00:00:05 Brandon Guffey
But I'm sitting on the back porch trying to cope. I'm having a bourbon.
00:00:10 Brandon Guffey
Smoking a cigarette, I get a message. It says, 'Did I tell you your son begged for his life?' with a laughing face emoji.
00:00:16 Brandon Guffey
And at that point, I couldn't hold back.
00:00:18 Brandon Guffey
So I start going back and forth with the person.
00:00:21 Sonny Von Cleveland
I would imagine.
00:01:02 Jim Cole
So Brandon, welcome to the show.
00:01:04 Brandon Guffey
Thank you guys for having me on.
00:01:06 Jim Cole
Just tell the audience a little bit about yourself.
00:01:08 Brandon Guffey
I'm born and raised in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Raised by a teenage mother.
00:01:15 Brandon Guffey
Never left. One of those people that never wanted to leave. Rock Hill is kind of like a suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina. It's on the border.
00:01:22 Brandon Guffey
Got involved as an entrepreneur. Started off in advertising in the tech industry early on.
00:01:28 Brandon Guffey
Left mid or early 2000s.
00:01:31 Brandon Guffey
Started landscaping, transitioned that into a landscape supply store, then into a heat and air company as well.
00:01:39 Brandon Guffey
And then I decided that I wanted to get involved in politics. I felt like I had a call. It ran on a county council level, and then my seat for the state house opened up, and I decided to run for it.
00:01:50 Brandon Guffey
And shortly after I won my primary, not the general election, I ended up losing my seventeen-year-old son, Gavin Guffey. Due to a crime that I'd never heard of at the time,
00:02:01 Brandon Guffey
And that's extortion. And now my fight is trying to save as many children as possible online from all the harms that we're learning about.
00:02:11 Sonny Von Cleveland
Wow, that I have a crazy connection with that because when I got incarcerated, I was 16. My mother left.
00:02:20 Jim Cole
Oh.
00:02:20 Sonny Von Cleveland
And she moved to Rock Hill, South Carolina. And of all the places, I fantasized about Rock Hill. Obviously, I'm this 16 year old kid that's going into this crazy time, and my mother moved there, so I'm thinking, well, this place must be amazing, and I've always wanted to go there.
00:02:36 Sonny Von Cleveland
What got you to want to get into politics in the South like that? Because you have referenced before, you never wanted to be a politician. It kind of chose me. Can you walk us through what got you into politics?
00:02:52 Brandon Guffey
Growing up in Rock Hill, even though it's one of the larger cities in South Carolina, it still has that small hometown feel. I was a bit of a hellion growing up.
00:03:02 Brandon Guffey
So a lot of people knew me for different reasons, not anything to do with politics. I was coaching sports, coaching my sons in soccer at the time.
00:03:10 Brandon Guffey
And you know, I just kept feeling this calling, feel like I needed to get involved in politics,
00:03:15 Brandon Guffey
And I didn't know anything about county level or city level. I knew about state and federal.
00:03:21 Brandon Guffey
And I talked to my wife about it. She thought I was crazy and said to pray about it.
00:03:28 Brandon Guffey
And I prayed about it, just prayed for a sign. And one day, with me owning the landscape supply store
00:03:35 Brandon Guffey
I always had two people there to make sure they opened up on time. That way, I didn't have to get up at the crack of dawn to be there. I get a phone call. People are lined up outside the gates trying to get in. I rush up there and unlock the gates, both people. Just happened to call out. Never happened before. Never happened again.
00:03:52 Brandon Guffey
And I'm sitting there trying to get the computers up, and the contractors are lined up. As one of the contractors is there, he says, "If you know anybody who'll run against this guy, you let me know."
00:04:04 Sonny Von Cleveland
And I randomly threw it out there like that.
00:04:06 Brandon Guffey
Randomly threw it out there. I took that as my sign. I didn't even ask my wife. I didn't call anybody else. As soon as the employees got there.
00:04:15 Brandon Guffey
I hopped in my jeep. I drove down to York, which is about a 30-minute drive.
00:04:19 Brandon Guffey
Walked in, didn't know what district I lived in, didn't know who the councilperson was and just said, "I want to run for county council."
00:04:28 Brandon Guffey
At that time
00:04:31 Brandon Guffey
It was two days before the filing deadline. The filing period only opened two weeks. Me and my wife had that conversation months before.
00:04:38 Brandon Guffey
So it wasn't something that I even knew I was in the right time.
00:04:41 Brandon Guffey
And I filed, and they said, "Well, this the chair of County Council. This the guy who used to lead the Republican Party. You don't stand a chance." And I said, "Well, I'm just doing what I feel like I'm called to do."
00:04:52 Brandon Guffey
I get back before I can even get back to my shop. I get a phone call from a friend of mine that works for the county government.
00:04:59 Brandon Guffey
And he says, "So you're running for office?" And I said, "Yeah." How did you know? He said, "Well, this councilman just called me and want to know who this grass cutter is that filed to run against him." Oh man! So that kind of kicked it off. It was like I felt like he was being pretentious. Sure. You know he's a doctor, and he was trying to put it out there that just blue collar people don't need to be doing this. And so I ran. You know they kind of called me the Facebook candidate because I didn't go out knocking on doors and all that. I ran a social media campaign,
00:05:29 Brandon Guffey
Essentially, I ran under the premise of grace. I was this person. I know all these mistakes that we can make, and I want to make our community better.
00:05:39 Brandon Guffey
But even my first county council meeting. I'm sitting there
00:05:43 Brandon Guffey
And they asked me
00:05:47 Brandon Guffey
Come up and you come up for comments. I even made the comments. I said I don't know why God's got me here.
00:05:52 Brandon Guffey
But I'm sure it'll show itself in time.
00:05:55 Brandon Guffey
And then I start going into comments, and always just felt that way. I felt like I was just following what I needed to do, but there was nothing really there where I felt like this is what I'm here for.
00:06:06 Brandon Guffey
And then whenever the state house seat opened up, I decided to run for it.
00:06:11 Brandon Guffey
I still didn't know at that time. You got your basic talking points. It was just my talking points: It's time for a new generation to lead.
00:06:19 Brandon Guffey
I'm a big believer in one of the problems we've got in politics having too many people that are too old.
00:06:24 Brandon Guffey
And it's grandparents making decisions for grandkids instead of parents making decisions for kids. Sure. And um, so I just kind of ran on that, and then everything happened with Gavin.
00:06:34 Brandon Guffey
And at that time
00:06:36 Brandon Guffey
I didn't know if I wanted to continue in politics. I wanted to quit. My wife said, "Absolutely not! You're one of the few people that can make a difference."
00:06:44 Brandon Guffey
Go up there and save the next Gavin. And I've been very successful in that.
00:06:49 Brandon Guffey
And now I know why all of that happened. That groundwork had to happen for me to even get to the point that I'm at now.
00:06:55 Sonny Von Cleveland
Sure, it's very Viktor Frankl-ish in my mind.
00:07:00 Sonny Von Cleveland
Pain has a purpose. There's a meaning behind our suffering, and if we seek it out, we find it.
00:07:09 Sonny Von Cleveland
Pain and misery and suffering doesn't happen for no reason. It's just whether or not we're going to allow it to have a reason, if we're going to give it a meaning, or if we're going to just chalk it up as oh, it's just so unfair. I can't believe this happened to me.
00:07:23 Sonny Von Cleveland
Or we give it a purpose and we give it a mission and we grind it to make a change and a difference in the world. Very similar to what I've done with my life.
00:07:34 Sonny Von Cleveland
I used to blame the world for everything that happened to me, like oh, this is it. Until I found
00:07:39 Sonny Von Cleveland
It happened so that I could do this. This is happening because of that.
00:07:45 Sonny Von Cleveland
There's the meaning in my suffering.
00:07:47 Brandon Guffey
Without that pain, we don't fight as hard to keep others from feeling that pain.
00:07:51 Sonny Von Cleveland
Because comfort is the enemy of progress.
00:07:54 Jim Cole
And I think it's a
00:07:57 Jim Cole
It's so profound because I'm sure you would give anything to have Gavin back.
00:08:03 Jim Cole
But because of it did happen, and there's nothing that can be changed about it. You've taken that experience and made sure that loss was not in vain.
00:08:16 Sonny Von Cleveland
Because I imagine there are so many parents that have gone through this.
00:08:21 Sonny Von Cleveland
I have a couple of friends in San Diego that have their own. They've called it the Endurance Movement because the son's name was Anthony.
00:08:30 Sonny Von Cleveland
It just crippled them.
00:08:32 Sonny Von Cleveland
And it's crippled so many parents that they go through the rest of their lives crippled.
00:08:37 Brandon Guffey
And I think it cripples a lot of the teens that deal with that trauma and fear. They feel like they can't share it. It's shame.
00:08:47 Sonny Von Cleveland
One hundred percent, they're buried in it. I learned last night it was an hour and forty minutes. We went through Tyler, the kid Tyler I made a video about was three hours. I was shocked by that.
00:09:02 Jim Cole
Yeah, yeah, it happens very fast. And and and what's interesting is, and we'll we'll get into this at some point about sextortion. But in my law enforcement career, we saw the timeline that it took just get shorter and shorter and shorter because the bad guys are perfecting how they just go straight for the heart, they straight for the gut,
00:09:24 Jim Cole
Instead of beating around the bush.
00:09:29 Jim Cole
From initial encounter to harm was so fast, and it's mind blowing.
00:09:35 Brandon Guffey
It took an hour before they exchanged images. So it was building up to the exchanging of images.
00:09:43 Brandon Guffey
But from then forty minutes from the first image being shared until he took his life.
00:09:48 Jim Cole
So maybe let's go back to that evening. And kind of describe for the audience a little bit
00:09:59 Jim Cole
One well about what happened
00:10:02 Jim Cole
And then we can talk about Gavin as a person and Gavin as a son.
00:10:08 Jim Cole
A little bit, so the audience can get to know Gavin a little bit. But that evening, like what what?
00:10:16 Brandon Guffey
So I came in from a political event. We had just won the primary. Which in my district, once you win the primary, that's kind of you win in the general election. And you're kind of riding this wave of high. And I come back from a political event and came in around midnight.
00:10:36 Brandon Guffey
And as a father always does, you kind of come in and assess your home.
00:10:40 Brandon Guffey
Gavin and Cohen
00:10:42 Brandon Guffey
Cohen's my 16-year-old at the time. They had both just come back from a young life camp.
00:10:47 Brandon Guffey
They, everyone at the camp had.
00:10:49 Brandon Guffey
Covid, so they were kind of quarantined. They were on their last day within the room. I have my four-year-old sleeping in the living room.
00:10:56 Brandon Guffey
Away from his brothers.
00:10:58 Brandon Guffey
And I come in; he's asleep on the couch. I walk by Cohen's room. Cohen is asleep in his bedroom.
