“I surrender,” Marty said, putting his hands up, blood streaking down his cheek, “You got me good.”

Marty, according to Joshua Mundy and Jay Carnicom, allegedly arrived at in the Days Inn parking lot in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that day to meet a 13-year-old girl for sex. Instead, he met Dads Against Predators (DAP), an organization that confronts alleged pedophiles and films the encounters for social media.

Public humiliation is the primary MO for the vast majority of vigilante pedophile hunters, but DAP is different. These guys draw blood, often releasing videos where they openly assault their targets. The Marty sting was brutal.

The Daily Caller is withholding images and identification of some alleged predators, including Marty’s video, because some appearing in this story have neither been charged nor convicted of a crime.

A Daily Caller review of dozens of these kinds of videos from various sting groups shows that while exchanges typically get testy, they almost never get violent. For DAP, however, the moment things get testy, they immediately start pounding on their marks.

Carnicom and Mundy had been posing as an underage girl on a dating app, a tactic they’ve deployed hundreds of times, to lure Marty into a public appearance. Once they had Marty out in the open, they confronted him about what they say were a number of inappropriate texts he allegedly sent them.

Mundy began reading Marty’s alleged texts aloud. “‘You’re fucking sexy,’ to a 13-year-old girl,” Mundy recited. “‘I don’t want to go to jail,’” Mundy continued reading. “‘You’re gonna be fine,’ little girl.’”

“You’re calling little girls ‘babe?’” Carnicorn asked.

“Hey! This man is here to meet a 13-year-old girl!” Mundy yelled, a staple shaming tactic Mundy has used hundreds of times throughout his five-year career of catching and exposing alleged pedophiles on the internet.

Marty continued to walk away as the pedophile hunters egged him on to call the police. “Leave me alone,” Marty pleaded before trying to run away. His short dash didn’t last long, as he soon turned around and raised his fists to fight.

The two pedophile hunters, both holding iPhones to record the encounter, quickly accepted the invitation. A storm of punches rained on Marty’s face, opening a large gash under his eye.

DAP informs Marty that the cops are on their way, at which point he flees.

Though the hunters referred Marty’s case to detectives, police in Indiana did not file charges. Years later, he allegedly again unknowingly alerted DAP while they were posing as another underaged girl on a dating app, but Marty left the chat when DAP revealed the girl’s age, DAP alleged.

The Daily Caller reached out to Marty to hear his side of the story but did not hear back by time of publication. Marty is one of many targets of DAP sting operations who did not face criminal charges. The Daily Caller is withholding his full identity since he has neither been charged nor convicted of a crime.

The rapid rise in social media content consumption in the last decade has birthed some unique phenomena: Teenagers now become multi-millionaires by playing video games. Women turn their 15 minutes of fame into lucrative OnlyFans careers. And now, 17 years after the final episode of NBC’s “To Catch A Predator,” online pedophile hunters can publicly shame their targets and share the content to the masses.

Their videos once languished on the back-burner of social media algorithms, a casualty of a censor-happy media climate. Now, as Americans increasingly reject Big Tech censorship, the number of vigilante pedophile hunters are blowing up, reaching users’ feeds across the globe as they watch their follower counts rocket skyward.

Alex Rosen of I Fight For Kids, for instance, has gained significant followings across various platforms. X, however, is where accounts like his and DAP’s have made their biggest strides, particularly in the Elon Musk era.

Rosen’s account, @iFightForKids, has amassed over 315,000 followers. That’s up from 6,500 in July 2022, according to analytics firm SocialBlade.

The numerous online predator hunters deploy markedly different approaches to their craft. Rosen, for example, doesn’t ever lay hands on his targets. DAP, on the other hand, has no problem getting violent.

In one case, Mundy roundhouse kicked an alleged predator in the skull, knocking him out cold.

“I’ve kicked several predators in the face,” Mundy told the Daily Caller.

DAP accuses their targets of soliciting underage children in their videos, but some haven’t been formally charged with a crime. Because of this, the Daily Caller blurred their faces throughout this story and chose not to include or link out to any full videos of the pedophile hunts for legal reasons.

