BONUS | More from The Guys at The Door

In episode 5, we finally get answers to the biggest remaining questions in this case—straight from the federal agents who knocked on Stacie's door over 20 years ago. Now we're talking with Jim Cole and Josh Findley about the other cases they've worked and the hard-won lessons from their careers protecting children and victims. Check out Jim Cole's new podcast, Unlikely Allies: https://ourrescue.org/unlikelyallies Learn more about Josh Findley's work: https://www.onemi-global.com/ Reach out to our team at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Learn more about the cases in this episode: William A Knudsen, a case from 2007: https://www.oregonlive.com/breakingnews/2007/06/excounselor_at_troutdale_eleme.html For more exclusive content head to terriblestory.substack.com https://terriblestory.substack.com/. Get free access to archival photos, resources, and bonus stories that didn't make the cut. Plus — get early, ad-free episodes as a paid subscriber. If you or anyone you know is experiencing sexual violence and needs help, please visit rainn.org http://rainn.org or call the national hotline at 800-656-HOPE (4673) or text HOPE to 64673. You can anonymously report school employee boundary crossing and grooming and educator sexual misconduct to Safe Oregon. You can call or text 844-472-3367 or email [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. If you’d like to learn more about educator sexual misconduct and get involved, there are many great organizations doing research, education and advocacy work, including: S. E. S. A. M. E. https://www.ncsesame.org/– Stop Educator Sexual Abuse Misconduct & ExplotationEnough Abuse https://enoughabuse.org/The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children https://www.missingkids.org/homeAmerican Association Of University Women https://www.aauw.org/Stop Sexual Assault in Schools https://stopsexualassaultinschools.org/

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:00Speaker 01

  Today, I wanted to share a conversation Katie and I had with the federal agents who knocked on Stacy's door, Jim Cole and Josh Finley. Jim and Josh both worked as special agents for the Department of Homeland Security, investigating cyber crimes and child exploitation. And since retiring from DHS, both have continued to advocate for victims and children. Just a heads up, we talk about crimes against children in this episode. Please take care while listening. And before we get started, I wanted to dedicate this episode in memory of Special Agent Bob Peterson. Thank you for your work protecting children. Let's get into it.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Obviously, this has been a journey for us to find you guys. And it was very, very healing for Stacy and incredible for us to learn. And I was so moved by the part where you were talking about how you didn't miss very often and how this was kind of an exception in a weird way. And there was all these tiny little cracks that we were able to trace through and follow. I wanted to hear a little bit more about the work you guys did in other institutions, like in Portland, in Oregon. Were there other schools that you saw this problem in? And churches, summer camps?

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Boy Scouts, churches, yeah, all the above.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  I'll go with a Boy Scout story. So this Boy Scout leader had two nieces and would kind of inappropriately touch them, like give them piggyback rides and like reaches hands around. And then his niece moved to Massachusetts. About five or six years later, so she's an early teen now, he hit her up online and started talking to her and wanted her to come and visit him in Oregon and lie to her parents and fly out so they could engage in sexual activity. She tells her parents, they call the police. A local detective in Massachusetts takes over her account