00:11:04 Brandon Guffey
Look in my bedroom. My wife is asleep in the bed. At the end of the hallway is Gavin's room. You can hear him playing video games with friends. I kind of open up the door like you always do and just say, 'Hey, bud, keep it down. You know your mom's brother is trying to sleep.'
00:11:19 Brandon Guffey
I get a phone call. I step back outside and talk to somebody else who was running in a race for about an hour. I like to pace and talk on the phone at the same time.
00:11:28 Brandon Guffey
I do that. I come back in and lay in my bed about one o'clock. Hadn't even undressed. Just took my shoes off. Kind of replying to email. Still kind of on that high.
00:11:38 Brandon Guffey
And Gavin came out of his bedroom around one thirty a.m.
00:11:42 Brandon Guffey
And he was very quiet.
00:11:45 Brandon Guffey
I'm used to saying, "Hey bud, don't slam that door."
00:11:48 Brandon Guffey
It's very quiet.
00:11:49 Brandon Guffey
" And then I'm waiting to hear a refrigerator door slam from him grabbing a soda, or cabinet slam from grabbing some chips or something.
00:11:57 Brandon Guffey
And I didn't hear anything. Something just told me to get up and go check on him.
00:12:00 Brandon Guffey
So I get up and I begin to walk down the hallway. All our bedrooms are on one side, our living room, kitchen, all that. We've got a foyer with a bathroom right in the middle of the home.
00:12:11 Brandon Guffey
And as I'm walking back, Gavin is walking towards me.
00:12:14 Brandon Guffey
Seventeen-year-old boy, just in his underwear
00:12:17 Brandon Guffey
And he's kind of covering himself up.
00:12:19 Brandon Guffey
And I'm thinking, as a father
00:12:21 Brandon Guffey
Give him his privacy. Don't go in for a hug. Just look at him straight in the eye and just say, 'Good night, buddy. I love you.' We passed each other right in front of the bathroom at that time, and I walked into the living room to go lean down and kiss my four-year-old on the head to tell him good night. I love him.
00:12:40 Brandon Guffey
And what I heard sounded like a bowling ball coming.
00:12:44 Brandon Guffey
Off of a top shelf, and I didn't know what it was
00:12:48 Brandon Guffey
So I ran to the bathroom and yelled Gavin's name.
00:12:51 Brandon Guffey
Didn't hear anything. Immediately, kick the door open, and found Gavin laying in between toilet and the bathtub.
00:12:59 Brandon Guffey
My first thought was he was trying to step into the shower, fell, and hit his head. That was the loud noise.
00:13:05 Brandon Guffey
I'm yelling for my wife and my son, which they startled anyway with the noise.
00:13:12 Brandon Guffey
To call 911 and as I grab him
00:13:15 Brandon Guffey
He starts to bleed, and I can't find where he's bleeding from. But then I smell gunpowder.
00:13:22 Brandon Guffey
And I looked over and saw a gun laying there.
00:13:25 Brandon Guffey
And I can only imagine that he had stuck the gun down in his underwear before walking in there.
00:13:31 Brandon Guffey
And at that time, I really had no clue. Gavin was living his best life. He had just gone off to college. He had just come back from that young life camp. We had great conversations that a father and son have, where he's talking about how he's dating this girl, and Dad, she's a twelve
00:13:52 Brandon Guffey
But you know I don't feel compatible with her, and I, you know, explaining the difference between attractability and compatibility, and sometimes it's not about that beauty; it's about who you actually connect with, and you know, it was one of those things that I mean, I still remember that conversation of that day. Is like I walked out and felt like I was ten foot tall and bulletproof. It's like oh, I was. Super dad, like I nailed that conversation. Yeah, you know, and um,
00:14:16 Brandon Guffey
With all that happening, I didn't know what caused it. I remember sitting outside, um,
00:14:23 Brandon Guffey
While law enforcement's coming,
00:14:24 Brandon Guffey
And it seemed like they were there instantly.
00:14:27 Brandon Guffey
Um, having to call parents,
00:14:30 Brandon Guffey
Our parents, um,
00:14:33 Brandon Guffey
Trying to comfort my wife.
00:14:36 Brandon Guffey
Got neighbors over there.
00:14:37 Brandon Guffey
And I'm just googling.
00:14:40 Brandon Guffey
My son just shot himself. What do I do? I couldn't find anything. You find books years down the road on how to deal with stuff, but at that moment I couldn't find anything. I immediately started going in my mind because I was raised by a teenage mom who was worried I was going to be feminine without a male influence in my life.
00:15:03 Brandon Guffey
And it was always rubbed some dirt on it. Football coaches like suck it up.
00:15:08 Brandon Guffey
Men don't cry.
00:15:10 Brandon Guffey
And I'm sitting there, and I just started thinking, did I cause this? Was he hurting? I didn't know suicide was impulsive at that time.
00:15:19 Brandon Guffey
And the only message that we had, Gavin sent out a less than three sign
00:15:24 Brandon Guffey
Which is on my shirt here
00:15:26 Brandon Guffey
And it was just a heart on a black screen, just a way to tell his friends I love you.
00:15:30 Brandon Guffey
And that was the only message. It was a few days later.
00:15:35 Brandon Guffey
I started getting phone calls from my aunt.
00:15:38 Brandon Guffey
My mom, being the oldest of kids, I have an aunt that's just a couple years older than me, in Concord, North Carolina, and she's blowing my phone up. I had it disconnected where nobody could really call through,
00:15:50 Brandon Guffey
And she ends up getting somebody to reach me and said it's very important. I need to talk to you, and she sends me these images, and it's of Gavin's fourteen-year-old cousin.
00:16:00 Brandon Guffey
It's messages to him.
00:16:02 Brandon Guffey
To where this person is extorting him over images of Gavin.
00:16:07 Brandon Guffey
And I didn't really understand what was going on, but since the death was already being investigated by state law enforcement at the time,
00:16:16 Brandon Guffey
We immediately called Sled,
00:16:18 Brandon Guffey
Had them come in, and they brought in the FBI Homeland people that were on it as well. And while I'm waiting on them, my 16-year-old, we had a ton of people at the house. We walked back to the bedrooms,
00:16:31 Brandon Guffey
And I'm trying to explain to my wife before the agents get there of what these messages are.
00:16:37 Brandon Guffey
And my sixteen-year-old walks out of the out of his bedroom,
00:16:42 Brandon Guffey
And he's mad at the world. Like him and his brother, yeah,
00:16:44 Sonny Von Cleveland
I bet.
00:16:45 Brandon Guffey
Finally getting that connection, yeah.
00:16:47 Sonny Von Cleveland
Because there's that sibling rivalry. I'm imagining at sixteen and seventeen,
00:16:51 Brandon Guffey
And oh, yeah. Cohen was always Mister Popular, and Gavin was Mister Funny Guy. Yeah, you know. And Cohen was just mad at the world. He just picks up his phone. He says, "I don't know who the hell you are, but quit calling."
00:17:05 Brandon Guffey
And I said, "Who was that?" And I look, and the person calling him was Bella Janet thirty, the same person that was messaging his little cousin on the phone.
00:17:13 Sonny Von Cleveland
These guys just don't give up. They don't.
00:17:15 Jim Cole
And we can talk more about that,
00:17:17 Brandon Guffey
And we will. And then I looked at my phone, and I had messages from Bella Janet thirty. Well, by that time,
00:17:23 Brandon Guffey
You know, everyone's at the house.
00:17:25 Brandon Guffey
We're signing over access to our phones.
00:17:27 Brandon Guffey
Luckily, the FBI kind of took over the conversation of my sixteen-year-old.
00:17:35 Brandon Guffey
Um, so was able to get more information by doing that, and they told me just do not reply.
00:17:41 Brandon Guffey
As a father, now I'm realizing that something happened. I don't know what.
00:17:46 Brandon Guffey
In my mind, I was thinking, what could you have done that was so bad, right, that you would take your life? Like I'm sitting there thinking,
00:17:54 Brandon Guffey
Did he molest a kid? Did he, you know, commit a horrific crime? Right, and he's being extorted over it.
00:18:01 Brandon Guffey
Um, I still didn't know that it was sex extortion.
00:18:04 Brandon Guffey
At the time,
00:18:05 Brandon Guffey
And just by going through that,
00:18:09 Brandon Guffey
That mindset of what is so bad, I still couldn't fathom. Even if he had committed a crime, like I'm your father, I'll always be there for you. I'll always love you.
00:18:19 Brandon Guffey
Might not agree with what you did, but I'll always love you and I'll always be there.
00:18:24 Brandon Guffey
And we tried to get away. His birthday's August twentieth,
00:18:29 Brandon Guffey
And a few days before his birthday.
00:18:32 Brandon Guffey
We tried to get away for the family, which is less than a month after, or less than a month prior, he had taken his life,
00:18:39 Brandon Guffey
And we decided to go down to Myrtle Beach just to get away as a family and not have everybody in the community. We had tons of support, but at that time, you just can't be consolated.
00:18:48 Sonny Von Cleveland
Sure, and I'm sure there's there's a time of mourning that you need where you just want to be just with your family.
00:18:53 Brandon Guffey
Well, and everybody mourns differently. Sure, like my wife just want, you know, recluse wanted to be there. And then me, I'm,
00:19:03 Brandon Guffey
I wanted the people there. It's like you know, I just wanted to tell the people, like, can't you just see I'm grieving? Like, give me room. Like, I'm not here to console you.
00:19:11 Brandon Guffey
And then if you're not reaching out to me, it's like, what do you not care?
00:19:14 Brandon Guffey
Yeah, you know, I mean, you're just angry at the world. Yeah, yeah. At that time, yeah. But I'm sitting on the back porch trying to cope. I'm having a bourbon, smoking a cigarette, and I get a message that says,"Did I tell you your son begged for his life with a laughing face emoji."
00:19:29 Brandon Guffey
And at that point, I couldn't hold back,
00:19:31 Brandon Guffey
So I start going back and forth with the person.
00:19:34 Sonny Von Cleveland
Yeah, I would imagine. So, you know,
00:19:39 Brandon Guffey
Over the years, what we found out was that Gavin was targeted by a college-age kid in Lagos, Nigeria. It's not just one person; it's a network,
00:19:53 Brandon Guffey
Typically tied with the Yahoo Boys out of Lagos. But this person was the one that was extorting him.
00:20:01 Brandon Guffey
Luckily, we have been able to extradite him a year to the day of Gavin's death. He was arrested in Lagos, Nigeria.
00:20:09 Brandon Guffey
He sat there for about a year before he was extradited,
00:20:14 Brandon Guffey
And now he's sitting in a prison in South Carolina, awaiting a federal trial,
00:20:18 Brandon Guffey
Which hopefully should come within the next few months.
00:20:23 Sonny Von Cleveland
How does?
00:20:24 Sonny Von Cleveland
I mean, I got a ton of questions.
