Libs of TikTok may be making it harder to bust actual predators

The notorious right-wing influencer places me in an odd position--being as concerned for the safety of people preying on children as I am for the kids they victimize.

Chaya Raichik, better known as Libs of Tik Tok

In my two decades as a liberal blogger and my decade-plus of being paid to open my big mouth, one thing has been clear besides my opposition to the religious right. I have less than zero tolerance for scumbags who prey on children. Part of it comes from discovering not long after I left my first “wife” that she had willfully concealed a history of abusing her own children. That history would have ended my first marriage before it even started, and would have led me to throw her out first and ask questions later had I known about it while we were married.

Partly to atone for having been an unwitting accomplice in a manifestly unfit mother’s attempt to cover her tracks, I started the petition that resulted in Graham Spanier being pushed out for his disgraceful and tone-deaf behavior in the Jerry Sandusky case. For that reason, I’ve also called out fundies for sweeping child abuse under the rug, and engaging in victim blaming and victim shaming of the worst type.

That being said, as my wife and I were packing up to move to Michigan, I found myself in a rather odd position. I learned about a teacher who was engaging in behavior that at best—AT BEST—raised serious questions about whether she belonged within an area code of children. But I found myself as concerned for that teacher’s safety as I was for the kids she taught. How’s that, you ask? Well, the person who turned the hot lights on this teacher is a woman who has proven herself to be, with apologies to Keith Olbermann, one of the worst people in the world—namely, Chaya Raichik, better known as Libs of TikTok.

In mid-October, Libs of TikTok highlighted a video from a trans teacher talking about how she’d had a chat with one of her students who was the only one who noticed she was growing breasts. Being the son of a teacher, I knew this was inappropriate as all hell. Pretty much any other time, I’d be calling for that teacher to be suspended, or at the very least severely reprimanded.

But that wasn’t my only concern at the time. Anyone who wonders why needs to consider Libs of TikTok’s sordid history. The people and institutions mentioned in her posts have frequently been the targets of harassment and threats, including bomb threats. A study in late 2022 by Task Force Butler found that Raichik singled out someone 280 times from April to November 2022—and concluded her tweets were directly responsible for 66 incidents of harassment and threats.

Either Libs of TikTok knows her followers are abandoning the way of peace at an alarming rate, or she doesn’t really care. At worst, she’s a stochastic terrorist of the worst type. At best, Raichik is disengaged in a way that an influencer of her standing simply cannot be. If I knew that significant numbers of people who read my posts were engaging in violent behavior, I’d call it out in the strongest terms. In the absence of something I haven’t heard or seen, Raichik hasn’t done so—or at least not making it clear enough that this is not acceptable.

For that reason, I was shocked to see this video shared by conservative blogger Kaeley Triller Harms. Even though Kaeley is as conservative as I am liberal, she and I have forged a friendship over our shared passion for calling out abuse in the church, and how the church has chained women up for far too long under the guise of “submission.” It reminds me of my high school and college days, when sitting and talking with those who don’t think like you didn’t make you a squish, a sellout, or a “cuck.”

But Kaeley and I have gotten into more than a few knock-down, drag-out debates over the last two-plus years. This was one of them. She and her friends couldn’t understand why I publicly warned Raichik that she would be held morally—if not legally—responsible if any harm befell that teacher. I explained to them that given the hard proof that Libs of TikTok’s posts have directly led to a spike in harassment, trolling, and threats, we liberals see her in the same way that conservatives see antifa.

A few days after we settled in our new home in Michigan, I learned Libs of TikTok was at it again. This time she turned the hot lights on Renee Hoberman, a child therapist from Long Island who had been arrested and charged with distributing child sex abuse material.

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The evidence against Hoberman seems absolutely damning. For much of this summer and fall—at least—Hoberman distributed what federal prosecutors on Long Island called “heinous and disturbing” child sex abuse imagery on Kik, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord, some of which depicted infants. She also popped in on several Kik chatrooms posing as a man and giving horribly graphic descriptions of assaulting kids.

According to The New York Times, Hoberman isn’t insulting our intelligence by claiming to be innocent. She confessed to using multiple accounts to upload these images. She’s facing some serious prison time, if I crunched the numbers right. According to the online Sentencing Guidelines Calculator, she’s looking at a minimum of 10 to 12 years behind bars.

And yet, when I saw this post, as sick as I felt for the kids victimized in the images shared by Hoberman, I was also concerned for Hoberman’s safety. What if somebody sees fit to take the law into their own hands when she appears in court? Consider how often Raichik’s followers have seen fit to act as judge, jury and executioner. Given that history, it would be derelict if measures weren’t in place to make sure Hoberman is kept safe at her appearances.

Hyperbole, you say? Well, there are numerous instances of where vigilantes taking the law into their own hands to track down suspected child predators. In so doing, they often crossed lines that should never, ever, ever be crossed—even when there is no doubt the predators are guilty. The Venn diagrams between these vigilantes and Libs of Tik Tok’s followers have substantial overlap.

In particular, I was reminded of a profile NBC News did in 2019 of “POPSquad,” a volunteer troupe that conducts cyberstings of people who troll online for sexual trysts with minors. NBC focused on a 2018 POPSquad encounter that went tragically sideways. For several days, a POPSquad member posed as a 15-year-old boy while chatting with 20-year-old Alain Malcolm. The “boy” convinced Malcolm to drive to Bristol and meet him at a house for sex. But when Malcolm arrived, he was confronted by POPSquad leader Shane Erdemann, who interrogated Malcolm about his plans for the night. As Malcolm went to his car, Erdemann caught video of his license plate and loudly read the numbers as his camera was still rolling. Malcolm hanged himself when he got home half an hour later.