• 3:01Speaker 03

  and starts talking to the suspect. He indeed does buy a plane ticket for his niece and comes up with the most elaborate scheme to get to spend a weekend with her. His sons had a Boy Scout meeting at the coast. He went there and then was going to feign he was sick and didn't want to get the rest of the Boy Scouts sick. So he was out like in seaside or something like that. And so he goes out, pretends he's sick and says, I don't want to get anybody else sick. He goes to a hotel. And then as soon as he gets to the hotel, he packs up his stuff, drives back to the Portland airport to pick up what he believes is his niece coming into town.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  And the dark humor in law enforcement, we all have it. Sorry, the detective talked him into showing up at the airport in his Boy Scout uniform.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  It was the best.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  To meet his niece, which for us was, was, was great because very identifiable, right? So if you got to do surveillance, you want to watch them, all those kinds of things. To put him in a Boy Scout uniform, a grown man in a Boy Scout uniform in an airport, very easy to pick out. You know, you don't have to be that careful. He came to the airport to pick up what he thought was his niece and was going to take her back to the coast. But luckily for us, we intervened and arrested him at the airport. And he went to prison for, I think, 20 years.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  The other part to that is it was a holiday weekend Friday. And generally speaking, you put, you know, you need people for surveillance and the arrest team, like transport. So Josh puts out an email to the office, hey, looking for volunteers? And we have a task force. There's other agencies on there too, like FBI and some. So it kind of went out to everybody. We had more volunteers than we knew what to do with that wanted to be there on a holiday weekend just because it was such a unique situation with this Boy Scout leader.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  My God, that's crazy. That's crazy. It was lucky you guys were able to intervene like that. Lucky she went to her parents.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  That's the biggest thing. I'll give you another story to exemplify what I was wanting to say to you. Okay, so it's probably 2008, 2009. My 16 year old niece calls me up on a Friday morning. We were planning on playing golf that day. We'd taken it off. So it was like eight o'clock. She woke me up and she said, hey, Uncle Josh, there's a creepy guy at my house. And so I was like, okay, I'm on my way. So I grabbed my gun, put it in the back of my pants and drove to her house, which was about five, six, seven minutes away. And so I get there, go knock on the door. She answers it. She said he left. And I was like, what in the hell is going on?

• 6:00Speaker 03

  And she's like, well, I met this guy online. And I was like, oh, what? And she was like, yeah, you know, he said he was like 26 or something like that, and she's 16. It turned out he was 53 years old. And while we're standing there talking, I was like, how do you get your address? She's like, well, I gave it to him. And I'm like, oh, you can't do that. You can never give out your address. And then she gets a text message and she's like, it's him. And so I said, okay, give me the phone. And so she gives me the phone and it says, it's okay, baby, if you're scared, we can just have phone sex if you want.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  And I was like, reply, I'm sorry, was in the shower. You can come back now. And so this like 53 year old shows back up at the house. I introduced myself to him very nicely and called the local police. And so he'd come from Vancouver, Washington. So he had crossed the state line in order to have sex with a 16 year old, which is a federal crime. And so the local police arrested him. We adopted it, the federal charges for it.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  And so he, he was charged federally for that crossing of the interstate line. Now, this is the point that I was trying to get to you was my aunt, who was raising my niece, came to the police station and I could see her walking up. And she was just pissed, right? Just angry. And so I went out and intervened with her. And I was like, hey, look, I know you want to go in there and yell at her, right? I know you want to like tell her she was stupid for doing this and all those kinds of things. But I said, at the end of the day, she made the right decision by going to somebody, by calling somebody she trusted.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  If you go in there and yell at her, the end result of that going to be is that she doesn't want to admit when she makes a mistake in the future. And so, so many parents like miss that point of they come down on their kid for making a mistake where the kid admitted to it or came to them and said, hey, there's a problem. And so many of them are just like, they'll yell at their kid, like, oh, you were talking to somebody online? What they should be focused on is their kid was able to come to them and talk to them. And so that's what shuts so many kids down is the fear of being judged, of being ridiculed. That's one of the things I always try to get across

• 8:53Speaker 03

  to parents is like, keep that open line of communication and reward your kid when they communicate with you.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's such a great point. There's so much that can be done when you bring in those like safe adults. One thing we wanted to unpack with you guys was in Brett's case, when IT flagged the computer use, they didn't call you guys immediately. And so we were kind of wondering like, whether it's an IT person or anybody else, what should you do when you find suspicious material on an electronic device?