00:20:27 Sonny Von Cleveland
How did it come out that it was actually Gavin had sent pictures, and then it turned around to to sextortion? Because I mean, that's how it works, right? Like they get the kid to send them a picture, yeah, and then turn around and begin the extortion. How did you guys discover that? Was it through like Gavin's electronics?
00:20:46 Brandon Guffey
It was through the investigation that I was able to discover it because I have such a big mouth and I kind of had a platform.
00:20:52 Brandon Guffey
There was a fear because the extortionist was also saying that. Whenever they were talking to me, they were saying they were hired by a political opponent.
00:21:00 Brandon Guffey
That Gavin was targeted due to politics and all of these things. So I had to stay quiet up until November of two thousand and twenty-two.
00:21:10 Brandon Guffey
So I couldn't even really put the story out there about what happened.
00:21:13 Sonny Von Cleveland
Do you remember the moment that you found out though that it was like,
00:21:18 Sonny Von Cleveland
This is why? Oh yeah,
00:21:21 Sonny Von Cleveland
Like this.
00:21:21 Brandon Guffey
This this the dumbest thing I've ever seen.
00:21:25 Brandon Guffey
Like why would why would you take your life over this? However, being in politics and the one thing that people don't realize is the stress that it puts on your family.
00:21:34 Sonny Von Cleveland
Sure, yeah.
00:21:35 Brandon Guffey
There were rumors started about family about Gavin during that political election. I'm sure by my opponent's supporters that just want to just tear you down, and that's the nature of politics now. The reason good people don't want to serve. Yeah. And in my mind, if that had never happened.
00:21:54 Brandon Guffey
I think whenever this happened,
00:21:56 Brandon Guffey
Gavin might have looked at it differently, but I think in his mind he was like,"I can't go through this again.
00:22:02 Brandon Guffey
" He had, you know,
00:22:04 Brandon Guffey
Everything was running right,
00:22:06 Brandon Guffey
And he's playing video games,
00:22:08 Brandon Guffey
And come find out he tells his friends on the video games,"Hey, I got to jump off. I'm gonna talk to this girl that messaged me.
00:22:14 Brandon Guffey
The profile's pretending to be a volleyball player,
00:22:17 Brandon Guffey
At a college, like a freshman at a college." And the message started off as if you see pictures of Gavin, he had my wife is Panamanian,
00:22:26 Brandon Guffey
This thick dark hair. Like I would fuss at him, he couldn't get a brush through the hair. I'm like, brush your head, and he's like, Dad, you don't understand, I can't brush my hair.
00:22:34 Brandon Guffey
But he had this thick head of hair,
00:22:37 Brandon Guffey
And the first message was, you're cute. Are you in the military?
00:22:41 Brandon Guffey
And we're thinking like, man, that should have been a sign right away. Sure.
00:22:45 Brandon Guffey
You know, like teenagers do. I'm sure he comes back with a flirty comment.
00:22:50 Brandon Guffey
They start talking for a little bit.
00:22:51 Sonny Von Cleveland
Did you get the transcripts of all this? Have you seen like how it went?
00:22:56 Brandon Guffey
I've not seen the entire thing. I've seen bits and pieces.
00:22:59 Sonny Von Cleveland
They they have it though.
00:23:00 Brandon Guffey
The investigators have it. I don't have the full transcript.
00:23:04 Brandon Guffey
I was able to get what I was able to pull off of Gavin's phone,
00:23:09 Brandon Guffey
But with it being through Instagram, which was most of the messages, and that became my my biggest problem.
00:23:16 Brandon Guffey
Is it Bela Janet twenty eight is the one that attacked Gavin on Instagram.
00:23:22 Brandon Guffey
Bela Janet thirty,
00:23:24 Brandon Guffey
With the same profile picture, same group of friends, is the one that began to try to extort me,
00:23:29 Brandon Guffey
My son, cousin, wife,
00:23:32 Brandon Guffey
All of them.
00:23:34 Brandon Guffey
So whenever they filed, I guess the subpoena to get the information, Instagram pulled Bela Janet twenty eight offline,
00:23:43 Brandon Guffey
But left up all the other profiles.
00:23:46 Brandon Guffey
Attached to this person,
00:23:47 Brandon Guffey
If I send you a friend request, you can choose block this person and any new profiles they create. They know this is a criminal,
00:23:53 Brandon Guffey
And they left up all the other profiles. and Now we're finding that there are dozens of additional teens that were being extorted afterwards through those profiles.
00:24:03 Sonny Von Cleveland
Yeah, wow,
00:24:05 Sonny Von Cleveland
Very common. And Instagram just left them.
00:24:08 Brandon Guffey
Yeah, yeah, and I'm suing Meta right now due to that.
00:24:11 Sonny Von Cleveland
Hope so. Yeah, that's insanity. Yeah.
00:24:14 Jim Cole
And we can talk about that separate. But suing these ESPs is very, very rarely success successful because they have section two thirty,
00:24:24 Jim Cole
Which they will argue it doesn't give them blanket immunity. It pretty much gives them blanket immunity.
00:24:31 Jim Cole
They're it gives them immunity from things that they're a user of the platform does.
00:24:39 Jim Cole
They're only culpable for what they do.
00:24:43 Jim Cole
And so, when a user, when you are a platform that has a lot of users, Section Two Hundred and Thirty basically gives you a very limited liability for what users do on your platform because you are not responsible for what they do on their platform. Is the that's what they're right?
00:24:58 Sonny Von Cleveland
It would be like if I went and bought a an Explorer and I went and crashed into a bunch of people, then they try to sue Ford. Yeah, Ford.
00:25:04 Jim Cole
So that's that's kind of the premise of it. Right. Um. But what it has done is it has allowed these electronic service providers.
00:25:14 Jim Cole
To really completely disregard user safety, particularly child safety, on their platforms, because it's the it's users exploiting users, not it's not the parent company that's exploiting, but they're providing the playground. One big arguments that we talk about is take an amusement park, right?
00:25:36 Jim Cole
And if in an amusement park,
00:25:39 Jim Cole
Kids are going into the amusement park and behind like. And kids were being committing suicide because of a contact that they had with with someone in the amusement park. Another another you know person that's there, or being sexually assaulted in the bathrooms, or being that emerges that amusement park would get shut down.
00:26:00 Jim Cole
Yeah, yeah, right. It would get shut down. Yeah, and so here we are, where there's this virtual online amusement park, and those thing things are happening, and worse. But we're not holding the amusement park responsible. It would be like you know the the amusement park company saying,"Well, it's not our problem. It's like this was a customer who assaulted another customer, so not our problem. What they do, even though it's occurring on their property, on their on your watch.
00:26:30 Brandon Guffey
I would make this argument though. So let's say they catch the person that was responsible for assaulting one of the kids.
00:26:37 Brandon Guffey
And the guy comes back immediately with a fake ID, but they know exactly who he is.
00:26:42 Sonny Von Cleveland
Yeah, he comes and he gives it with an ID that just has a different first name, right?
00:26:46 Brandon Guffey
Yeah, but but they know because they're they're tracking by an IMEI. They know exactly the device is coming from, right? And they go back in and they say,"Oh, we're going to let you in,
00:26:57 Brandon Guffey
" And then that person begins to attack all the family members of the other person that was there, and then goes after all these other kids.
00:27:04 Sonny Von Cleveland
Should they be held liable? Hold hold them liable?
00:27:07 Brandon Guffey
Yeah. Well, that's what two hundred and thirty is.
00:27:08 Jim Cole
What that is what's happening. It's um.
00:27:11 Brandon Guffey
And luckily, the lawsuit, you know, the one in California,
00:27:14 Brandon Guffey
Which my case is kind of caught up in, it's not a bellwether case. Um, but that case in California was the first to break through the Section two hundred and thirty, um,
00:27:26 Brandon Guffey
Because they wouldn't even allow you to get discovery. Yeah, because of two thirty.
00:27:29 Jim Cole
The case we get thrown out before it ever went. So what happened?
00:27:32 Sonny Von Cleveland
This is the one that sued Meta for fifty million, right? Is that the one? Are we talking about the same case?
00:27:37 Brandon Guffey
I don't even keep up with the numbers. There's one in New Mexico. Is that the big one?
00:27:40 Jim Cole
The girl that the New Mexico case where the attorney general, the New Mexico attorney general, sued some electronic service providers. There's another case out of California,
00:27:52 Brandon Guffey
Which is all social media victims.
00:27:54 Jim Cole
Yeah, in both cases.
00:27:57 Jim Cole
The difference was in instead of trying to say instead of suing because of conduct of a user to a user,
00:28:09 Jim Cole
The way that you that you get past the two thirty protection is by the platform themselves engaged in harmful behavior that that they did, and so and what what the argument is. And look, it's complicated, but so I'm boiling this down to a real.
00:28:30 Jim Cole
But what the argument is is that their algorithms—that's the company speaking for themselves. Yeah, the the algorithms are developed by the company; they're not developed by users. They're developed by the company, and the algorithms themselves are directing kids to adult offenders and are putting offenders and kids in touch. But in the particular, in the in the.
00:28:53 Jim Cole
California case. It was more about the addictive nature of the platforms,
00:28:59 Sonny Von Cleveland
And it was more that it wasn't just one purposely addict.
00:29:02 Jim Cole
Yes, it wasn't just one platform that was being sued. It was, but but the major platform was Meta.
00:29:09 Jim Cole
Now, the unfortunate part in this whole thing is the award. So so so one, it is a landmark decision because it was the very first case. Where and it's a civil lawsuit, not a criminal lawsuit. Civil lawsuit.
00:29:26 Jim Cole
So the jury is the one making the decisions on whether these platforms engaged in harmful and addictive behavior, and the jury agreed that they did,
00:29:38 Jim Cole
And that then caused harm to the plaintiff, the plaintiffs that we're suing, and they did they did agree that it did.
00:29:50 Jim Cole
The unfortunate part is, then the jury only awarded,
00:29:55 Jim Cole
Very, very little monetary damages. I think it was three million dollars. Yeah, right. And so, to a behemoth electronic service provider like Meta, nothing. Three million dollars is a rounding error. Yeah, like it's not. It is.
00:30:09 Sonny Von Cleveland
That's it is residual loss on the the back end.
00:30:12 Jim Cole
Now, where it hurts them is now.
00:30:17 Jim Cole
It was because other attorneys now see a path forward to be able to successfully litigate.
00:30:26 Sonny Von Cleveland
Well, yeah, I guess my primary question, like in your instance, as a father, I would want to know how the hell did this person discover my child,
00:30:36 Sonny Von Cleveland
And why aren't there guardrails in place to protect under eighteen.
00:30:40 Brandon Guffey
Users, I agree,
00:30:41 Sonny Von Cleveland
On a social media platform from over eighteen users. How are they discoverable?
00:30:45 Jim Cole
So I think this goes to what we talked about recently, right? With you, as you're on this learning journey, you make assumptions. I do, right?
