Why 14 Police Officers Came to My Door — And Why I’ll Never Publish Stories About Minors

There are certain subjects you will almost never see in GoNaked News. I don't publish stories about underage kids. I don't publish stories about sexual experiences people had when they were teenagers. I don't publish stories involving incest. Even though I had my own first sexual experience when I was 15 with my girlfriend's 23-year-old uncle, I don't write about it here.

Part of that is simply editorial choice. Those aren't subjects I'm particularly interested in covering. But there's another reason, and to explain it, I need to take you back five years, to August 2021.

I was out of town when 14 police officers showed up at my house. They knocked on the door at 4:23am, and before long they were inside (after breaking down the door), going through everything. Bob was home alone, confused and terrified by what was happening. Officers searched the house and took virtually every piece of technology they could find: laptops, old computers, external hard drives, thumb drives, and Bob's work computers. If it stored data, they were interested in it, and in my house, that was a lot of technology.

At one point, Bob asked if he could go into another room to put on some clothes. An officer accompanied him and stood there while he dressed. Eventually, Bob was told why they were there. Police believed I might be in possession of illegal images involving minors. Bob immediately told them they were wrong.

After roughly three hours of officers going through our home, they left with boxes of computers and storage devices. Bob called me absolutely panicked. When he told me what had happened, I was panicked too. I immediately called a friend who I knew could connect me with an attorney, and within hours I had legal representation.

So how in the hell had I ended up the subject of a child-pornography investigation?

For that, we have to go back a few years earlier.

Back in the day, Tumblr was one of the great warehouses of adult imagery on the internet. Whatever you were into, somebody probably had a Tumblr devoted to it. It also happened to be one of my favorite places to find images for the newsletter.

In late 2018, Tumblr announced that it was banning explicit sexual content from the platform. Users were given some warning before the policy took effect, and suddenly everyone I knew who had been using Tumblr for years was trying to save whatever they could before it disappeared.

I started downloading images manually, but that quickly became ridiculous. There was simply too much material. Then I came across a post on Reddit about a tool somebody had created. You entered the address of a Tumblr blog, and the software downloaded the images from the entire site.

I tried it, and it worked spectacularly well. On one Tumblr alone, I downloaded something like 9,000 images in about 90 seconds. Suddenly I had a steam shovel instead of a teaspoon.

A dozen or so friends and I began archiving sites before Tumblr's deadline. Somebody liked BDSM. Somebody liked men of color. Somebody liked rope play. Somebody liked watersports. Somebody liked fisting. Somebody liked leather. You get the picture. It was adult pornography, and there was a mountain of it.

The important thing to understand is that the downloading software didn't look at an image and ask whether I liked it. It didn't ask whether I even knew what was buried four years deep in a Tumblr archive. It simply grabbed everything, page after page, thousands of images at a time, and dumped them onto external hard drives and thumb drives.

When I say I accumulated millions of images, I mean that literally. I had millions of them.

For a couple of years, those files sat on hard drives. Eventually I had so many drives that I couldn't remember what was where. So during the summer of 2021, I began moving the archives into cloud storage. I would upload perhaps 100,000 images at a time, buy more storage, upload another batch, buy more storage, and keep going. Terabyte after terabyte of adult images.

What I hadn't considered was something very important: putting something into cloud storage does not mean nobody else is looking at it.

Cloud services use automated systems designed to identify suspected illegal material, and somewhere among the millions of images I had accumulated, two images were reportedly flagged as potentially involving minors.

To this day, I have never seen those images. I don't know exactly what they contained. I don't know which Tumblr they came from. I don't know whether they involved an actual minor, an adult who appeared younger, or something else that triggered the system. What I do know is that two images buried somewhere in millions of automatically downloaded files were enough to bring 14 police officers to my home.

For months afterward, there were conversations between my attorney and investigators. Somewhere along the way, somebody had the unenviable job of examining the material they had confiscated, which meant wading through every variety of adult sexual content imaginable.

There were men engaged in extreme BDSM. Men strapped to St. Andrew's crosses. Big men in jockstraps smoking cigars. Watersports. Fisting. Rope. Leather. Every fetish somebody had thought worthy of creating a Tumblr page about.

I hope whoever drew that assignment had a broad definition of professional development.

Meanwhile, my attorney and I discussed how the files had been obtained. I explained the downloading program and that entire Tumblr archives had been copied automatically rather than images being individually selected. I even talked to him about metadata, the information that can sometimes help show where a file originated, when it was acquired, and how it was handled. I knew enough about technology to understand that the files themselves might help explain how they got there.

Then we waited.

There were long stretches when nothing happened. My attorney told me at one point that if several years passed without charges, that would obviously be encouraging. We have now passed the five-year mark, and no charges were ever filed against me. I can only conclude from that outcome that investigators found no evidence that I intentionally sought out or downloaded illegal material.

What I never got back were the computers, the hard drives, or the thumb drives. As far as I know, they're sitting somewhere in a government storage facility collecting dust.

The part that stayed with us, however, wasn't the technology. It was what happened to our home.

Our front door and doorframe were badly damaged during the entry, and we had to replace them ourselves. The house had been turned upside down. Bob spent two days putting things back where they belonged, but putting the furniture back was the easy part.

It took him months before he could sleep normally again. For about two years, I lived with a low-grade feeling that something might happen at any moment. Every knock at the door felt different. Every unexpected phone call felt different. There is something profoundly unsettling about realizing that strangers can enter your home, go through your belongings, take your computers, examine your private life, and leave you wondering for years what happens next.

And throughout all of this, I continued publishing GoNaked. Most of you never knew any of this was happening because at the time I was advised not to discuss it publicly, so I didn't.

I'm telling you now for two reasons.

The first is because I want you to understand one of my editorial boundaries. I want absolutely nothing to do with sexual material involving minors. That includes nostalgic stories about teenage sexual awakenings. It includes photographs. It includes fictional material that starts wandering into questionable territory. It includes incest stories and other subjects where age and consent can become murky.

Could some of those stories be perfectly legal? Of course. I'm still not interested. I have been close enough to that fire to know I don't need to warm my hands over it.

The second reason is because my experience is a cautionary tale about digital storage. Many of us use Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, and other services to store our photographs, artwork, documents, and personal archives. Do not confuse "stored in my account" with "completely private."

Automated systems scan enormous amounts of digital material for security, abuse, and illegal content. If something in your account triggers one of those systems, you may suddenly find yourself answering questions about a file you don't even remember possessing.

The fact that you didn't intentionally download something may eventually matter enormously, but it doesn't stop the knock on the door. It doesn't stop somebody from taking your computers. It doesn't repair your front door, and it doesn't give you back the nights you spent wondering what was going to happen next.

So be careful with what you download. Be especially careful with programs that scrape websites or automatically download thousands of files you have never personally reviewed. Know what's sitting on your hard drives. Know what's being uploaded to your cloud accounts.

And understand that digital possession can carry consequences even when the thing sitting on your computer arrived there buried among a million other files.

Five years later, I can finally tell you why there are certain subjects I simply will not touch. Some editorial lines are philosophical. Some are ethical. And some are drawn by 14 police officers standing in your living room.