Sex Abuse Scandals News Stories

Excerpts of Key Sex Abuse Scandals News Stories in Major Media

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The fund set up to compensate victims of Jeffrey Epstein's sexual exploitation has already received more than 100 claims and paid out tens of millions of dollars. The fund will accept requests until the end of March, said Jordana Feldman, its administrator. So far, the fund has paid more than $30 million to accusers. The fund began taking claims in July, a little less than a year after Mr. Epstein, a financier, died in a Manhattan jail cell following his arrest on federal sex-trafficking charges. Because he had put his roughly $600 million fortune into a trust, there were concerns that it could take years for his victims to get any money back from his estate. But the estate's executors agreed to establish the fund, allowing accusers – including those who had reached settlements with Mr. Epstein after his 2008 conviction on soliciting prostitution from an underage girl – to seek compensation. Spencer Kuvin, a Miami lawyer representing nine women who have submitted claims to the fund, said the settlement process appeared to be fair. Three of [his clients] received settlements from Mr. Epstein when they were teenagers, but had felt intimidated by him and his legal team. "This process is light-years different," Mr. Kuvin said. Ms. Feldman said a person who received a settlement was normally barred from coming back for more money. But she said given the circumstances surrounding the earlier investigation of Mr. Epstein, it was important not to close the door on any victims.

Note: No mention is made of the many prominent men who were served by Epstein's girls. Why is no one investigating this? This New York magazine report has a wealth of information on Jeffrey Epstein's very strange death. Explore a complex yet very informative timeline of Epstein and his relationship to the Mossad and much more. Many links are made here with verifiable information that the major media has failed to report. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Jeffrey Epstein from reliable major media sources.

The Boy Scouts of America will be facing at least 92,700 claims of sexual abuse as former scouts submit filings against the bankruptcy-bound organization, said one of the lead attorneys for the legal team representing the claimants. Sex abuse in the BSA was an "unspoken norm," according to Van Arsdale, one of the lead attorneys who says he has communicated with thousands of alleged survivors over the past 19 months. "Based on what we are hearing from survivors, sexual abuse was a rite of passage in troops across the country, similar to other tasks where children had to ... perform certain duties to earn their coveted merit badges," he said. The cases against the Boy Scouts are no normal court proceeding. The organization filed for bankruptcy in February as hundreds of sexual abuse lawsuits were filed across the country -- some of which alleged repeated fondling, exposure to pornography and forced anal or oral sex. Alleged survivors will now have to pursue their claims in bankruptcy court rather than via civil proceedings, Michael Pfau, a Seattle-based attorney representing hundreds of alleged victims, told CNN. "Their lives won't be scrutinized, but they lose their right to a jury trial. For a lot of abuse survivors, telling their story in a court of law and forcing the organizations to defend their actions can be cathartic. That won't happen with a bankruptcy," he said. Pfau estimated ... that the number of claims would surpass those targeting the Catholic Church.

Note: Doctors at the University of California and USC have also been accused of sexual abuse by hundreds of patients. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on sexual abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.

Peter Nygard, meet Jeffrey Epstein. The Canadian fashion kingpin has fallen into sordid company amid explosive allegations he sexually assaulted a slew of underage women – including three 14-year-olds. Ten unidentified women have filed a class-action lawsuit accusing Nygard, 77, of rape and sex trafficking. The allegations are eerily similar to the twisted web woven by hedge fund pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. "Nygard lured and enticed young, impressionable, and often impoverished children and women with cash payments and false promises of lucrative modelling opportunities in order to assault, rape, and sodomize them. Many were drugged to force compliance with Nygard's sexual desires," the plaintiffs said in a press release. Many of the women were underage at the time of the alleged assaults, between 2008 and 2015. Nygard allegedly ordered underlings to "procure" the girls and take them to what he called "pamper parties." At the parties, they were allegedly fed drugs and booze. Many of the payouts were allegedly run through his string of companies, the suit charges. The lawsuit also alleges the style impresario bribed cops and government officials in the Bahamas to turn a blind eye to his antics. Nygard allegedly has a database of more than 7,500 underage girls and women. Most of the incidents allegedly occurred at Nygard's mansion on Lyford Cay in the Caribbean paradise. And most of the alleged victims were young "impoverished" Bahamian girls.