• 9:27Speaker 02

  First, before we get into what they should do, that is not uncommon. We see a lot of organizations that are worried about, once you call the police, you, you open Pandora's box a little bit because we're going to come in, it's going to be intrusive. We've got a criminal law violation and that's going to open up like their IT systems to law enforcement scrutiny. It's going to open up the organization. There's, they're thinking about risk and reputation. Schools in particular are thinking about, what are parents going to think? What's the school board going to think? And oftentimes, one of their first, like these are like churches

• 10:12Speaker 02

  and these organizations, even youth serving organizations in the past, it's getting a little bit, it's getting better. But their first thing, especially if the IT person goes to, like they're not, they may not independently make a decision to call law enforcement. They find it and then they're reporting up like, hey, I found something concerning and put it, the ball in their court to do the right thing. And often those people are just thinking about the, that risk, like that risk, particularly reputational risk. And a lot of times they're thinking, well, we don't really know all the facts. So we should kind of do our own investigation. I can't tell you how many organizations we dealt with that knew something

• 10:57Speaker 02

  long before we got involved. And we're trying to do their own kind of investigation. And then it kind of got to a point where they, they recognized they had to, but they, it's, they don't want to. They don't want to get us involved in a lot of cases. And so, and like, what should they do? Yeah, they should contact the police, but not just the police. One of the other issues is, look, not to disparage, you know, but.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Different law enforcement components have different levels of training and experience in these crimes. These are nuanced and there's lots of horror stories that I can tell you about like a patrol officer who's not been exposed to these things, doesn't have the right training, and oftentimes is going off of some pretty bad misperceptions, who responds to these types of incidents and maybe the first person, and then don't do the things that they should have done, or like actually cause harm. There's a really famous case that went viral out of Columbus, Ohio, where a father discovered that his 11-year-old daughter was a victim of sextortion.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  She had been cajoled into taking a topless photo. She thought she was talking to a teenage boy. It was really, you know, an adult male who had psychologically manipulated her. She's 11 years old, she does it. She start, he then starts making demands for really, really terrible things. She then goes to her father. He then looks at the messages. He knows immediately it's an adult. Calls 911. Six hours later, at 11:30 PM, a patrol officer and a sergeant arrive at the house to follow

• 12:55Speaker 02

  up on this report because it wasn't treated as a priority. And when the father tells them the circumstances, the first thing out of the sergeant's mouth is, "Well, I mean, if you want to pursue this, then we could arrest your daughter for child porn." And the only reason that anyone even knows about this is because it was all captured on his Ring doorbell camera at the door. He's like, "She's 11. What do you mean?" And they're like, and the sergeant was like really unempathetic, there's no empathy whatsoever and just like, "Well, she's the one who took the photos, right? And since she sent them?" Like, yeah, like she, she's guilty of, you know, she just kept saying child porn, which

• 13:40Speaker 02

  is a term we hate, by the way. And the guy is like, he's in disbelief. And after she, they, they're like, "Look, I just wanted someone to come talk to my daughter." And like, you know, and, and they're just like, you know, "Well, if you want, if you want us to follow up on this, then this is what's going to happen." Which is completely like the antithesis of what should happen. So he then released that video to the media. And of course, now the police have to respond. The police chief is having to respond. Then they pulled the body cam footage from the police officers and got more conversation after they left the porch about it. It was bad, bad, bad.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  And I use that in a training course that I run that tries to teach police how to be more trauma-informed. And so, but it's a great example, but the problem is if the IT guy just calls 911, you're going to get a patrol officer who responds and probably does not know what to do. So the reality is it's more nuanced than they should just call the police. What they need to do is to specifically call a cybercrime unit or an Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force or a federal agency like HSI or FBI.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  We had one case in Centennial Middle School in Gresham where the, the computer teacher was viewing CSAM at the computer and it got flagged by their IT department. And their IT guy deleted everything just because he thought it was probably a student that was looking at like age-appropriate material or whatever. Then he went and reviewed the security cameras at the time when they, the downloading occurred and saw that the only person in that room was the teacher, that there was no class