Despite meting out most of the violence, members of DAP have also suffered injuries, at least in one case significant enough for a hospital visit.

“My partner got shot. I had to wrestle a gun from a guy,” Mundy said. “The shot took place so close to his leg, it almost looks like a shotgun blast.”

The widely covered June 2022 incident occurred at a Target department store in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

“The guy went on a high-speed chase with us after he tried to shoot us. I had to jump on him, wrestle him. It’s a whole thing,” Mundy explained. “It’s hard to even tell the story, because there are some stories in my life … imagine having a ghost story. You don’t like telling it because it sounds fake.”

DAP’s critics wonder how they get away with assaulting their marks, but Mundy said it’s highly unlikely that people caught in vigilante stings would call the cops on him. He told the Caller that cops did arrest him once, but the charges were dropped.

North Carolina police issued warrants for “simple affray” for Mundy and his two colleagues following the Target shooting, according to My Fox 8.

“The number one question I hear all the time is, ‘How do you get away with hitting them?’ But the reality is [for] assault … they gotta press charges. They gotta call the cops, right? So I can call the cops, report my stuff and send the police my videos. All the time the police ask for my videos, and obviously I’m smacking predators in these videos, but the police can’t watch the video and be like, ‘He’s hitting somebody, so that’s assault,’ or else they would charge everybody on WWE with assault every Monday,” Mundy said.

“Even if they press charges, okay, I bond out. I get a lawyer. I fight it. Now I subpoena them in court. I make them talk about it by the file in court. So I guess there’s ways that they could do it, but I’m always prepared for that,” he concluded.

Dads Against Predators shove a target of a string operation onto the ground in a department store. Screenshot/Twitter/@jaycarnicomdap

Rosen disagrees with this tactic. He argues it leads to a lower conviction rate.

“I think hitting them … don’t get me wrong; I want to murder these people,” Rosen explained. “[But] this society that we’re in, hitting them is the dumbest thing you can do, because all it does is just let them walk.”

“All it takes is a defense attorney saying, ‘Oh, they only lured my guy here because they wanted to get quick, easy views and just slap him around. They don’t even care about questioning the guy.’ So there’s a lot of things that can go wrong.”

Despite his non-violent ethos, Rosen, like Mundy, has also stared down the wrong end of a gun. At least two of his targets have pulled firearms on him, one in Oregon in 2022 and another in June in Massachusetts, he told the Caller.

“The pedo got arrested on a bunch of penalties for that. So I didn’t complain,” Rosen said.

Rosen estimated that of his near-600 busts, police arrested more than 100 of the alleged predators. Some, like 56-year-old Arkansas man Jimmy Dewayne Stevens, go away for a long time. An Arkansas judge sentenced Stevens to 35 years in prison for possession of child pornography after Rosen caught him.

“He was very comfortable with me. He voluntarily went to the station and turned himself in for child pornography,” Rosen said of Stevens. “He got his devices, and he willingly got in the car with me, and I drove him to the station, and he showed the cops his CP [child pornography], and he got arrested,” Rosen relayed.

While Rosen disavows taking a physical approach with his targets, his operations are no less eventful.

“This pedo we caught in Springfield, Missouri, horrible tweaker, skittish, didn’t want to talk to me,” Rosen explained. “Tells me he bought child pornography of seven-year-olds. And then he’s like, ‘You know what? I’m suicidal.’ And at that point I was — I can’t let you go back in or tell me that. So we called 911,” Rosen continued.

“He ends up going into his shed, he gets brass knuckles and a knife and he starts walking down the street. I’m like, ‘What do you have in your hand?’ He tells me, ‘Knife.’ And then he’s like, ‘I’m not gonna use it on you.’ I’m like, ‘Oh shit.’ And then he kneeled down; he put the knife to his neck. And I’m trying to tell him, ‘Drop the knife. Drop the knife.’ And luckily, I stalled him enough the cops came, and he ended up dropping the knife. He’s on a 96-hour hold right now, and they got a hold of his devices, and when they dump them, they’re gonna find pretty nasty shit on there.”