Note: Read an excellent, well researched essay on this disturbing case. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on sexual abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.

Eleven-year-old Allie sways back and forth. She rolls her eyes into her head and collapses onto the bed behind her. After lying there motionless for a moment, she pops back up. "Um, I wasn't really sure what else to add, 'cause all that was requested was to faint while putting my eyes backwards," she says to the camera, thanking a user who goes by "Martin" for the suggestion. Allie's channel is full of skits that she has eagerly filmed at the request of strangers on YouTube. She's learned that her audience particularly enjoys watching her pretend to pass out and hypnotize herself; those kinds of requests come in all the time. For Allie ... the attention is exciting. To the girl's great delight, her dizzy-themed videos randomly blow up sometimes, pulling in thousands of views despite her small following. She refers to her viewers as "fans" and promises to film whatever they'd like to see. That often means unwittingly acting out sexual fetishes for predators, who flock to her content like flies. This didn't happen by accident. YouTube's automated recommendation engine propels sexually implicit videos of children like Allie from obscurity into virality and onto the screens of pedophiles. Executives at the Google-owned company are well aware of this. Over the years, YouTube has claimed repeatedly that keeping children safe on its platform is a top priority. But ... the company has actually continued to amplify such videos into virality and to specifically steer them toward users seeking sexual content and footage of partially clothed kids.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and sexual abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.

Berlin's city hall deliberately placed troubled children in the care of paedophiles. From 1969 to 2003 the authorities put at least nine boys in the hands of convicted sex offenders on the advice of a disgraced social scientist. The idea behind the Kentler experiment – named after Helmut Kentler, an academic who argued that paedophilia could have "positive consequences" – was that unruly and "feeble-minded" children would benefit from adult sexual attention. In the late 1960s Kentler persuaded West Berlin's ruling Senate that the homeless boys would jump at the opportunity to be fostered by paedophiles. One of the boys, referred to in legal proceedings as Marco, had been taken into care after suffering physical abuse at the hands of his father. In 1989, aged six, he was placed with a convicted child abuser. A year later this foster father, Fritz H, began going into Marco's room for a "cuddle". For ten years he was repeatedly beaten and raped by Fritz H. It is not known how many children were subjected to the Kentler experiment. Four years ago the Berlin Senate commissioned an inquiry into the scandal from experts at Göttingen University. Their final report has yet to be published. At the beginning of the experiment, Kentler, who died in 2008, was regarded as one of Germany's foremost sexologists and often appeared as an expert witness in court cases. He boasted of having secured the acquittal of several alleged paedophiles. In 1970 he urged the Bundestag to decriminalise sex between adults and children in West Germany.

Note: Watch an excellent segment by Australia's "60-Minutes" team "Spies, Lords and Predators" on a pedophile ring in the UK which leads directly to the highest levels of government. A second suppressed documentary, "Conspiracy of Silence," goes even deeper into this topic in the US. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and sexual abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.

A man once described by an FBI agent as the world's largest "facilitator" of child abuse websites pleaded guilty on Thursday to operating a web hosting service that allowed users to anonymously access hundreds of thousands of images and videos depicting child abuse. Eric Eoin Marques, 34, faces a mandatory minimum of 15 years in prison and a maximum of 30 years after his guilty plea to one count of conspiracy to advertise child abuse images. A plea agreement will ask the US district judge Theodore Chuang in Maryland to sentence Marques to 15 to 21 years in prison, but the judge is not bound by the recommendation. Marques created and operated a free, anonymous web hosting service, called Freedom Hosting, on a network allowing users to access websites without revealing their IP addresses. In 2013, FBI agents in Maryland connected to the network and accessed a child abuse bulletin board with more than 7,700 members and more than 22,000 posts. Agents downloaded more than 1 million files from another website on the network, nearly all of which depicted sexually explicit images of children. Images on the service depicted the rape and torture of infants and older children. Authorities seized nearly $155,000 in US currency from Marques, who said during an August 2013 extradition hearing that his business had been "very successful" and profitable. FBI special agent Brooke Donahue has described Marques as "the largest facilitator of child pornography websites on the planet", according to court records.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on sexual abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.