00:30:53 Jim Cole
And the general public makes assumptions. It's like,
00:30:56 Jim Cole
You know, the youth. You feel like, well, the government obviously would protect and put things in place to protect kids.
00:31:05 Jim Cole
We have the FDA to protect our food sources and our and our food, you know,
00:31:12 Jim Cole
And so like you start to make these assumptions, like, well, of course, the guy you just think the by nature the reality is that's not true,
00:31:22 Jim Cole
And so these electronic service providers,
00:31:27 Jim Cole
A couple things,
00:31:29 Jim Cole
They're incredibly wealthy,
00:31:31 Brandon Guffey
The richest company since the inception of man.
00:31:34 Jim Cole
Yeah, I mean, look, and I would liken this to the big tobacco lobby, like like from the seventies and eighties.
00:31:44 Brandon Guffey
Can I? And I want on that. If you look at the discovery emails, whenever they were actually able to go into the internal emails of these companies,
00:31:54 Brandon Guffey
If I was to provide you with those internal emails, you can't tell the difference between whether it's big tobacco. Or big tech. Yeah, it was the same about addicting kids younger.
00:32:02 Jim Cole
It was the same getting them on the platform. Yeah, it's the same. And so I think the big tobacco thing is a bit is a good analogy for those who remember that. Yeah, no, I remember those way back. Right, you know, because like now you don't see tobacco ads on TV. You don't see them in our our magazines and and publications. But before they were everywhere. They were everywhere, right? They were everywhere.
00:32:26 Sonny Von Cleveland
The Marlboro Man was on the commercial.
00:32:27 Jim Cole
That's right, and then also.
00:32:29 Jim Cole
Um, the warnings that are now on packs now.
00:32:34 Sonny Von Cleveland
So, so big tech basically took a page out of yeah,
00:32:37 Jim Cole
And so one of the things for big tobacco is is they actually hired what they would do is they would get independent, and I put independent in air quotes because they weren't true. They were actually paid for by big tobacco. They create like a shell company, put money there,
00:32:54 Jim Cole
Hire a laboratory to basically.
00:32:58 Jim Cole
Put out a report that said,"No, this actually good for you. This healthy for you. This that.
00:33:02 Brandon Guffey
" That's what big tech does in Congress.
00:33:05 Jim Cole
Did the same thing, right? It's the same thing, and so now you've got them fighting like,"No, this not harmful. This like, you know, there's no science that says that kids are harmed using these platforms. There's no science that says they're addictive, and and all these things.
00:33:22 Sonny Von Cleveland
" Yeah, so they're putting out these reports that are completely false.
00:33:26 Jim Cole
Like there's not yeah or there's some truth or they're pointing to a lack of any scientific research right because look anything that's new scientific research takes a while to catch up right hasn't been done yet so it's like it's not just about coming up with a a study that is counter to you know what we probably all know anecdotally but there's also a lack of science so they can kind of point to well there's no scientific Backing to say that this is harmful,
00:33:57 Jim Cole
Which is technically true at time now. Studies are coming out now; things are coming out to show that.
00:34:03 Sonny Von Cleveland
But in the ten years prior, we just have all this loss and devastation.
00:34:07 Jim Cole
So, so what I would say about it is, they're going to take advantage of any like of of public assumptions, right? They take advantage of public assumptions and help to to push those assumptions.
00:34:22 Jim Cole
They will, they will, and take advantage of kind of any loophole that they can find. And they've got armies of lawyers.
00:34:29 Brandon Guffey
I mean, they're armies of really two hundred and seventy thousand dollars a day lobbying in D. C.
00:34:35 Jim Cole
Yeah, and then that—that's the next thing I want to talk about. So, in big tobacco, you had—you know, everybody knows Philip Morris was the big tobacco company, but there were other companies, right? As part of that, they were just the big one,
00:34:48 Jim Cole
And.
00:34:50 Jim Cole
They had, but but really, the power of those companies was the lobby. It wasn't. I mean, the companies certainly are the ones making the money, but then they pay the lobbyists,
00:35:00 Jim Cole
Who are then getting in front of Congress and other leaders of government and pushing a narrative, and those lobbies become very powerful,
00:35:10 Brandon Guffey
Especially with dark money.
00:35:11 Jim Cole
Very powerful, yeah. And we can go into that a little bit. So so what happens is,
00:35:17 Jim Cole
So now. In the the tech companies, I mean, it is is crazy,
00:35:23 Jim Cole
The parallels that you can draw between big tech and the big tech lobby and big tobacco and the big tobacco lobby, because the big tech lobbies, there's there's two major ones,
00:35:33 Jim Cole
They're the ones that are really working behind the scenes and pushing narratives, and they they have.
00:35:41 Jim Cole
Almost unlimited financial resources.
00:35:43 Brandon Guffey
Yeah, yeah. You stir up the far left. You stir up the far right. So you tell the far left that this is going to take away a child that's struggling with their identity. They're not going to be able to search it because that's considered adult content. So they're not going to be able to find the information they need. You stir up the far right by saying they want everyone to upload an ID before you can even get online to look at anything. So they can create a national database to see what everyone's doing. Big big government surveillance. It's obvious. There's multiple ways around it.
00:36:11 Brandon Guffey
You know that that's three or four episodes by itself. So we don't even have to get into that.
00:36:15 Sonny Von Cleveland
Yeah, yeah, good. We can definitely straight off on that.
00:36:17 Jim Cole
So I want to, before we get too far away from the the original the night,
00:36:23 Jim Cole
I want to talk a little bit about the law enforcement response because that evening,
00:36:29 Jim Cole
You you guys call nine one one,
00:36:31 Jim Cole
And then what what happens kind of in the in the next few hours after that?
00:36:35 Brandon Guffey
Well, I will tell you, I own county council. I was.
00:36:40 Brandon Guffey
Chair of Justice and Public Safety Committee,
00:36:42 Brandon Guffey
Which kind of oversaw law enforcement.
00:36:46 Brandon Guffey
The response with me being a council member,
00:36:50 Brandon Guffey
It seemed immediate.
00:36:51 Brandon Guffey
I mean, I didn't come out of the bathroom until law enforcement was there.
00:36:55 Brandon Guffey
First responders were at my house; seemed immediately. I even had a law enforcement officer that I'm still very grateful for today. I didn't even realize it—not on duty—that just showed up to be there with me.
00:37:09 Brandon Guffey
To stand outside with me,
00:37:11 Brandon Guffey
And you know, I I was very lucky to have that support. But not only that, in the state of South Carolina, if it's a death of anyone under the age of eighteen,
00:37:22 Brandon Guffey
South Carolina law enforcement division automatically has to investigate.
00:37:25 Jim Cole
Which is coroner, yes. Yeah, you mentioned sled, so that's the state investigative police agency, correct?
00:37:31 Brandon Guffey
Yep. And then the coroner's office is going to have an investigation. Then you would have the county police department has their investigation. And that's the rule that it is suicide, that it wasn't homicide or anything of that nature, right? So all of them were there, but it was kind of overwhelming because then I start thinking, okay, well, how did he get the gun,
00:37:51 Brandon Guffey
You know, and things like that.
00:37:55 Brandon Guffey
And then it's like, okay, well, am I responsible in that way? And I can't imagine for.
00:38:03 Brandon Guffey
The parents that are trying to do everything right, and a child gets a gun, and then they're held responsible. Like, not only did you lose your child, but now you're facing a prison sentence, as well.
00:38:13 Brandon Guffey
And I completely agree with ensuring that guns are locked up. And this was kind of a a one off case from whenever me and my wife went camping,
00:38:22 Brandon Guffey
And that's the only reason he had access to that gun. But being in the south,
00:38:30 Brandon Guffey
It's not uncommon. For your teenage boys to have access to guns because they're going to go hunting,
00:38:36 Brandon Guffey
Right? Yeah. And Gavin was my kid that hated guns. He was skateboarder, artsy kid. He did not want to be around guns, so I never had any fear with him. My fear was the eight-year-old or the four-year-old at the time,
00:38:49 Brandon Guffey
Right? But that law enforcement response, and then as things started happening, now they couldn't tell me.
00:38:56 Brandon Guffey
Now I will say one of the things I am really grateful for of my sheriff at the time.
00:39:01 Brandon Guffey
Um, he couldn't go into details,
00:39:03 Brandon Guffey
But he just kept telling me,"Brandon is not your fault,
00:39:07 Brandon Guffey
" And I thought he was just telling me for my mental health. Yeah, true aspect. Like I keep thinking that, but he just kept saying,
00:39:13 Brandon Guffey
"I can't tell you more, but it's not your fault.
00:39:15 Jim Cole
" So it sounds to me like law enforcement kind of figured out very quickly that this was a a case of sex torture.
00:39:24 Brandon Guffey
I think within forty eight hours.
00:39:26 Sonny Von Cleveland
Okay. Oh wow. Because that's that's not.
00:39:28 Brandon Guffey
I mean, they don't normally look at things like that, and that's the problem. If every time I see a suicide now of a teenager,
00:39:35 Brandon Guffey
Yeah, like I want a law that says you have to look at their digital records because these teens will take their lives and they're doing it out of shame. They're trying to hide it, and now you got all these disappearing messages because it happens over Snap, it happens over Instagram, and Gavin's messages were in there too. You know,
00:39:53 Brandon Guffey
That that becomes.
00:39:55 Brandon Guffey
The problem is getting that digital evidence, and that requires a company with digital forensics to be able to come in. And luckily, York County Sheriff's Department SLED had the right digital forensics to where they could pull that information.
00:40:08 Sonny Von Cleveland
I think it's important there to to recognize that there are organizations that provide those digital forensics.
00:40:15 Jim Cole
Yeah, it's one of the things that our rescue,
00:40:17 Sonny Von Cleveland
And that's what one of the things that our rescue does.
00:40:20 Jim Cole
We do that's the, and we're not the only one,
00:40:21 Sonny Von Cleveland
But yeah, there's more. But that's the importance of. Of how people can get involved to help because they're without that digital forensics,
00:40:30 Sonny Von Cleveland
Yeah, what would have happened?
00:40:31 Brandon Guffey
And now every crime is requiring digital forensics.
00:40:35 Jim Cole
Yeah, I mean, the digital world is just—it's too intertwined in our daily lives, right?
00:40:39 Sonny Von Cleveland
So the messages between Gavin and the sex storer disappeared.
00:40:45 Brandon Guffey
There was some on Instagram. Yeah, so so they were in Instagram Messenger.
00:40:50 Sonny Von Cleveland
But nothing ever actually really disappears, right?
00:40:52 Jim Cole
Well, it depends.
00:40:53 Sonny Von Cleveland
The server can go in, or like the the ESP can go in there and pull those records.
00:40:57 Brandon Guffey
Not always end to end encryption.
00:40:59 Jim Cole
Not always.
00:40:59 Sonny Von Cleveland
And that's why we want to get rid of end to end encryption, right?
