Pedogate

Alabama televangelist Paul Acton Bowen pleaded guilty to sexually abusing six teenage boys. A judge stacked the counts. He is not eligible until the year 2980.

Burbank nanny Travis Elconin produced child sexual abuse material with children in his care. A federal judge sentenced him to 30 years and lifetime supervision.

Jared Perry, serving 17 years for assaults on infants, was found dead at HMP Parc in Wales. Prison-death investigators treated it as a suicide in custody.

A 38-country task force arrested 337 people tied to Welcome to Video, a Bitcoin-paywalled dark-web abuse site. The operator, Jong Woo Son, served 18 months in South Korea.

Richard Huckle, one of Britain's worst child-sex offenders, was stabbed to death in his Full Sutton cell. An inquest later examined how a high-risk prisoner was left that exposed.

The FBI warned parents about child sextortion. By 2025 NCMEC logged more than 50,000 financial-sextortion reports a year — 137 a day — mostly targeting teen boys.

Conspiracy of Silence, the 1994 documentary on the Franklin child-abuse scandal, was ordered destroyed. One copy survived. The torrent still circulates with the John DeCamp interview.

Disney music publishing director Jon Heely was charged with three felony counts of child sex abuse. Two juries hung. A judge dismissed the case in October 2019. He was never…

German police dismantled Elysium, a darknet forum with 87,000 members trading child-abuse material. Operators were jailed in 2019. Kidflix, with nearly two million users, was taken down in 2025.

Elite child-sex trafficking networks spanning Hollywood, Washington, and the Vatican were never isolated. The DOJ's 3.5-million-page dump and Katie Phang's lawsuit show how power still protects itself.