Ghislaine Maxwell's answers to questions about the sex-trafficking operation she allegedly ran with the late Jeffrey Epstein were made public Thursday as a federal court released Maxwell's 2016 deposition. The transcript is finally being unsealed after a back-and-forth legal battle between Maxwell and Virginia Giuffre, who has accused Maxwell, Epstein and others of sexually abusing her when she was a minor. In it, Maxwell repeatedly denies "recruiting" girls for Epstein or taking part in orgies and other activities. Persistent allegations that Epstein sexually abused young women under the guise of receiving massages prompted an investigation by Palm Beach police in the early 2000s. Giuffre's attorney asked, "Are you aware there were underage girls, 30 of them, in this police report that were assaulted by Jeffrey Epstein in the Palm Beach house during the time you are working there?" In her reply, Maxwell said she couldn't testify about that, accusing one of Epstein's alleged victims of lying and saying that she spent only limited time at Epstein's house in 2004, the year in question. For years, accusations against Maxwell and Epstein were obscured by legal maneuvers – most famously, a controversial nonprosecution agreement Epstein reached in 2007 with federal prosecutors in Florida. That plea deal with then-U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta led to state charges against Epstein, but it also prevented him and any co-conspirators – including, allegedly, Maxwell – from being prosecuted in federal sex crimes in southern Florida.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking ring from reliable major media sources.

Back in the Nineties, socialite Ghislaine Maxwell was known in New York as the “female Gatsby” for her lavish entertaining. Today ... she is behind bars. The daughter of the disgraced media tycoon Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine was his ninth and ... his favourite. When her father died, his publishing empire collapsed after it was found that he had been pillaging the pension fund to prop up his businesses. However, a trust fund provided an income of £80,000 a year for Ghislaine. She lived the high life. Ghislaine was never more at home than with the super-rich, bumming a ride on Donald Trump’s private jet and dating billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein. Ghislaine was in love with Jeffrey the way she was in love with her father. Marriage didn’t happen, but she was always by his side, choreographing his world. “My job included hiring many people,” she said in a court deposition. She admitted hiring masseuses as young as 17. A source close to Ghislaine said in [a] Vanity Fair article: “When I asked what she thought of the under age girls, she looked at me and said, ‘They’re nothing, these girls. They are trash.’” She was driven to only respect high status and wealth. Things started to unravel for Ghislaine ... when under-age girls accused Epstein of paying them to perform sexual acts. Ghislaine fought to keep the court papers from [a] 2017 defamation case closed – and failed. On August 9, the first batch was released. The following day, Epstein was found dead in jail, presumed suicide, and Ghislaine vanished. On Thursday, Maxwell was finally arrested and charged with six federal crimes.

Note: Key Epstein witness Maria Farmer claimed in a highly revealing interview with crack reporter Whitney Webb that she was in the car with Ghislaine and Trump's ex-wife Ivana when they enticed young girls to come give a massage for large amounts of money. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Jeffrey Epstein from reliable major media sources. Watch an excellent segment by Australia's "60-Minutes" team "Spies, Lords and Predators" on a pedophile ring in the UK which leads directly to the highest levels of government.