00:41:02 Jim Cole
Yeah. So end to end encryption. I mean, it's a privacy mechanism, right? But the problem is, is when bad things are happening, then it's happening in the dark. It's there, and there's no way to get.
00:41:15 Brandon Guffey
You don't have that evidence there. Yeah.
00:41:18 Brandon Guffey
But I will use this as an example because that became my fight with the company that I'm suing. Is that they then went to to say that they're going to protect children more. They changed their messaging to end-to-end encrypting,
00:41:31 Brandon Guffey
End-to-end encryption. Then it came out that they weren't truly end-to-end encrypted and that they could still access the messages.
00:41:38 Brandon Guffey
And then they make an announcement that they pulled down August of 2024, pulled down sixty-three thousand sextortion accounts.
00:41:48 Brandon Guffey
Just off of Instagram,
00:41:49 Brandon Guffey
In one day, just out of Lagos, Nigeria,
00:41:53 Brandon Guffey
And then they run this press saying how great they are,
00:41:57 Brandon Guffey
And I used the example and I said, well, it tells me one of two things: either you collected all these people that you knew were extorting children online,
00:42:06 Brandon Guffey
And you waited until one day to pull them down, or you've got the ability to pull them all down in one day,
00:42:11 Brandon Guffey
And yet you haven't done anything since. Either way, it tells me. You're a bad actor, and this is a PR stunt.
00:42:18 Brandon Guffey
Yeah, and and you just continue to allow. You know, one of my big things is I believe whether you're using VPNs or anything else, everything links back to a device. Sure, and if a device violates terms and conditions,
00:42:34 Brandon Guffey
That device should forever be banned from that platform.
00:42:38 Brandon Guffey
I mean, it should be blacklisted, not just whatever.
00:42:41 Sonny Von Cleveland
You can't just turn around and create a new one.
00:42:42 Brandon Guffey
They're not going to create a new email and just set up a new account, right? It should link back to those devices. But that gets way off. But you're asking about law enforcement. Law enforcement was there. The investigation, the coroner's reports, where I actually found out what sex extortion was. I still didn't know, and as I would look, because they were just calling it sexual extortion, yep. And I still didn't really know it. And I found out more about sex extortion from you.
00:43:07 Brandon Guffey
Whenever I met you,
00:43:09 Brandon Guffey
Flew out to Virginia Beach to meet with Stephen to work on the documentary, which is now shown to all the Boy Scouts. Yep. And whenever I sat down with you, you blew my mind with how everything works because I didn't really have a clue. I thought that this is some creepy guy sitting in his basement, yeah, trying to target children.
00:43:33 Jim Cole
Folks, we really hope you've been enjoying Unlikely Allies, the podcast. Over 20 years of my law enforcement career was specifically spent working child exploitation and human trafficking, investigating the offenders that are committing these horrific crimes, but trying to support the victims and survivors of these crimes. At Our Rescue, now I continue that fight, and you can help us do that by making a donation at OurRescue. org.
00:43:59 Jim Cole
Those donations.
00:44:00 Jim Cole
Are critical to the support that we provide.
00:44:03 Jim Cole
So, from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank you. We could not do this work without you.
00:44:09 Jim Cole
That's how it originally started, right? And I think it's probably now is a good time to talk a little bit about that because sexortion didn't really become, I guess, better known, right, in the general public until I mean, kind of starting roughly five years ago, as it started to hit. More pervasively,
00:44:32 Jim Cole
And however, it goes back a really, really long way.
00:44:37 Jim Cole
And we were talking a little bit before we went start recording,
00:44:43 Jim Cole
But I had worked a case or helped work a case. I wasn't a case agent. One of my partners was a case agent, guy named Jim Kilpatrick.
00:44:51 Jim Cole
So Jim and I were stationed at our cyber crime center for Homeland Security investigations in Fairfax, Virginia.
00:44:59 Jim Cole
And in that role, we we tend to work these big global cases. As kind of instead of being at a field office where you're going to work a case that's that generally speaking,
00:45:12 Jim Cole
You know it's going to have at least a connection to your local jurisdiction, your geographic region.
00:45:19 Jim Cole
Now in at the cyber crime center, we're working these big, massive global cases with lots of victims all over the world, a lot of offenders all over the place.
00:45:28 Jim Cole
And one of the cases that we worked was a dark night, a dark net forum that had been specifically set up by individuals who were sexually extorting minors,
00:45:40 Jim Cole
And they were also targeting males. But when we first started sexual extortion of minors,
00:45:48 Jim Cole
It was mostly female targets,
00:45:51 Jim Cole
And there was no monetary part involved. This was; these were predators.
00:45:58 Jim Cole
Who wanted sexual content from their victims,
00:46:02 Jim Cole
And when they trick their victims into kind of originally doing something fairly minimal, but embarrassing, right? And that's where offenders in general weaponize fear, shame, and guilt, right? That's what offenders do,
00:46:16 Sonny Von Cleveland
One hundred percent.
00:46:17 Jim Cole
And so they get they get the child to do something that would cause embarrassment, right? So for a female. It could be as simple as just bearing their breasts, even for a short amount of time. Right, but that's going to be—they would never want their parents to see that. They would never want to see the boys at school to see that. They wouldn't want their teachers and principals to see that. And that's where these guys go into the extortion part: is they capture that and then they now threaten them with the public release of that of that image,
00:46:47 Jim Cole
Unless they do more. And then they promise, if you do the next thing, I'll stop. But they never stop, right? And so, yeah, it gets worse and worse and worse because now they have worse content that's even more embarrassing, and it just cycles from there. And you can see where these kids end up,
00:47:05 Jim Cole
Just being incredibly traumatized, and they're they're basically being all night stock. But then,
00:47:11 Jim Cole
To make matters even worse, now these offenders have their offender friends, and they start to share. Oh,
00:47:19 Jim Cole
Contact this. Here, here's the whatever. The here's the Instagram. Here's the Snapchat account. You contact her, and I'll send you the material. And now you can show her that you have it too, and she'll do stuff for you.
00:47:34 Sonny Von Cleveland
Right. And so this poor child is getting hit from ten,
00:47:37 Jim Cole
Fifteen different predators. Start to get hit by multiple.
00:47:40 Sonny Von Cleveland
And that becomes their whole life.
00:47:41 Brandon Guffey
They they become trafficked. Yeah.
00:47:43 Sonny Von Cleveland
Yeah. It inundates their entire life.
00:47:45 Jim Cole
It is a it is a mechanism. I mean, it's a severe form of exploitation.
00:47:49 Jim Cole
And it is. I think sex extortion is the bluriest.
00:47:54 Jim Cole
It's the bluriest overlap of trafficking and what we what we would call child exploitation and what we call trafficking. Right. It's the bluriest piece, right? Especially now with the monetary aspect of it. So, this darknet site had I want to say had about thirty five to forty offenders,
00:48:14 Jim Cole
Who were pooling their resources.
00:48:17 Jim Cole
To exploit kids at scale, and and by the time we got onto it, we're able to take it down and investigate it. They had over four thousand victims globally,
00:48:30 Jim Cole
And they they were grouping and organizing these kids by hair color, eye color, body physique,
00:48:37 Jim Cole
Like because different people are attracted to different things.
00:48:40 Sonny Von Cleveland
Catalogs.
00:48:41 Jim Cole
So that's basically what they do, and then they would put all the information. They put this their account on these. Social media. This their parents' name. Like they were, they were basically putting files together on each kid that they then stored for everyone who is part of this board to have access to, so that any one of them could go. Oh yeah, today I want to reach out to this kid and do it to this kid. And then they were getting these kids to abuse their younger siblings,
00:49:07 Jim Cole
Neighbor kids if they were babysitting, and if they didn't have siblings, they would have them abuse pets.
00:49:15 Jim Cole
I mean, it was horrific.
00:49:18 Jim Cole
And then these kids, when we when we we sent leads all over the world to contact these kids to arrest these offenders,
00:49:27 Jim Cole
And when when the the law enforcement agency on the ground is contacting these kids,
00:49:34 Jim Cole
It was very common for these kids to have been involved in a lot of self harm.
00:49:39 Jim Cole
I we did not have a case of suicide,
00:49:42 Jim Cole
But we had lots of cases where these kids are cutting themselves.
00:49:45 Jim Cole
Had withdrawn, like parents would be like. All of a sudden, they just they were just not,
00:49:50 Jim Cole
Or they started engaging in really, really,
00:49:54 Jim Cole
Um, like they went from being like this model kid, straight A student, to now they're failing in school, they're skipping classes, and they're using drugs,
00:50:04 Jim Cole
Right? And it's like, and and we watch families just. Get devastated by this.
00:50:08 Sonny Von Cleveland
I think the fact that you didn't have a suicide in that is was remarkable.
00:50:12 Jim Cole
Yeah, I agree. I agree. It was remarkable,
00:50:15 Jim Cole
But that didn't last that long, right? So then, so then, what happens is these Western African criminal organizations figured out that there was a way to utilize that that playbook and monetize it.
00:50:34 Jim Cole
And that males in general make better targets than females do, because let's just face it, you know, teenage males,
00:50:45 Jim Cole
It takes a lot. Well, it's a lot less work to get a teen male to expose themselves.
00:50:52 Brandon Guffey
I tell the teenagers that I speak with, I'm 46. If you show me boobies, blood leaves my brain biologically, and I don't think straight. How do I expect you to act? Right.
00:51:02 Sonny Von Cleveland
When you have not,
00:51:03 Brandon Guffey
There was a range in hormone.
00:51:05 Jim Cole
When you're 14, 15,16, 17, and and look, this isn't just happening to kids either.
00:51:10 Jim Cole
College, this happened to college students. It's happening to adults. Like actually,
00:51:14 Jim Cole
Before I left HSI, we started actually talking to the military because military members, I mean, up into their 40s, were being extorted,
00:51:27 Jim Cole
And we started looking. This like this is now turning into a national security issue because.
00:51:33 Jim Cole
Now, our our adversaries can do this to a military member with with a security clearance.
00:51:39 Sonny Von Cleveland
Start getting to export.
00:51:40 Jim Cole
That's right. And and army CID and army counterintelligence are starting to see these.
00:51:45 Sonny Von Cleveland
And I have to imagine they're trying to get into government, into politics, and things like. Because I mean, I think we've seen some politicians that have.
00:51:52 Brandon Guffey
That was one of the fears with the platform that they were talking about banning for a while,
00:51:56 Brandon Guffey
Was the the Chinese Communist Party actually having control of that.
00:52:02 Brandon Guffey
And then you're giving them access to your networks that you join. So, like, whenever I first got elected, you couldn't have certain apps on your phone.
00:52:09 Sonny Von Cleveland
So, is that why they were so adamant about going against TikTok, getting it out of Chinese hands? Yes.
00:52:14 Jim Cole
Wow. Yeah, that's exactly why. Is it the national security?