• 15:37Speaker 03

  at that time. Good, good-hearted, good gesture, but he went and recreated all the downloads and, and went and downloaded it. And, and again, like, he's lucky because he was dealing with like Jim and I, right? And we were like, dude, we can't use that as evidence. Like, you, you, you went and recreated it. That's not evidence that we can use in court. But like Jim was saying, like another patrol officer would be like, "Well, you downloaded CSAM. Like, you know, you're, you committed a crime." And it's like, no, you have to, you know, judge people by their intent. And, you know, most federal statutes have that, that qualifier, that there needs to be an intent to commit the crime.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  I'm curious, like, right now, you know, obviously, this is a problem. Like, CSAM is exponentially grown since the 2000s, since some of these cases unfolded. Are IT people still on the front lines in this way? Like, how has that changed in the past 20 years?

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think they are still to a degree. I think offenders get smarter as time goes by. They, they find their ways into these communities of offenders where they're, they're teaching each other how to avoid law enforcement and, you know, one of the ways. But one of the reasons we used to see this a lot at work is offenders' mindset was, "Well, if I do it at home, my wife might find it, right? So if I do it at work..." And it's kind of interesting how people would risk the work kind of environment, thinking, well, you know, but now most people know that their companies are screening. There's probably more awareness about that.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  So I think it's one of those things that, yeah, IT people honestly should still be watching out for this. And to be honest, there's some software out there that you think about it like antivirus for this type of, of conduct and, and material. But there's a huge resistance from IT companies in, in deploying that software, to be honest. They don't see the need for it. And I would say that it's probably more prevalent than most IT people believe that it's happening, but they're not necessarily looking for it. Normally, when they find it, it is more about happenstance than it is by design.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  And so I think it is still relevant to them, but I think for a couple of reasons, they don't find it all that often. And there's more awareness by the offenders that are aware that companies are, you know, looking at content that's going across their network.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  So a lot of the platforms that CSAM's distributed on, like, can be just, you know, denied by the, their IT to begin with. Like, you know, you can't get to it, you can only get to certain. And then, and then most of the large tech companies receive what we call a hash list of known CSAM material and they're screening for it and making cyber tips to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children anytime it comes across their platform. So Google, Apple, all those kind of things.

• 19:06Speaker 04

  In the 1960s, the federal government embarked on a huge experiment.

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  It was groundbreaking at the time.

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  The goal: to figure out the best ways to teach.

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  They evaluated different philosophies of education.

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• 20:55Speaker 01

  Before we get into some other cases, I would love to talk to you guys a little bit. I think you'd be able to shed some light on this. Basically, in the news in Wisconsin in the last few weeks, there's been

• 21:06Speaker 02

  Andereg.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. AIC SAM.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  So there's a huge misunderstanding about the Andereg case, to be honest. And so the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals took up the Andereg case. He was charged with a variety of violations under federal law, under 18 USC, basically the child pornography statutes. And I use that term only because that's what they're called. And which included the distribution of the material, the possession of the material and the receipt of the material. And I think the production of the material. It was all AI-generated CSAM that did not depict an identifiable child. Right?

• 21:55Speaker 02

  So after being convicted in federal court, they took up an appeal based on some previous case law that the Supreme Court had decided. One of those being Ashcroft Free Speech Coalition, which came about after legislation was passed establishing the current child pornography statutes in federal law. And the actual statute that defines child pornography as a definition and then one of the provisions of the statute that makes

• 22:36Speaker 02

  it illegal to possess, to distribute, et cetera, included like computer-generated imagery, cartoons, drawings, all these things. Right? And that's what they were litigating was that was a violation of the First Amendment, free speech, because no real child is harmed. And so, under the Supreme Court analysis, they agreed that it was protected by the First Amendment if no real child was harmed and it happens in the confines of your own home. So when he was convicted of the possession of this under not child pornography statutes, but obscenity statutes,