Deutsche Bank (DBK.DE) has agreed to pay $150m (Ł119m) over compliance failings in part linked to dealings with Jeffrey Epstein. New York’s Department of Financial Services said in a statement on Tuesday it had imposed the penalty on Deutsche Bank’s New York branch for “significant compliance failures in connection with the Bank’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein,” the accused child sex trafficker who died in police custody last year. The penalty also covers anti-money laundering failings linked to Danske Bank Estonia and Middle Eastern bank FBME. Epstein, who is believed to have been a billionaire, became a client of Deutsche Bank’s in 2013, five years after he pleaded guilty to procuring for prostitution a girl below age 18 in Florida. Despite coverage of the settlement and subsequent allegations against Epstein, investigators found Deutsche Bank failed to properly monitor his account. “Hundreds of transactions totalling millions of dollars” that raised red flags were missed, the New York Department of Financial Services said. These included payments to Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators, settlement payments with victims totalling $7m, payments to Russian models, payments for women’s school tuition and expenses, and payments to “numerous women with Eastern European surnames” that were “consistent with public allegations of prior wrongdoing.” Repeated “suspicious” cash withdrawals by Epstein — totally over $800,000 over four years — also failed to raise concerns.

Note: 60 Minutes Australia has produced an excellent segment on Jeffrey Epstein and his recently arrested sidekick Ghislaine Maxwell. How did Epstein get away with sexually abusing hundreds of teenage girls for decades? The government and multiple police departments knew what was happening, yet key officials in high positions of power protected him. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Jeffrey Epstein and financial industry corruption from reliable major media sources.

A former friend of Jeffrey Epstein confidante Ghislaine Maxwell said Tuesday she had a “secret stash” of tapes and photos allegedly showing Epstein engaging in sexual activity with various underage girls. The friend said they expect Maxwell to use the stash as her “insurance policy” to possibly avoid jail time. The friend, whose name has not been released, spoke with Daily Mail about the collection. “Ghislaine has always been as cunning as they come. She wasn't going to be with Epstein all those years and not have some insurance,” the friend said. “The secret stash of sex tapes I believe Ghislaine has squirreled away could end up being her get out of jail card if the authorities are willing to trade.” The friend said Epstein not only recorded everything he did, but also recorded several “rich and powerful men who took advantage of his sick largesse.” This gave Epstein something to “hold over” anyone else who partook in the alleged circle of trafficking and abuse between Florida and New York. Maxwell is accused of recruiting and grooming several victims of Epstein’s alleged scheme since the early 1990s. Several victims, including Virginia Roberts Giuffre, said Maxwell would pay them to work at Epstein’s homes in either New York or Florida when they were teenagers. The pair would then begin grooming the victims for “sexual services,” which would allegedly be offered to many of Epstein’s associates and friends among the world’s elite.

Note: For more on this story which was hardly reported in the US, see this informative article. This New York Post article is an exception. 60 Minutes Australia has produced an excellent segment on Jeffrey Epstein and his recently arrested sidekick Ghislaine Maxwell. How did Epstein get away with sexually abusing hundreds of teenage girls for decades? The government and multiple police departments knew what was happening, yet key officials in high positions of power protected him.

Federal authorities arrested Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime confidant of Jeffrey Epstein, on Thursday in New Hampshire in connection with the late, accused sex trafficker. She was taken into custody at about 8:30 a.m. in Bedford, officials said, and hours later appeared, via video feed, before Magistrate Judge Andrea Johnstone in Concord. Johnstone ordered Maxwell, who did not enter a plea, to be sent to New York City and kept in federal custody there. Maxwell was charged with six counts for acts committed between 1994 and 1997 and then allegedly lying to investigators in 2016. Four counts are related to allegedly helping transport minors for sexual activity and two for perjury, according to the criminal complaint. "Maxwell played a critical role in helping Epstein identify, befriend and groom minor victims for abuse," Acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss [said]. "In some cases, Maxwell participated in the abuse herself.” Multiple young women have accused Maxwell ... of complicity in Epstein's alleged sex trafficking ring. They say she either recruited them directly or provided logistical support, like scheduling visits to Epstein's home. The abuse allegedly happened at Palm Beach, Florida; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and at Epstein's home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, officials said. "Maxwell was the center of that sex trafficking ring. Now that the ring has been taken down, I know that I can’t be hurt anymore," Epstein victim Jennifer Araoz said in a statement.