00:52:16 Sonny Von Cleveland
Welcome to my crash course in education, ladies and gentlemen.
00:52:19 Jim Cole
Yeah, the national security implications of that. Yeah.
00:52:21 Brandon Guffey
Wow. Right. Imagine if you get a judge. And you can accept him and his wife are just having sex on the couch,
00:52:28 Sonny Von Cleveland
And now you can control the outcome of trials and cases. Yeah. Look, wow.
00:52:33 Jim Cole
Extortion and blackmail have existed since time immemorial, right? I'm sure a caveman extorted another blackmail, another right. Yeah. It's just that now in this digital age, the face of it has changed, and the ease of it has changed. And one of the things I want to talk talk about when sex extortion first started,
00:52:52 Jim Cole
Sometimes the.
00:52:54 Jim Cole
What we in law enforcement terms we use "flash to bang," right? Is the flash to bang could be weeks. It could take,
00:53:03 Jim Cole
It could take one of these offenders,
00:53:06 Jim Cole
Kind of working a child for a long period of time before they would get the incriminating, especially with females, right?
00:53:16 Jim Cole
And what we're seeing is that flash to bang time just decreasing, decreasing, decreasing.
00:53:21 Jim Cole
And I think you can speak to that very well with your own experience.
00:53:24 Brandon Guffey
And I think the teens, you know, that from what I'm seeing, and just like you were talking about, you were the first to educate me on traditional sex extortion.
00:53:34 Brandon Guffey
We saw a rise of these extortionists going after girls and getting images, and then they would use those images or take over those accounts. Yeah, because in those Western African countries, a lot of them cannot; they might be banned from a platform or They may be whenever it comes to transferring money in the way that they're set up there, so they have to take over another account often.
00:53:57 Jim Cole
Yeah, and and the account takeover happens. They trick these kids into resetting their password,
00:54:05 Jim Cole
And so what happens is the the offender knows the account. They go on to the platform to to reset the password,
00:54:12 Jim Cole
And then they trick the kid by through like you're going to get a code on your phone. Send me the code. And then I can send you money, or I can do X, and the kid doesn't know any better, so they send you know the code,
00:54:24 Sonny Von Cleveland
Which then gives them access.
00:54:25 Jim Cole
The two-factor authentication code. Once they put the code in, they change the password. Now that kid's locked out of their own account, and they own it. Yeah, yeah.
00:54:33 Brandon Guffey
So they would do that with those photos. Then you started to see the rise of the financial sextortion.
00:54:40 Brandon Guffey
And in the minds of, especially the Western African countries, they just look at Americans. We're all rich. Yeah, we're all rich. And they look at it. And truthfully, in their mind, it's nothing to be able to extort a teenage boy, thirteen to seventeen, and get a hundred dollars. Like you said about the military, I think one of the reasons they were targeting military because military get these sign-on bonuses. They knew they could catch that eighteen, nineteen-year-old just had a massive sign-on bonus and get ten grand, right, from them because they didn't want this information getting out. So they started targeting the teenage boys, and they become friends with multiple people within the network.
00:55:13 Brandon Guffey
So it's friends of friends. That way, you join it because you say Bobby knows this girl. Yeah. So I'm gonna join it. Bobby knows her, and then it's like, well, Bobby and Gavin know her, so why don't I join it? And then so they got the circle of friends. Well, the bigger the circle of friends, the bigger influence they have, because then they start looking at where do you go to church. I'm gonna send this out to your church. Who are your family members? I'm gonna send this out to your family.
00:55:36 Sonny Von Cleveland
Where do you go to school?
00:55:37 Brandon Guffey
They'll use those images from those girls they were extorting.
00:55:41 Brandon Guffey
Now, what I found over the past year,
00:55:44 Brandon Guffey
South Carolina, we enacted a bell-to-bell cell phone ban policy in many of our schools.
00:55:50 Brandon Guffey
We thought the extortion of girls had stopped.
00:55:53 Brandon Guffey
Then we saw a huge rise of these teenage girls coming forward,
00:55:58 Brandon Guffey
Stating like scared to death whenever they got their phones at the end of the day,
00:56:03 Brandon Guffey
Because for years they had been getting messages while they're sitting in school from an extortionist. Because the boys started to wise up, and the boys would say, "I don't believe that you're real. Send me a topless picture of you throwing a peace sign." Right. The girl would. They would say, "You got 10 minutes to send me this picture. I'm gonna make all of yours go viral." The girls were just thinking,"This is some creep, but he's not sharing my photos, so I'm okay." And it starts to desensitize them and groom them. Essentially, they would run to the bathroom, snap a photo,
00:56:31 Brandon Guffey
Go back to class. No one ever knew.
00:56:33 Brandon Guffey
But then, whenever they started getting their phones at the end of the day, they realized.
00:56:37 Brandon Guffey
Like they freaked out because I didn't hit this deadline.
00:56:40 Brandon Guffey
All my information. Then they started coming forward,
00:56:42 Brandon Guffey
And no one talks about it because this is your most shameful moment, your most embarrassing moment. Sure.
00:56:49 Brandon Guffey
And ultimately, when I I try to teach to the teens, is grace is what we forgot.
00:56:55 Brandon Guffey
We're too busy judging everyone for every mistake that they make,
00:57:00 Brandon Guffey
But.
00:57:03 Brandon Guffey
After we seen the financial extortion, we've had more than fifty teenagers take their lives. I'd never heard of sex extortion. Whenever it happened to Gavin, I had to stay quiet till November because of the investigation.
00:57:15 Brandon Guffey
And I came out with my story and posted it on YouTube. Everything that I knew at that time, as honestly as I could,
00:57:22 Brandon Guffey
The day before I was elected to the state house.
00:57:25 Brandon Guffey
And it was like, I don't care if it's going to hurt your investigation or not. I've got to get the story out. Yeah, yeah. And my biggest problem is we had lost three additional teens during that time period.
00:57:35 Brandon Guffey
So my big thing is I believe that the louder I always say, the only thing God blessed me with is a big mouth. That's right. And the more that I can run my mouth, the more I can save teens.
00:57:47 Brandon Guffey
And I pray I never know how many teens I save.
00:57:49 Brandon Guffey
That's right. Because I pray I don't have to hear about other teens taking their life over this.
00:57:55 Brandon Guffey
But I know if I can get that message out there, that awareness. If Gavin would have knew that this was happening, to the stats at the end of 2024, were one in 17 teens have been a victim.
00:58:05 Brandon Guffey
Yeah. Now the stats as of last year, whenever I was speaking at University of Colorado, or universe,
00:58:12 Brandon Guffey
Yeah, or Denver University, excuse me.
00:58:14 Brandon Guffey
Whenever I was speaking there, Thorn released stats and it was one in five due to the rise of artificial intelligence. Yeah. So now these kids don't even have to send photos. Right. The worst case of sex torsion that I have dealt with.
00:58:27 Brandon Guffey
And my phone was ringing two to three times a day because I put my whenever the People magazine article come out in 23,
00:58:33 Brandon Guffey
I put my personal cell phone and everything out there.
00:58:37 Brandon Guffey
My roommates in Columbia tell you I'm on the phone till three or four o'clock in the morning talking to teens trying to help them.
00:58:42 Brandon Guffey
Now the thing is, is at first it was trying to talk to the teens, talk them down, trying to get them to go to their parents, get their parents or them to go to law enforcement, and that was always a battle. Now the good news is, is now I'm having parents reach out.
00:58:56 Brandon Guffey
Because it's getting out there, the teens are getting brave enough to go to their parents and say this happened. That that makes a big difference.
00:59:02 Jim Cole
That makes a huge difference.
00:59:04 Sonny Von Cleveland
Huge. When we let these kids know, like if this happens,
00:59:09 Sonny Von Cleveland
Like my son's eight years old and he can give you a great breakdown on what child exploitation is, what human trafficking is, he will not be the victim because he already knows what this is. He.
00:59:19 Brandon Guffey
I wouldn't say I wouldn't say will not be the victim,
00:59:22 Brandon Guffey
And the worst case I dealt with was an eight year old. On Roblox,
00:59:27 Brandon Guffey
Mom called me after a month. Now this person wasn't even using like the Discord. They were typing on a billboard,
00:59:35 Brandon Guffey
And then they would delete it, and the kid would type back.
00:59:39 Brandon Guffey
So they're using a billboard within the game.
00:59:42 Jim Cole
Wow!
00:59:42 Brandon Guffey
Not even talking on a chat board. So they're not going to Discord. Yeah.
00:59:45 Sonny Von Cleveland
So this is traceable. Yeah.
00:59:47 Brandon Guffey
Wow. They're changing it in the game.
00:59:49 Jim Cole
There's no record of that communication.
00:59:50 Sonny Von Cleveland
Wow.
00:59:51 Brandon Guffey
So, but this person. Convinced the eight-year-old. Well, they went to the parents' social media.
00:59:57 Brandon Guffey
Once they found out the kid's name,
01:00:00 Brandon Guffey
Went to the parents' social media, then created using a Nudify app a nude image of this eight-year-old,
01:00:06 Brandon Guffey
And then said, "If you don't send me more pictures, I'm going to tell your mommy and daddy." Now, this eight-year-old could only get on the platform once a day for an hour at a time,
01:00:16 Brandon Guffey
And they would get on there,
01:00:18 Brandon Guffey
They'd go in their room, and they were being Groomed, and it wasn't until the mother walked in and caught them trying to insert something in that all of this came out,
01:00:29 Brandon Guffey
And the child was just terrified. Like my mommy and daddy, this this looks like me.
01:00:33 Sonny Von Cleveland
Yeah, and that kid doesn't realize that that's AI, right? That is like, how did you get that picture of me? Yeah, yeah. And so they're going to do.
01:00:40 Jim Cole
Look, the offenders are very creative. They're very manipulative,
01:00:45 Jim Cole
And they will stop at like I had a. We had a case right here in in the Nashville, Tennessee area,
01:00:54 Jim Cole
With an offender who had he had fifty four personas across multiple platforms, and I am talking about everything from gaming platforms,
01:01:03 Jim Cole
To include Roblox, to include Xbox, PlayStation.
01:01:07 Jim Cole
He convinced kids that he worked for these companies, depending on what platform they had. He was a big like he was a.
01:01:14 Jim Cole
A game designer and all these things, and he had these kids like in the palm of his hand,
01:01:19 Jim Cole
But he horrifically sexually extorted kids, and he would find out where they lived, and then take Google Map shots like at the front of their house and all this stuff.
01:01:35 Brandon Guffey
And they did that to Gavin.
01:01:36 Jim Cole
He would convince this kid that he took the picture. Yeah, because he would crop it so it didn't look like. Yeah, so he's like, I'm outside your house, and he would tell them, if you don't do this, I will burn your house down with your parents in it. I will come in and kill your parents. I will do X, Y, and Z, or they'll swat your house. Yeah, or they'll swat the swatting.