Erdemann had compiled enough evidence to get Malcolm kicked out of community college, fired from his job at a circuit board company, and possibly arrested. But it all went to pot because Erdemann couldn’t leave well enough alone and read Malcolm’s license plate out loud, then uploaded the video to Facebook (it was subsequently deleted). What if someone had seen this on Facebook and decided to take matters into their own hands? And what if it had been someone else’s car? An innocent third party may have been put in harm’s way.

It’s highly likely that Malcolm actually did molest boys, but they will never get justice because POPSquad couldn’t leave well enough alone. If I had been Malcolm’s family, I would have sued POPSquad for wrongful death. Lest you think that wouldn’t have gone anywhere, that’s what exactly happened in Texas a decade and a half ago. In 2006, Bill Conradt, the chief deputy assistant DA in Rockwall County—east of Dallas—committed suicide as a SWAT team barreled into his house in nearby Terrell. It turned out that a man identified as Conradt had been in contact with a volunteer from Perverted-Justice as part of an online sting of child predators in partnership with NBC’s series, “To Catch a Predator.” The volunteer had been posing as a 13-year-old boy, and convinced Conradt to meet him at what was actually a bait house in Murphy where host Chris Hansen and his team had set up operations along with Perverted-Justice and police. According to a post-mortem by Esquire, Hansen and NBC producers pressed for an arrest warrant and a SWAT action when Conradt didn’t show up.

Conradt’s family, led by his sister, Patricia, sued NBC for wrongful death and invasion of privacy. Any chance NBC may have had in court evaporated in February 2008 when federal judge Denny Chin—who would later go on to preside over the Bernie Madoff case—gave NBC a severe tongue-lashing when he allowed the case to proceed. Chin found that a reasonable jury could conclude NBC stampeded the police into the SWAT raid in the name of bigger ratings even though there was no evidence Conradt was accused of violent crimes, and should have known it would raise “substantial risk of suicide.” In so doing, Chin said, NBC “engaged in conduct so outrageous and extreme that no society should tolerate it.” He also found that NBC and the police reasonably should have known this was a possibility. In other words—even if Conradt was a pervert, he still had rights that NBC and the police flagrantly disregarded. Under the circumstances, NBC was all but forced to settle later that year.

The message was obvious—even if Conradt was a pervert, he still had rights, and those rights had to be respected. Indeed, this is a big reason why prosecutors find themselves tearing their hair out when vigilante groups get involved. Due to their lack of training, they frequently use tactics that make prosecuting their targets difficult, if not impossible—even when their targets are manifestly guilty.

That’s exactly what happened with the “To Catch a Predator” sting. Prosecutors in Collin County—home to Murphy—decided not to prosecute any of the men swept up in the dragnet because Murphy police didn’t conduct any real investigation before making the arrests. Rather, prosecutors believed the police simply worked as an adjunct of Perverted-Justice, an outfit that was essentially a vigilante group. That’s not just a technicality. That’s an important safeguard to prevent wrongful arrests. Prosecutors later admitted that they believed some of the men were predators, but their hands were tied because the arrests were illegal.

A similar situation played out on the Illinois side of St. Louis. For over two years, Kyle Swanson and his compatriots at KTS Predator Hunters posed as children online to lure men into parking lots. Once the proverbial roof fell in on their targets, Swanson and friends streamed it live on Facebook. According to former Madison County State’s Attorney Tom Gibbons, KTS Predator Hunters’ tactics frequently made it “virtually impossible to charge somebody,” even when the people being profiled are clearly guilty. Swanson also showed reckless disregard for the safety of innocent third parties. For instance, in September 2020, Swanson lured a suspected predator to a meeting in the parking lot of a school in Collinsville without warning school officials or the police. Collinsville’s superintendent of schools blew a gasket when he learned Swanson lured “a potentially dangerous adult” onto school property.

The bill finally came due for Swanson in 2021, when he lured a man into meeting him in a parking lot. Swanson refused to let the man out of Swanson’s car, and even threatened to hit him. When prosecutors found out about it, they hit the ceiling—especially when it emerged that Swanson’s target had deleted “evidence of a crime” from his phone, potentially short-circuiting a criminal investigation.

Swanson was brought up on charges of unlawful restraint, obstruction of justice, and assault. Later that year, Swanson reached a deferred prosecution agreement with prosecutors that called for him to end all sting operations in Madison County. Considering the near-mathematical certainty that Swanson’s tactics allowed actual predators to get away, his lawyer must have been one helluva talker.

When I called out Libs of Tik Tok for her post about that teacher, Kaeley and her friends wondered why I was actually concerned for that teacher’s safety. Perhaps if these instances where people saw fit to take the law into their own hands were more widely reported, they’d understand. After all, one of the most sacrosanct principles of our criminal justice system is that no one is below the law. And that principle applies even when someone is manifestly guilty. Apparently Libs of Tik Tok doesn’t understand that principle. And because of that, there’s a very real possibility that some real slimeballs may never face justice—and that their victims will end up the real losers.

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