Rosen’s work has caught the attention of figures across the political spectrum. Valentina Gomez, a 25-year-old Republican candidate for Missouri Secretary of State, joined him on the Missouri hunt. Gomez has gone viral in the past for things like encouraging people not to be “weak and gay” and firing a flamethrower to LGBT books.

“I was with Alex and the team the entire time until the pedophile was arrested and taken into custody,” Gomez told the Daily Caller. “We need to bring back public executions for anyone who commits a crime against a child. I’ll be happy to provide the bullets.”

The last public execution in the United States took place in 1936.

Political hoops, however, sometimes limit the reach and scope of what these organizations are able to do, Mundy says.

“When we first started, we were heavily focused on trying to go places to get these guys charged, finding states where the laws … because Ohio, there’s nothing that they can do at all. But if you cross the states out of Michigan, you have more of a chance to get a charge,” Mundy explained. “Because there’s not an actual minor on the phone, to them, it falls under a role play or just pretend, technically. A lot of other states are like that as well.”

Ohio’s Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force corroborated those claims. If a police officer is posing as a minor and a predator attempts to solicit the officer “to engage in sexual conduct with the offender,” that offender can be prosecuted under Ohio’s statute.

It applies if “the other person is a law enforcement officer posing as a person who is less than thirteen years of age, and the offender believes that the other person is less than thirteen years of age or is reckless in that regard,” according to Ohio’s criminal code.

The statute, however, does not apply to civilians posing as minors, David Frattare, the Statewide Commander of Ohio’s ICAC, told the Caller.

Some refer to people like Rosen and Mundy as vigilantes — a label they reject — and say they should leave the job of catching potential pedophiles to the police.

“We’re not vigilantes because we don’t break the law. We gather evidence of a crime; we turn it into the cops,” Rosen told the Caller. “It is no different than me recording a robbery taking place … It gives the cops probable cause to go do their job. And you know, cops will probably say, ‘Oh, well, leave it to us.’ But behind the scenes, so many cops are appreciative of what we do.”

Mundy echoed those sentiments, stating that cops have been overwhelmingly appreciative of his efforts despite public-facing police departments criticizing their operations.

“Is it the cops job? Of course it is, but it’s everybody’s job to come against child predators,” Rosen told the Caller.

Law enforcement, however, noted that rather than helping put pedophiles in prison, vigilantes are often the reason suspects end up walking free.

“Our hands are kind of tied with them, because we can’t use that stuff to prosecute someone. So without finding more evidence or obtaining confessions for other true victims, there’s not much we can do,” a detective with the Goshen Police Department (GPD) in Ohio, who asked not to be identified by name, told the Daily Caller. “Any time that they do [a sting operation] and they don’t report to law enforcement prior to a confrontation, I think that they’re interfering with it.”

The detective referred to a 2022 case where a vigilante group, Predator Catchers Muncie, apparently lured a Goshen School Board president to Indiana and accused him of trying to meet with an 11-year-old girl.

While police responded to the video the predator hunters made, they ultimately did not charge the man.

“[The hunters] did a pretty good job talking with that guy. They got a lot of information that, if we could have used, would have been great in trial, but without getting law enforcement involved, they’re kind of standing in the way,” the Goshen detective told the Caller.

The detective believes the vigilantes are a net benefit to society, noting that they serve as a deterrent for potential predators. He’d like to see them coordinate with law enforcement more, though, rather than take matters into their own hands.

“If we can’t build probable cause for a search warrant because we’re not obtaining the information, then we’ll never know. So there’s potentially victimized people in the past that we would never be able to find out because we can’t use the information obtained from a citizen, and they’re not being held accountable for the pedophilic actions that they’re taking now,” the detective said. Dads Against Predators’ Joshua Mundy shoves a sting target into a bush. Screenshot/Twitter/@jaycarnicomdap

Professor David Finkelhor, Director of the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes against Children Research Center, told the Caller that these vigilantes should stay out of it altogether.