01:01:57 Brandon Guffey
Just to say, look, that was just a teaser to let you know the damage I can cause.
01:02:01 Jim Cole
Yeah, and for the audience that's not familiar with swatting, we should probably cover that just real quick.
01:02:04 Sonny Von Cleveland
Yeah, I'm not familiar with that.
01:02:06 Jim Cole
Yeah, so swatting is that kind of like.
01:02:08 Jim Cole
Swatting is when yeah, so basically what you do is you know where someone lives,
01:02:13 Jim Cole
And you contact police and say someone's being held hostage in the home. You make it and you can you you spoof the phone number so it looks like it's coming from that residence or that a person in the residence. You call nine one one with all kinds of oh my god he's gonna kill us and this and that and the other, and so the police response then is oh no someone yeah the SWAT team is gonna come. Surround that house, do the whole thing, and and in these swatting cases,
01:02:44 Jim Cole
The family's just in there going. They have no idea what's happening.
01:02:47 Sonny Von Cleveland
They're having dinner or something.
01:02:48 Jim Cole
And it's really dangerous. It's really dangerous.
01:02:52 Brandon Guffey
And as a father, that's one of the things. Like our job as a father is to protect our family. One hundred percent. That's our number one instinct.
01:03:00 Sonny Von Cleveland
One hundred percent.
01:03:02 Brandon Guffey
I was so busy trying to protect my son from the outside world. Yeah.
01:03:07 Brandon Guffey
That a predator could come into his bedroom at night while I'm there.
01:03:13 Sonny Von Cleveland
Yeah, that's one of the and attack biggest points I think we try to make now with our education is it's not the stranger out on the street out there; it's this device, it's all these devices that we have in our homes. Like we are opening the inside of our home, our sanctuary,
01:03:29 Sonny Von Cleveland
To the predators.
01:03:30 Sonny Von Cleveland
It's our job as parents.
01:03:32 Sonny Von Cleveland
To to understand these things, to learn, to educate ourselves, to research, to know how to protect the inside of our home.
01:03:39 Brandon Guffey
Now, I mean, hell, I am chair of AI regs in South Carolina. I am a national leader on tech legislation across the country. Vice chair of tech and communications for the National Council of State Legislators, and yet you had to show me how to do little tricks or how to fix my Instagram that I haven't been able to fix, and you showed me in one minute.
01:04:02 Brandon Guffey
How do I feel as a parent, trying to safeguard my child and these platforms?
01:04:09 Sonny Von Cleveland
And I think that the importance lies on us spreading the education, right? To to teach to get into more homes and more parents get them in a room and say,
01:04:21 Sonny Von Cleveland
"This is how we protect our kids.
01:04:24 Brandon Guffey
" But every platform's different.
01:04:25 Jim Cole
Yeah, I think I think the key to prevention is like.
01:04:30 Jim Cole
Is not parents trying to learn every platform and learn every tech possibility, right? Kids are kids are always going to outpace parents in that, right?
01:04:39 Jim Cole
So, I think the key here is about having basic conversations that are ongoing about when something happens online, regardless of what the platform is, regardless of what it is. If something happens online, then I am your safety person. You come to me immediately, and you will not be in trouble. Yeah, right.
01:05:09 Jim Cole
You, my I tell parents to thank the child for being brave. Being brave, because I think one of the problems that we happen is is human nature works against us in this in this regard, right? Because you are a parent, and and. When you've told your kid not to do something, right? You say, "Hey, don't do X," and then your kid does X. Then your first, your first human nature response is,"Why did you do X?
01:05:39 Jim Cole
I told you not to do X." Right. Right. The problem is that can actually be harmful. Yeah, right. You're scaring the child actually. You're counter, and so why would your kid trust you to come to you if they vol, if they did X? Why would they voluntarily tell you they did X?
01:05:56 Brandon Guffey
Last time, my best conversations I have is with fathers. Mothers are usually very sympathetic, very protective in that situation, but the fathers get the angriest. Yeah, and whenever I get fathers on the phone, I tell them,
01:06:09 Brandon Guffey
"Look, you're angry.
01:06:11 Brandon Guffey
You're angry at your son, your daughter. I understand that because our job is to protect our child."
01:06:16 Brandon Guffey
You're angry because you told them everything that you know.
01:06:19 Brandon Guffey
You realize that you can't protect them in every situation, and you're more angry at yourself right now, not your child. Yeah, you know they're not always going to listen to you. Yeah, but right now they're coming to you out of fear. They're coming to you because they're so brave and they know Dad's got my back.
01:06:36 Sonny Von Cleveland
Yeah, and you have to be.
01:06:37 Brandon Guffey
You need to shut up. Yeah, man up.
01:06:40 Brandon Guffey
Be thankful that they're here because I wish to God my son would kill me. Yeah, and things could have been different. Yeah, yeah. So, as angry as you are, I would be. I would be crying tears of joy. Yeah, right now. Yeah, yeah.
01:06:53 Jim Cole
So, a huge part of prevention is actually educating parents to be the safety valve,
01:06:58 Sonny Von Cleveland
Right? To create that safe space that your kid can come talk to you.
01:07:02 Jim Cole
You can come talk to me about anything,
01:07:05 Jim Cole
And I am going to do whatever it takes to help you. And I will say we'll address like the behaviors later in in a constructive way.
01:07:16 Sonny Von Cleveland
Yeah, because safety is the first thing.
01:07:18 Jim Cole
But the first thing we have to manage is that you're safe. That that we're we're trying to remove the threat.
01:07:24 Brandon Guffey
Yeah. And I thought,
01:07:26 Brandon Guffey
I truly did. I thought that me and Gavin had that type of relationship. Gavin was my mischievous kid that got into things.
01:07:35 Brandon Guffey
I knew that he had been sexually active,
01:07:37 Brandon Guffey
So we'd already had to have that conversation. I knew that he had experimented with drugs. We had already had to have that conversation. Those are two of the hardest conversations that a teenager is ever going to have with a child. Yeah, right. Yeah. So I didn't feel that there's anything out there that he couldn't come to me with.
01:07:52 Jim Cole
Brandon, I can't tell you how many times we learned about an issue of sex torsion and the parents didn't know. hadn't we We discovered it through another means, and the family didn't know. I mean, obviously, the kid knew. But the family didn't know yet. I can't tell you how many parents we went to,
01:08:09 Jim Cole
And then had,
01:08:11 Jim Cole
Especially if it was a female, a mother say,"Oh, there's no way," she would tell.
01:08:16 Sonny Von Cleveland
She tells me everything.
01:08:17 Jim Cole
She tells me everything. She would tell me,
01:08:19 Jim Cole
And it's a it's a harsh realization when then it it starts to unravel and does come out, and then the mom's like,"Oh, oh, she didn't.
01:08:29 Sonny Von Cleveland
" And I think, and and maybe you can speak to that a little bit, but I think that that is that lends to.
01:08:34 Sonny Von Cleveland
The feeling of guilt from the parents, where you are like,
01:08:39 Sonny Von Cleveland
I did everything I could. That this my child knew he could talk to me.
01:08:44 Jim Cole
Yeah, but they don't want to let you down. Yeah, they don't.
01:08:47 Sonny Von Cleveland
They don't. And I think that the way that you have handled this, and that you are now out speaking against it so heavily, is is you you show dads especially you can have that relationship, and sometimes this is the heavy toll of shame. These kids feel so shameful that even if I had this great relationship with my dad,
01:09:09 Sonny Von Cleveland
This was a breaking point.
01:09:11 Sonny Von Cleveland
Our children need to know that this is not a breaking point,
01:09:15 Jim Cole
Right? Like this is, and again, I I think a big part of our prevention has to be to have those conversations with parents so that they can be that resource. But not every kid lives in a safe home, yeah. Right? Not every kid lives in a home.
01:09:27 Sonny Von Cleveland
That's the disheartening part. Is we're thinking about. This is a relationship with a father and a son that was great.
01:09:33 Jim Cole
Yeah, a lot of our cases came forward because not because a a child went to their own family,
01:09:41 Jim Cole
But because they told their best friend.
01:09:44 Sonny Von Cleveland
Right, and the friend said something,
01:09:45 Jim Cole
And then the friend went to their parent and said,"Oh, like over out of concern." And then it then it all broke open. A lot of cases break open that way. No.
01:09:56 Jim Cole
And so I think it's important for all parents, or really all adults, because teachers may be the first line of a safe person.
01:10:05 Jim Cole
It could be, you know, I mean, almost anyone. But if it can't be, yeah, if it can't be their own parent,
01:10:12 Jim Cole
Just people in general on the prevention aspect need to understand that. Look, a kid in their life might come to them with this information,
01:10:20 Jim Cole
And how you respond is critical to what can happen. Yeah, right. Because look, I know of kids who went to usually a parent only to be called stupid.
01:10:31 Brandon Guffey
Yeah, like like how stupid?
01:10:33 Sonny Von Cleveland
How stupid could you be that you would do that?
01:10:35 Jim Cole
How? Yeah, like we've told you, like right? And and unfortunately, all that reaction does, or or the fear of that reaction does,
01:10:44 Jim Cole
Is drive them closer to really harmful behavior.
01:10:47 Sonny Von Cleveland
Sure, and God forbid you have younger siblings that have seen an older sibling get in trouble to where like a mom kicks them out. Or a dad kicks them out of the house because you've done something. That's going to double down on that. I'm not saying nothing to my parents. They kicked our brother, our sister out of the house.
01:11:02 Brandon Guffey
Well, the out of the thousands of parents and teens that I've dealt with,
01:11:07 Brandon Guffey
I've only had one situation, and unfortunately, it was within my community,
01:11:12 Brandon Guffey
To where a parent was not forgiving,
01:11:17 Brandon Guffey
And it was because not only that they found out their child had been extorted on a.
01:11:23 Brandon Guffey
A gay platform, and the child had not come out about their identity to begin with,
01:11:29 Brandon Guffey
And so it wasn't just the extortion.
01:11:31 Jim Cole
Talk about the parent was not forgiving.
01:11:34 Brandon Guffey
It was the shock of this with their standing in the community, and then the crime on top of it.
01:11:42 Jim Cole
Talk about wrapping fear, shame, and guilt in another layer of fear, shame, and guilt on top of fear,
01:11:46 Sonny Von Cleveland
Shame, and guilt, and slamming it in a blender.
01:11:48 Jim Cole
And that's another thing. A lot of the kids that are.
01:11:52 Jim Cole
That are particularly becoming victim to—I hate to say "new" because it's not really new, but it's new in the media over the last couple years—are these nihilistic extremist groups like Seven Six Four as an example,
01:12:07 Jim Cole
The sadistic sex extortion, right? And so,
01:12:11 Jim Cole
A lot of the kids that fall prey to that start off because they are.
01:12:18 Jim Cole
They're searching for answers about their sexuality online, and that's oftentimes what then lead is is a leader into these groups. They're they're scouring those kind of platforms for these kids that have these vulnerabilities that then they can further exploit.