Note: Watch the revealing documentary "Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?" For more on Maxwell, see this CNN article. More on her famous connections can be found in this article. A probing 16-episode program has incredibly revealing interviews with dozens who worked directly with Epstein. Incredibly detailed, it reveals the huge blackmail operation, connections with Israel, and much more. This series goes where others have not dared go. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Jeffrey Epstein from reliable major media sources.

In 2016, famed crime novelist James Patterson and co-authors Tim Malloy and John Connolly published Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal that Undid Him. Patterson had heard about the story of the mysterious billionaire who’d gotten a sweetheart deal after having been charged with sex with underage girls, and he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Yet after the book came out, laying out the breadth of Epstein’s crimes and how a cadre of enablers and hangers-on enabled him for years, it got relatively little attention. By 2019, of course, that had obviously changed. The Miami Herald had published its bombshell investigation into the 13-month deal then-Florida attorney general Alexander Acosta had offered Epstein, allowing him to serve little hard jail time. A new Netflix series, Filthy Rich, based on Patterson’s book, documents all of the lurid details familiar to those who’ve been following the story — the Trump/Clinton connections, the bizarre relationship with British heiress and alleged procurer Ghislaine Maxwell. But it also includes heartbreaking interviews with the young women who say they were victimized by Epstein, adding humanity to the familiar tabloid story. "Initially, people just didn’t see this is as big a story as I thought it was," [said Patterson]. "I just couldn’t imagine anybody that is involved with news that wouldn’t say, 'Oh my God, this is a story.' This is unbelievable to me. Imagine if somebody out in the middle of the county had been with 50 underage girls. I mean ... are you kidding me?"

Note: Watch the revealing documentary "Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?" A probing 16-episode program has incredibly revealing interviews with dozens who worked directly with Epstein. Incredibly detailed, it reveals the huge blackmail operation, connections with Israel, and much more. This series goes where others have not dared go. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Jeffrey Epstein from reliable major media sources.

Jeffrey E. Epstein, the wealthy financier who is accused of sex trafficking, had an unusual dream: He hoped to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his vast New Mexico ranch. Mr. Epstein over the years confided to scientists and others about his scheme ... although there is no evidence that it ever came to fruition. Mr. Epstein, who was charged in July with the sexual trafficking of girls as young as 14, was a serial illusionist: He lied about the identities of his clients, his wealth, his financial prowess, his personal achievements. But he managed to use connections and charisma to cultivate valuable relationships with business and political leaders. He used the same tactics to insinuate himself into an elite scientific community. Mr. Epstein attracted a glittering array of prominent scientists. They included the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who discovered the quark; the theoretical physicist and best-selling author Stephen Hawking; the paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould; Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and best-selling author; George M. Church, a molecular engineer who has worked to identify genes that could be altered to create superior humans; and the M.I.T. theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, a Nobel laureate. The lure for some of the scientists was Mr. Epstein’s money. He dangled financing for their pet projects. Some of the scientists said that the prospect of financing blinded them to the seriousness of his sexual transgressions.

Note: A probing 16-episode program titled "EPSTEIN: Devil in the Darkness" has incredibly revealing interviews with dozens who worked directly with Epstein. Incredibly detailed, it reveals the huge blackmail operation, connections with Israel, and much more. This series goes where others have not dared go. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Jeffrey Epstein and corruption in science from reliable major media sources.

Child sexual abuse material has exploded since the dawn of the internet era, while child sex trafficking also has increased as a result of being made easier for traffickers. The number of child sexual abuse files exchanged online grew from 450,000 in 2004 to 25 million in 2015, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore cofounded Thorn to combat this problem. The non-profits mission is to build technology to defend children from sexual abuse online by eliminating all child sexual abuse material from the internet. Thorn partners across the tech industry, government and NGOs and leverages technology to combat predatory behavior, rescue victims, and protect vulnerable children. The non-profits products are used today in 35 countries and have helped identify more than 30,000 victims of abuse, 10,000 of whom were children. Recently, Thorn was one of eight recipients to share in an over $280 million grant from The Audacious Project by TED. As CEO of Thorn, Julie Cordua manages the Thorn Technology Task Force, the largest organization of its kind, uniting technology companies committed to fighting child exploitation. We saw how technology was being used to exploit our children through child sex trafficking, the spread of child sexual abuse material, and online grooming and coercion. Yet there was no concentrated effort to use technology to fight back and stop this abuse, Cordua says.

