Well, well. That didn’t take long. And of course it was utterly predictable.
I’m talking here about the RCMP and BC police (those bastions of sex-crime-solving competence!) ruling out Kody Maxson as a suspect in the online sexual blackmailing and bullying of Amanda Todd, who took her own life as a result of this and the added humiliation heaped on her by her peers at school. As the Toronto Star reports it, it’s already settled that he is NOT their man:
The man first named by Anonymous is facing charges in B.C. stemming from an August incident of alleged sexual assault against a victim under 16. A representative for Anonymous, who refused to give a name, told the Star the group “didn’t care” if it was wrong because the man had been accused of similar crimes, though the charges are still before the court.
The man’s lawyer, David Gable, issued a comment saying that the RCMP has cleared the named individual in the Anonymous report:
“Police have announced he is a person of no interest to them regarding Amanda Todd. His thing came about through an anonymous group that hacked in through a computer and got a lot of IP addresses, his being only one of them.”
Well, that’s nice. Very convenient for Mr. Maxson and his lawyer, no doubt, since it won’t be brought to bear on his current sex-assault charge. (Recall that he appeared in court on it just this past Monday.) And very convenient, too, for a police investigative force looking for a quick wrap-up to what’s shaping up as another very ugly, messy case.
Yet, funnily, I don’t believe any of them. Maybe because Vice has done more work investigating Kody Maxson (and verifying the claims of Anonymous) than the police and Mr. Maxson’s lawyer seem to have done. And they have found that Kody Maxson is indeed an online sexual blackmailer of young girls, with a snail-trail of incriminating data that he’s done a very poor job of trying to expunge.
And yes, the very act of scrubbing his identity seems more than a little guilty on Kody Maxson’s part. He tried to change the name on his Facebook page (to “John Doee”; how original!) around the time the Anon news broke; too bad the URL still shows it’s him. And even worse for him, there’s the Daily Capper video, referenced by Vice (it has since been taken down; another incriminating detail), which indicates that he’s one of a “community” (if you can use that word to denote a loose aggregation of slimeballs) that prey on girls in webcam chatrooms, capturing their images and using them to blackmail and bully these same girls into giving them a “show”.
Recall that this is what Amanda Todd refused to do, whereupon a brief flash of her breasts from an earlier chat was used very brutally against her. The video in fact mentions an Amanda, and was made in 2010…the same year that Amanda Todd’s long online nightmare began.
The fact that his fellow sex predators saw fit to give Kody Maxson an award for “Blackmailer of the Year”, based on his webcam-chat activities with girls just like Amanda, puts the lie to his contention that he is innocent and was “only trying to help”, as well as the police’s claim that he is “not a person of interest”. Based on what Vice uncovered, I would say that he is very much a person of interest, though it’s obvious that he is not the only one.
And, worse: If he skates on this incident, as it now looks like he will do, I predict that in a few years’ time, after Amanda’s sad story slides out of the headlines, we’ll be hearing about him again. And what we will hear will be depressingly familiar. You don’t need to be a criminal profiler to know that guys like this won’t quit; they’ll keep right on doing what they do, even if they have to look a bit further over their shoulders each time.