• 23:20Speaker 02

  which are a lesser burden and don't have the same free speech protection, at least it wasn't believed to have the same free speech protections. It got appealed and the Seventh Circuit Court, and I feel bad for the judge because all over social media, people are like, we need to search that judge's house and we need to look at his hard drives and all this stuff. And the reality is this, the judge is writing for a panel of judges. He didn't independently make that decision. It was a panel of judges who made that decision and they were stuck with the Supreme Court ruling. They really had no choice but to rule that way. They also, as part of their decision, basically said, this is concerning and the Supreme Court needs to take this up and basically fix this.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  And so they weren't in any way, shape or form really sympathetic to Andereg or anything, but they had to rule based on the law and Supreme Court case precedents. The other piece is what they actually ruled on and the ramifications of that are widely misunderstood. I've spent a lot of time trying to correct people. We've talked about it on our podcast because there's a huge misunderstanding. So one, there is a very nuanced set of circumstances where this is protected. The protection only covers AI-generated CSAM that does not depict an identifiable child, that never leaves the confines of your private residence,

• 24:49Speaker 02

  is never shown to another person outside of your residence. Those circumstances are incredibly rare. And so there's a misunderstanding and the headlines where, again, people want, you know, all the media want clicks and views and eyes on content. So the headlines are dramatized. And if you read a lot of the headlines, it makes it sound like the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals basically legalized AI-generated CSAM, which is not what happened, not even remotely what happened. Andereg will not get out of prison. Out of all the charges that he, it was the least of all the charges that was reversed.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  So his sentence is actually predicated on the other charges that are not affected by the ruling. So Andereg is still in prison and will be in prison for the complete length of his sentence. It didn't really affect anything in that way. And I'm not saying it's not concerning. Like, look, I think Josh, I speak for Josh. All CSAM, whether AI-generated, whether in the confines of your own home, I think are incredibly concerning and should be illegal. I know that there's free speech advocates that would argue on the other side, but they've not seen it. And they don't understand that even though it's AI-generated, it does damage real children.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  And in the reality, you know, unfortunately, I don't think the prosecution was ready to get into the weeds on how AI-generated CSAM is created, even if it's not like a face swap for a real child or I'm not using an image of a real child. They're using these things called Laura's, which are predicated usually on real people, real children. And to generate this material, although the end result may not be that person. And we also know that there were instances where large language models and visual language models have been trained with CSAM mistakenly in the corpus of data that was used for training.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  But not only CSAM, we know that real people are part of the data training set. So it doesn't have to be CSAM. Because if there are real children that are part of the corpus of training data that was put in there, then the synthetic material that's created through diffusion is using pieces and parts of real people.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  I think it's so important to like, understand those nuances. And I think it's an important discussion to be having. And it's upsetting that I guess people are just kind of reading the headlines and not diving into it deeper. But it does bring up the law and the law's inability to adapt to the world we're living in.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, we're slow. The law is slow to adapt.

• 27:38Speaker 03

  If you have a man who's downloading and looking at and getting sexual gratification from looking at violent rape videos. Right? What pathway do you think that that's leading that man down? Like, the more you see it, then that's more what you want. Right? And so it's the same exact way with CSAM. Like, the production of that material, the possession of it, the viewing of it for sexual gratification is leading that person down the pathway of abusing a child. And that's the only thing that it's going to lead to.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  These offenders exercising these things called cognitive distortions, they know something's wrong and then they get the courage or the gumption to actually like, take a step toward that thing that's wrong. And then nothing happens. And then their brain starts to say, well, nothing happened, so I can go a little farther. These barriers to acting on it start off as really big. But the more that they progress down the pathway, these barriers get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller to the point where they almost don't exist. So this material and the argument that, gosh, we should give offenders AI-generated CSAM

• 29:02Speaker 02

  because then they want to offend against a child, is not borne out by the science nor human nature.