“[Law enforcement] have very strict guidelines and protocols that they observe when they do this to be able to make sure that evidence is clean and that information that they get will not be thrown out in court,” Finkelhor said. “They’re also concerned with conducting their investigations in ways that don’t result in harm to criminals. They don’t want these offenders to be dying by suicide.”

Both Rosen and Mundy told the Caller that targets of their operations have killed themselves after the hunters released their videos on the internet.

“This is tricky business that needs to be left to professionals,” Finkelhor said. “We don’t want to encourage non-professionals to get the idea that finding and catching criminals is really something that they should be doing. The whole basis of our judicial system is really that we turn over this function to a set of professionals and experts, because we want it done well. We want it done impartially. We want it done in ways that can be supervised and where accountability can be served. Once you get freelancers going in this space, all that is lost.”

Dads Against Predators slap a target of a string operation in a department store. Screenshot/Twitter/@jaycarnicomdap

Both Rosen and Mundy said their targets hail “from all walks of life,” but the political left particularly seems to be the side more likely to defend potential predators.

Left-wing advocacy groups like the Global Prevention Project champion the use of the term “minor attracted people,” or MAPS.

State Democratic lawmakers in Washington also introduced a bill to change the name of the state’s Sex Offender Policy Board to the Sex Offense Policy Board.

Democratic Kentucky State Senator Karen Berg used that language in February while discussing the idea of supplying MAPS with child-sized sex dolls.

Berg did, however, clarify that she voted for a bill that would outlaw sex dolls fashioned to look like children.

Authors like Allyn Walker have tried to draw distinctions between the attraction to children and the act of sexually abusing them.

Walker says it’s a misconception that all MAPS are pedophiles, according to a Rutgers University synopsis of his book, “A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People And Their Pursuit Of Dignity.”

“As Walker discusses, the term ‘pedophile’ refers to a specific age range of attraction, to children who have not yet begun puberty. The attraction to children who are going through puberty is called ‘hebephilia,’ and the attraction to teens/adolescents is described as ‘ephebophilia.’ Walker emphasizes the importance of using correct terms to better understand MAPS’ experiences,” the Rutgers synopsis states.

A 2019 “Nature” study explored potential neurobiological factors in child sex offenders that may explain their behavior.

Moody, however, scoffed at the notion that offenders were attracted to children because of a biological defect, or as he put it, “because they’re missing a protein.”

The Maryland Democratic Party in June removed the chairman of their LGBTQ+ Diversity Leadership Council, Michael Knappen, after Rosen caught him allegedly trying to solicit what he allegedly believed was a 14-year-old boy.

“Obviously every leftist is not a pedophile. We have a lot of them who follow us. But I think the reason why they’re standing up for pedos is because it’s that whole thing of just demonizing the right wing, thinking that we’re all terrible people. So they’ll go to any length just to be right,” Rosen said.

“[They see] one of their fellow leftists in San Francisco in front of a kid; instead of just saying, ‘You know what? Maybe the guy who is wearing the Trump hat might be right about this one,’ they’re like, ‘I can’t agree with him on anything, so I’ll just double down on what my fellow comrades are doing.’ I think that’s why they get to the dichotomy of defending pedophilia. And I think that’s something that the right should exploit way more, because that’s an easy win for independents,” Rosen concluded, alluding to a San Francisco pride parade in June where attendees fellated and urinated on each other at an event open to children.

Mundy said he never travels to a state or area where he isn’t able to catch at least three alleged pedophiles. He believes the issue is one of good and evil.

“I wouldn’t call myself an atheist when I started this, but I was pretty close. I was leaning more atheist than not, and I really believe this is a good and evil thing at this point. I don’t even believe it’s really sexual. I think these are weak individuals, and they allow people to manifest within themselves, and it takes on weird forms. And I believe this is one of the worst.”

AUTHOR

Robert McGreevy

Reporter.

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