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Cardinal George Pell walked out of prison on Tuesday after Australia’s highest court reversed his 2018 conviction for molesting two choirboys decades earlier — liberating the most senior Roman Catholic cleric to ever face trial over child sexual abuse. The world may never be able to assess whether the court’s reasoning was sound. The central evidence — the testimony of the main accuser, on which the case “was wholly dependent,” the judges wrote — has never been released, not in video, audio nor even redacted transcripts. It is just one glaring example of the secrecy and lack of accountability that have shaped the Pell prosecution from the beginning. The case has been a model of opaque operations, starting with judges who dismissed related allegations early on, followed by gag orders preventing media coverage and a refusal to release evidence — even when a jury verdict is dismissed as unreasonable. Legal experts said that the case made clear just how much power judges in Australia have to suppress public oversight and overrule jury verdicts. At every stage, critics argue, Australia’s courts exhibited a penchant for secrecy and insular decision-making that resembled the Catholic Church’s flawed and damaging response to sexual abuse within its ranks. For many of those who have been living with the legacy of abuse in the church, the High Court’s decision is a blow to their faith in a justice system they had just started to trust.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on sexual abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.

Several websites popular with sexual predators were thwarted last month after a determined campaign by groups dedicated to eliminating the content. It was a rare victory in an unending war. In late November, the moderator of three highly trafficked websites posted a message titled “R.I.P.” It offered a convoluted explanation for why they were left with no choice but to close. The unnamed moderator thanked over 100,000 “brothers” who had visited and contributed to the sites before their demise, blaming an “increasingly intolerant world” that did not allow children to “fully express themselves.” In fact, forums on the sites had been bastions of illegal content almost since their inception in 2012, containing child sexual abuse photos and videos, including violent and explicit imagery of infants and toddlers. In a world exploding with the imagery — 45 million photos and videos of child sexual abuse were reported last year alone — the open web is a freewheeling expanse where the underdog task of confronting the predators falls mainly to a few dozen nonprofits with small budgets. Several of those groups, including a child exploitation hotline in Canada, hunted the three sites across the internet for years but could never quite defeat them. But [a] Canadian hotline developed ... a sophisticated tool to find and report illegal imagery. The three sites were overwhelmed by the Canadian tool, which had sent more than 1 million notices of illegal content to the companies keeping them online. And last month, they were compelled to surrender.

Note: Listen to a disturbing, yet vitally important New York Times podcast showing this huge problem that few are willing to look at. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on sexual abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.

The two sisters live in fear of being recognized. Ten years ago, their father did the unthinkable: He posted explicit photos and videos on the internet of them, just 7 and 11 at the time. Many captured violent assaults in their Midwestern home, including him and another man drugging and raping the 7-year-old. The men are now in prison, but in a cruel consequence of the digital era, their crimes are finding new audiences. This year alone, photos and videos of the sisters were found in over 130 child sexual abuse investigations involving mobile phones, computers and cloud storage accounts. The digital trail of abuse — often stored on Google Drive, Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive — haunts the sisters relentlessly, they say, as does the fear of a predator recognizing them from the images. The scope of the problem is only starting to be understood because the tech industry has been more diligent in recent years in identifying online child sexual abuse material, with a record 45 million photos and videos flagged last year. But the same industry has consistently failed to take aggressive steps to shut it down, an investigation by The New York Times found. Approaches by tech companies are inconsistent, largely unilateral and pursued in secret, often leaving pedophiles and other criminals who traffic in the material with the upper hand. There is no common standard for identifying illegal video content, and many major platforms — including AOL, Snapchat and Yahoo — do not even scan for it.