• 29:07Speaker 04

  The Supreme Court was to take this up. If you could design like, what the outcome of that is? What does that look like in the law, in practice, in all the ways?

• 29:16Speaker 02

  I would like to see that all illicit sexual abuse material depicts any form of a child or childlike would be illegal to possess, to view, to distribute, to receive, to advertise, to produce, et cetera. I basically think it needs to be folded in just to the child pornography statute. I wish we would change that to child sexual abuse material, but I think it needs to be folded in that statute. And actually, the provision's actually there. It's just, there's one that's not currently enforceable under those statutes because of two previous Supreme Court decisions.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  I mean, that's kind of where I lean toward because I know that this material is not only consumed by people, but it also can be used to groom children. It can be used to show children that, look, this is normal. I have these pictures of kids doing this and they're happy and all these things. But I do think that Andereg is not necessarily the best vehicle to take this to the Supreme Court. It's not the worst vehicle, but it's also not the ideal vehicle. What DOJ and the appellate division and child exploitation and obscenity section are going to do? I don't know.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  There's a couple of different ways they could approach and use Andereg, but they might look at other pathways to get this in front of the Supreme Court. But I think there's some things they need to do to be prepared for that. And I'm sure they're doing that.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  The thing that needs to change is the law. Right? The Congress needs to change the law. Currently, you know, it states that it has to be a real child. And it should just be able to add or indistinguishable from a real child. And then you let the jury decide that.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  That would be a way, yeah, that would be a way to do it. And it's going to get appealed, like, without a doubt. Once you do that, the first case where something like that is prosecuted, it will get appealed. But then there's a much stronger vehicle for the Supreme Court to uphold it.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  Sorry, Jim and I are getting into a legal debate here.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  No, no, no, it's fascinating. It really is. It's like such a can of worms and it's just like, there's so many little parts to this.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  Facets and nuances. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

• 31:58Speaker 06

  There was another case that we had come across in our research and you guys had briefly mentioned on our interview before and I wanted to go back to it.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Knudsen, that's another crazy case that has a lot of nuance to it as well. Then I actually learned some pretty valuable lessons from that that I carried with me like, like up to this day. That case was interesting one because it started with, he dropped off his computer at a computer repair shop and I had dropped the business card at, at several computer repair shops around Portland. Like, hey, if you're ever on someone's computer and you see concerning images of children, call me. And I had not received a call from any of them. I mean, you know, ever. And then this was the first one. It turned into a really, really good case and a very dangerous individual who had been really

• 32:48Speaker 02

  operating as a wolf in sheep's clothing in this community and in this school for a very long time.

• 32:55Speaker 06

  If you're up for sharing like some of the lessons that you learned from that?

• 32:59Speaker 02

  So a couple of things. So we did not have probable cause to be able to execute a search warrant or arrest him because the computer repair person that saw the material and called me, another employee had actually called Knudsen to come pick up. So I called a detective from the jurisdictionary, the Ingression Police Department, and we went into his home to contact him. He'd only been home for maybe 10 minutes. When we got there, I basically say, hey, we need to talk to you about some concerning things. And he invites us in and we start talking. His body language was such that, once I got to the topic at hand, I knew, but I did not know, uh, the mountain, I had no clue,

• 33:43Speaker 02

  like the mountain. And this is one of the craziest CSAM collections I think we ever had. And so,

• 33:52Speaker 02

  we get to the point where he admits, uh, that he's collecting CSAM, that he's created CSAM. This is like the predecessor, just some AI generated CSAM because he was taking students from the school imagery. He was a photographer. He took a lot of pictures. And let me tell you something, you've got to be pretty determined to print 53 binders, you know, two and three inch binders worth of CSAM. After we had done everything, we got the confession. I did not know he was a teacher until he told me. And so I had to go to the school and talk to the principal and she was

