing is typical over-the-top stupidity. No wonder the kids lack all sense of proportion!
Paris, an object lesson in making money out of cringeworthiness
They sum up the # of years per crime in case they can't convict on everything, so they still have an enforceable sentence for whichever acts he's found guilt of. If found guilty of quite a few, they'll probably be served concurrently.
Given the view the US has about sex in general, and that the accused is male, I expect he'll be out of prison in about 6 to 22 years, probably closer to the former unless he's loco and can't it well enough during the years of reviews he's bound to undergo.
The real shame is that it went on so long, and it's a bit surprising that the victims didn't seek justice on their own terms, unless they weren't all that opposed to the sexual encounter in the first place, that it was only the ones that said "NO" and being exposed on the internet didn't seem as bad to them as assault charges.
...that anyone who reasons that performing a sex act and allowing that person to possess images of said sex act is less worse than said person possessing photos of them nude doesn't particularly deserve much sympathy.
"OMG! You're threating to show everyone photos of me naked! I Know! I'll have sexual relations with you and allow you to film it because you'll never possibly use the additional images to blackmail me even further!"
Back in the day, you'd of got all the kids in a room, with all the parents, and then the parents (including the kids own most likely) would threaten to rip his arse hole out. The boys who got it out online would also be embarrased by the fact their parents get to see what they were upto.
After an hour or so of verbal, and narrowly escaping with ones wits and, probably a month of suspension, life would go on with all having learnt a valuable lesson.
Everyone would have got back to their lives being much the wiser, as it is the person that commited the blackmail just gets to go to prison where he'll probably become a prison bitch - then on leaving probably take up a wide array of more delicious crimes, and the teens stupid enough to get their tackle out online learn that you don't have to take responsibility for your own stupidity.
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