Note: Listen to a disturbing, yet vitally important New York Times podcast showing this huge problem that few are willing to look at. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on sexual abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.

The number of reported photos, videos and other materials related to online child sexual abuse grew by more than 50 percent last year. Nearly 70 million images and videos were reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a federally designated clearinghouse for the imagery that works with law enforcement agencies. Over 41 million videos were reported; the number five years ago was under 350,000. The center identified ... the companies that had detected the imagery, the first time detailed company information had been released. The companies flagged many of the same images and videos multiple times as they were shared among users. Facebook reported nearly 60 million photos and videos, more than 85 percent of the total. About half of the content was not necessarily illegal, according to the company, and was reported to help law enforcement with investigations. Instagram, owned by Facebook, was responsible for an additional 1.7 million photos and videos. Snapchat, Twitter and other social media companies also submitted reports of imagery. So did ... Google and Microsoft. Apple, Dropbox and the chat platform Discord also detected the illegal content. In all, 164 companies submitted reports. Some companies that made a small number of reports ended up finding a large volume of imagery. Dropbox, for instance, made roughly 5,000 reports last year but found over 250,000 photos and videos.

Note: Listen to a disturbing, yet vitally important New York Times podcast showing this huge problem that few are willing to look at. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on sexual abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.

Cybercriminal Eric Eoin Marques pleaded guilty in an American court this week. Marques faces up to 30 years in jail for running Freedom Hosting, which temporarily existed beyond reach of the law and ended up being used to host drug markets, money-laundering operations, hacking groups, and millions of images of child abuse. Investigators were somehow able to break the layers of anonymity that Marques had constructed, leading them to locate a crucial server in France. This discovery eventually led them to Marques himself. Marques was the first in a line of famous cybercriminals to be caught despite believing that using the privacy-shielding anonymity network Tor would make them safe behind their keyboards. The case demonstrates that government agencies can trace suspects through networks that were designed to be impenetrable. Marques has blamed the American NSA’s world-class hackers, but the FBI has also been building up its efforts since 2002. And, some observers say, they often withhold key details of their investigations from defendants and judges alike—secrecy that could have wide-ranging cybersecurity implications across the internet. The FBI had found a way to break Tor’s anonymity protections, but the technical details of how it happened remain a mystery. “Perhaps the greatest overarching question related to the investigation of this case is how the government was able to pierce Tor’s veil of anonymity,” Marques’s defense lawyers wrote in a recent filing.

Note: For more on this important case, see this informative article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on sexual abuse scandals and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

As word came that the Boy Scouts of America had filed for bankruptcy protection, one alleged abuse survivor was moved to come forward. The man told NBC News he was a 14-year-old Boy Scout in Louisiana working on an astronomy merit badge when a scoutmaster invited him to go by the lake to look at the stars. “I was very naďve,” he said. “But when he grabbed my groin, I immediately reacted.” So did the scoutmaster. “He threatened me with a machete,” the 73-year-old said, asking not to be identified. But now that the Boy Scouts are seeking Chapter 11 protection, the alleged abuse survivor said he’s ready to join the more than 3,000 men who are suing the nonprofit for allowing pedophiles inside the organization to prey on the boys. Michael Mertz, a Chicago-based lawyer who has represented Boy Scouts victims, said that by declaring bankruptcy, the organization is trying to limit the damages. Mitchell Garabedian, whose efforts to go after predatory Roman Catholic priests were dramatized in the Oscar-winning movie “Spotlight” and who also represents Boy Scouts victims, said the move to bankruptcy court could force the organization to open all its so-called “perversion files.” Those files, which were collected by the Boy Scouts and go back to 1944, contain the names of 7,819 Scout leaders who allegedly preyed on boys, as well as the names of 12,254 victims, experts and attorneys involved in the cases have said. So far, only the files from 1965 to 1985 have been made public.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on sexual abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.

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