• 34:34Speaker 02

  absolutely heartbroken. Uh, she, it was devastating to her and completely unexpected. They'd never saw this coming. And so, but we got her on board pretty quick. I was able to describe enough that she was like, okay, this is serious and I believe it. We then did a search warrant at the school in his office. We recovered a camcorder where he had blacked out the red light and was surreptitiously recording students. Like he would offer students who wanted to change out of gym clothes or after school and other clothes to do it in his office. And he would leave his office, but he would have the camcorder record them and would, would blackout the light. And, uh, so we recovered a lot of that

• 35:19Speaker 02

  and the camera and where it was and all those things as part of that warrant. And then, um, a few days after all of that, of course, the, like the rumor mill in the school, right? And all the teachers and everything. And the teachers were all going to the principal, like, what is going on? They can't believe he's been arrested. This has to be, this has to be false arrest, all these things. And so she called me and said, will you come out and address the teachers? So I grabbed the prosecutor in the case and we went out there and we addressed the teachers and I had no idea how much hate we were gonna get. We had teachers who were like giving us hate and, and just making

• 36:02Speaker 02

  these statements like, there's no way, uh, you guys don't know how to do your job. You're not looking at this right. Like all these things. So we're trying to kind of explain to them that, like, this is real, this is serious, this had, this is not, uh, uh, you know, a mistake. This is a mistaken identity. This isn't, it's trapment. This isn't, you know, someone didn't set him up. This is, you know, and he admitted to the conduct, right? It was a sentencing hearing that the biggest, one of the biggest lessons in my life, we're in the sentencing hearing, he's pled guilty. So we're not going to a trial, but the defense is asking for a lower sentence and the government's asking

• 36:44Speaker 02

  for a higher sentence. So that will result in federal court and what we call sentencing hearing, where both sides get to put on evidence of why, why the sentence that they're asking for should be more supported by the court. And so the defense put on, uh, some character reference witnesses that were teachers that he had taught with. And I remember this one female teacher and I'll never forget her face. She was also one of the most loudly protesting at the auditorium event. And I remember her talking about how awesome he was and how he volunteered to spend time with kids

• 37:28Speaker 02

  from difficult homes and backgrounds and broken homes, how he volunteered to drive these kids home when their parents didn't come pick them up after school or after school activities. And I'm sitting there listening to this and it was the first time it dawned on me that grooming wasn't just about the victim. But what I realized here is even more diabolical than the kids is offenders groom the protective people around kids to do it so that they will never believe the allegation and that kids are less likely to disclose, or even if they do disclose, they're likely to be dismissed

• 38:08Speaker 02

  or gaslit. Because, I mean, think about if a student had gone to that teacher and said, well, Mr. Knudsen's touching me. She would have said, oh, sweetie, like, like, this must be a mistake. Like, she would have brushed it off and not believed it. And so it causes me to think, how many kids, and not just unique to Mr. Knudsen, how many kids may have tried to disclose and been then dissuaded by someone who's been groomed? And then also, how many people protect these offenders in their communities, in their, in their peer groups, in their work, in their like churches and

• 38:51Speaker 02

  these things, because they just cannot wrap their head about it and they were groomed by the offender to think that they are a pillar of the community, that they're, they're, they're just the, the greatest person ever. And so that's when that dawned on me and I started teaching that as part of my training. Um, but that was one of those moments that was like, real light bulb went off.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  One of the anecdotes I'll throw in there is Jim and I are kind of founders of an operation called Operation Renewed Hope. The basis of this is looking at old CSAM material and applying new technology to it. Because, you know, when, you know, that CSAM first was discovered by, you know, Necmech or Interpol or whoever, um, we didn't have those technologies. And so we were always getting better and better technologies. And so, uh, Jim and I were like, let's go back and look at all the old stuff with the new technology. This was our, the second Operation Renewed Hope. There was a

• 39:53Speaker 03

  girl in New York. So they, they had this series of CSAM. They grabbed a face. Um, they put it into facial recognition software. Um, they find a YouTube channel of this girl in New York and they start looking at the videos on her YouTube channel to see like, you know, you know, is this hers? Is there any mannerisms or anything? And so, one of her YouTube videos, she talks about how she was molested when she was 11 and that she went to her parents, she went to the police and

• 40:31Speaker 03

  nobody believed her. Nobody believed her. The guy never got prosecuted, nothing. And all this, all this time, these images are sitting in the, the ICSA data set is what we call it, the, you know. Yeah. And so by using that new technology to identify her, we were able to prove her story that she had told when she was 11 and nobody believed her and go back and arrest the offender and charge him federally with the production of child pornography.

• 41:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, that is enough to make you cry. And we've heard this a lot of just like, why are you digging into this old story? Like, what is the point? And we're like, well, it matters for the people who lived it. Like 20 years might seem a really long time for you who wasn't involved, but like, that's not for those people.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  I will argue that telling these stories empower new victims to disclose and empower them to know that they're not alone. I think there's such a disservice when we don't, like that, that whole idea of like, why this is old, why? But what I have learned doing a lot of podcast, like, like I've been on a lot of podcasts, Josh has been on a lot and a lot of different media, is I go look at the comments and people, and I also know other survivors who have been on these shows and it empowers new, like survivors who either are undergoing abuse now or did and never disclosed. And so I think these, these things are really important because it's not just about, like, like,

• 42:07Speaker 02

  like, look, it's really important about Stacy and what happened to her. And it's definitely helpful for her, right? And you guys know that, but it hits people way beyond her. And, and in a very important and meaningful way, we suffer vicarious trauma by having to view this material and, and like, I've got, I go to a therapist and one of the things my therapist, she's like, well, when are you just gonna go fishing? You're a type like, like, like, the way that you heal is stop talking about it, stop being in it, stop doing the work. And I'm like, yeah, that's not, that's, that's, that's not a thing for me. But it's really important for, for those that are out there and it gives people hope.

• 42:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, completely. And thank you guys so much for being so open to sharing. It really is so important. And we've already started to get really great messages from other students at Centennial who were there during this time.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for listening to Not Just a Terrible Story. We are an independent production. You can support us by sharing this podcast with a friend and leaving a five-star review wherever you are listening right now, or hop over to our Substack, terriblestory.substack.com. There's a lot of great free stuff over there, archival photos, resources, and stories that didn't make it into the show. And you can also get early and ad-free episodes as a paid subscriber. To get in touch, send us an email at [email protected]. This podcast was created and produced by Katie Klein and me, your host, Sydney Gladu. Show art by Casey Burnell. Original music by Sean Simmons. Additional music from Blue

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Dot Sessions. Maria Palia Logos is our strategic growth advisor. And a very special thank you to Stacy Love, whose bravery, honesty, and determination made this series possible. May her truth-telling give others permission to trust their own stories, use their voices, and know that they are not alone. If you or anyone you know is experiencing sexual violence and needs help, please visit rainn.org. That's R-A-I-N-N dot O-R-G. Or call the national hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE. Or text HOPE to 64673. If you'd like to learn more about educator sexual misconduct, check out the show notes for additional resources.

• 44:49Speaker 04

  In the 1960s, the federal government embarked on a huge experiment.

• 44:55Speaker 05

  It was groundbreaking at the time.

• 44:57Speaker 04

  The goal: to figure out the best ways to teach.

• 45:00Speaker 06

  To evaluate a different philosophies of education.

• 45:03Speaker 04

  When it was over, one approach stood above the rest. Seven plus how many equals 11? There's a boy! But a lot of people didn't like it.

• 45:12Speaker 03

  One educator has called the approach totalitarian, another horrible.

• 45:17Speaker 04

  The kind of teaching that worked so well, most schools don't do it. I'm Emily Hanford. On the new season of Sold a Story, we investigate why. Follow Sold a Story in your podcast app.

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