01:12:34 Brandon Guffey
I I want to say this because I believe that links politically with what I see. Sure.
01:12:40 Sonny Von Cleveland
If we go back to jump into what the government's doing and how politics is is getting involved in this, yeah.
01:12:46 Brandon Guffey
But in in the nineties, you had we had what do they call it liberal arts universities? Sure. Where I could be conservative, my professor could be liberal, and as long as I made my argument, I still passed. Sure. Early two thousands, that started to change. Either you're going to do what your professor wants, you're going to do it from their perspective. They thought that's the way to teach you, and it started taking away the ability for our young adults to think in situations. Well, then you get to you know two thousand tens.
01:13:18 Brandon Guffey
Now you got the introduction of algorithms.
01:13:20 Brandon Guffey
I'm convinced algorithms is what caused the huge rise of gender identity crisis in this country. And I'll use the example: two twelve year old friends were playing by the creek, and all of a sudden the wind blows at that age, and you get an erection. Well, you just go home and Google: "Am I gay?" Because I got an erection near my best friend. That algorithm continues to feed you that information further and further. To where you're on chat boards with people that are truly struggling with their identity, and it's confusing the hell out of you. Whenever this is just something that's biologically natural.
01:13:52 Brandon Guffey
Yeah. Well, now we've got the introduction of artificial intelligence,
01:13:55 Brandon Guffey
And we're talking about adding it into so that that started taking away critical thinking at 13 years old in companies control. Now we're going to talk about adding artificial intelligence in education.
01:14:04 Sonny Von Cleveland
We're basically taking away independent thought.
01:14:07 Jim Cole
Period. Right. Critical thinking for sure. Yeah.
01:14:10 Sonny Von Cleveland
Kids don't even have to think anymore. It's like.
01:14:13 Sonny Von Cleveland
What am I doing here? And we've seen how bad AI is.
01:14:17 Brandon Guffey
We're putting we're putting too much of. And if we look back at World War Two, where you started handling things was propaganda. We're putting too much power in the hands of these companies that can shift an entire narrative, yeah, very very easily. If you look at whenever you know Hamas attacked Israel.
01:14:41 Brandon Guffey
One platform, there was a huge rise of people searching Osama bin Laden and praising Osama bin Laden, and it was those that were 25 and under on TikTok,
01:14:51 Brandon Guffey
Because it was kind of pushed out there, like this was justified, and people started praising everything that happened at911 9/11 that they weren't even alive whenever911 9/11 happened. Wow,
01:15:02 Brandon Guffey
Yeah, and that was all due to an algorithm, and it caused this huge rise.
01:15:07 Brandon Guffey
And it shows you how easily things can be manipulated. That's another national security risk of a country that can control the platform.
01:15:16 Brandon Guffey
When it comes to the signs of human trafficking,
01:15:19 Brandon Guffey
It's time to see things differently. Because traffickers don't always look like what you think. Well, you hope you just see a mom and daughter back there. You're missing that two out of every five sex trafficking victims are trafficked by someone they know,
01:15:31 Jim Cole
Including family members. Trafficking isn't a faraway problem.
01:15:35 Brandon Guffey
It's a here problem.
01:15:38 Brandon Guffey
Hello, I'm here to see your daughter.
01:15:41 Brandon Guffey
It's hiding in plain sight.
01:15:48 Jim Cole
We talked about your journey through politics at the at the county level,
01:15:53 Jim Cole
And then you running for the state legislature,
01:15:56 Jim Cole
Becoming a state legislator,
01:16:00 Jim Cole
And kind of as that was starting,
01:16:04 Jim Cole
You know, you you lost Gavin.
01:16:08 Jim Cole
And and I I know you so so but I I know that that lit a fire in you on this topic right and so as a legislator,
01:16:19 Jim Cole
How did that change, like your mission and your goals in politics?
01:16:24 Brandon Guffey
Well, I mean, losing a child, it's hard to even just get up and get going.
01:16:30 Brandon Guffey
And you know, I wanted to quit politics immediately,
01:16:34 Brandon Guffey
And my wife said, "Absolutely not. You're one of the few people." That can actually save the next cabin. Get out there and fight to save the next cabin.
01:16:42 Brandon Guffey
So I took office in January,
01:16:46 Brandon Guffey
And my number one focus became: you know, I wanted vengeance for my son. I wanted to make sure we caught the person that's responsible. I wanted to make sure that I'm educating kids across the globe about what sex extortion is and teaching them that grace is available. And I needed to arm our law enforcement and our school teachers to understand. What they are dealing with, because we have federal laws,
01:17:08 Brandon Guffey
But whenever it came to state laws, our local law enforcement had no authority. And unfortunately, a lot of our local law enforcement, whenever kids would come to them,
01:17:16 Brandon Guffey
They didn't know what to do. They would just say, "Well, don't send pictures," right? And they don't understand this the Snapchat generation that wakes up, snaps a picture. This their diary. It's not uncommon, especially after COVID, for kids to have relationships with people online that they have never met before. Right. Whether that's sexual, whether that's friendships or anything else,
01:17:35 Brandon Guffey
So there was just a lack of knowledge there. So I came in,
01:17:39 Brandon Guffey
And whenever I came in, we had the second largest freshman class in the history of South Carolina.
01:17:45 Brandon Guffey
South Carolina is one of the oldest states,
01:17:47 Brandon Guffey
And we came in with twenty-seven members—Republican, Democrat, and Freedom Caucus. I call us a tri-party system in South Carolina.
01:17:56 Brandon Guffey
And my views—I was more of a bull in a china shop person. It was.
01:18:01 Brandon Guffey
I know what's right, and if you don't agree, you're an idiot.
01:18:04 Brandon Guffey
Well, what you don't learn is that you don't get things done in politics that way.
01:18:08 Brandon Guffey
And so I came in with this mindset of this is what we're going to do. This should be very simple.
01:18:15 Brandon Guffey
We're going to put this law into place, and I worked. Luckily, you know, I'm a redneck that sold dirt and rocks in Rock Hill.
01:18:23 Brandon Guffey
I don't know how to write laws.
01:18:25 Brandon Guffey
You know, you start getting arguments of.
01:18:27 Brandon Guffey
You know may and shall and how that can change an entire case,
01:18:32 Brandon Guffey
And let offenders off, and so we had great legislative staff, you know, that came in and started helping me write a bill. We based it off of Utah's sex extortion law at the time,
01:18:43 Brandon Guffey
And what I found was the most the highest amount of sentence that we give. Like as a father, I want death penalty, right, for the people that do this, sure, but we can't do that,
01:18:54 Brandon Guffey
And I wrote this bill. We have a Republican supermajority in South Carolina. I'm a Republican lawmaker, and I'm thinking this bill is just going to pass.
01:19:04 Brandon Guffey
Every week, our freshman class of everyone would meet at my desk on Tuesday. We come in session on Tuesday, we're there Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
01:19:13 Brandon Guffey
And every Tuesday, the freshman class would meet at my desk and we would pray about how do we get Gavin's Law together. This was all of us working together on a common cause. I get all the credit for passing Gavin's Law, but it could not have been done. Without every member of that,
01:19:29 Brandon Guffey
But yet the bill wasn't moving.
01:19:31 Brandon Guffey
I had a group of freshmen that I became very good friends with. We call ourselves the Porch Caucus. We sit on the back porch and we talk about our problems. And those men became my backbone. Whenever I am struggling and just want to cry at the end of the night,
01:19:44 Brandon Guffey
And so frustrated because I can't get things moving,
01:19:46 Brandon Guffey
And we're all brand new and we're figuring, okay, what can we leverage?
01:19:50 Brandon Guffey
What can we hold our vote on to get this hearing?
01:19:55 Brandon Guffey
And I kept trying to go through the processes, you know, go to the chairman,
01:19:58 Brandon Guffey
And no one would move the bill.
01:20:00 Brandon Guffey
Now, whenever I first came in, the minority leader in South Carolina is a defense attorney,
01:20:05 Brandon Guffey
And he's the guy who has represented some of the largest fentanyl busts.
01:20:10 Brandon Guffey
He's represented people that have killed a cop,
01:20:13 Brandon Guffey
And to me, he's just the enemy. Like he's the problem with South Carolina politics. Whenever I came in,
01:20:19 Brandon Guffey
Week one, we're doing a fentanyl trafficking bill. We're literally. Fussing at each other back and forth because I wanted mandatory minimums on it. We ended up getting mandatory minimums in it,
01:20:28 Brandon Guffey
But needless to say, we were not friends by any means.
01:20:33 Brandon Guffey
And I just got very frustrated one day, and I went up to him on the floor,
01:20:36 Brandon Guffey
And this was three months in to being in the legislature. Bill has not even had a hearing yet,
01:20:42 Brandon Guffey
And I just went up to him and I said,"Look, you're the only one with the balls to tell me what's wrong with the bill. Will you help me?
01:20:49 Brandon Guffey
" And he said, "Absolutely," and you're right. I'm the only one with the balls to tell you what's wrong with this bill,
01:20:54 Brandon Guffey
And he starts asking me about my nonprofit. He said, "Tell me about lesson three." My mindset goes to immediately. He's trying to find a way to fund my nonprofit. That's not what I want to do. And I'm like, "That doesn't matter." He's like, "No, no, stick with me.
01:21:05 Brandon Guffey
What are you doing with this?
01:21:07 Brandon Guffey
" And I said, "I'm going around. I'm talking to teens about mental health and cyber crimes." He said, "But why?" I said,"I don't want this to happen to the next Gavin." But like, if Gavin would have known, then he wouldn't have ended up this way. He said, "But why?" Now I'm getting angry. Right, you're talking about my son. Yeah, right.
01:21:23 Sonny Von Cleveland
Yeah, that emotion is very raw.
01:21:25 Brandon Guffey
And I was just like, "Well, awareness is ninety percent of the battle.
01:21:28 Brandon Guffey
" And he puts his hand on my shoulder and he said,"So why don't we mandate the Department of Education to teach everyone what sex extortion is?
01:21:36 Brandon Guffey
" And I just said, "I didn't know we could do that." He said, "Sure, we can." I tell you what, I'm going to grab two Democrat attorneys. You grab two Republican attorneys. Meet me back in the room,
01:21:45 Brandon Guffey
And we went through and we started arguing on the bill, every line by line. You know. He brought up a very good point, and he said,
01:21:53 Brandon Guffey
"Brandon, you know I've heard you talk about whenever you're sitting there that night and you're saying,'What could my son done that was so bad, cause him to take his life?' We all know teenagers. What if his girlfriend is going to break up with him,
01:22:07 Brandon Guffey
And he just makes the comment,'If you break up with me, I'm going to post the video we made together.' Does that deserve 15 years in prison?"
01:22:17 Sonny Von Cleveland
I was like, well, that's technically sex extortion, right?
01:22:19 Brandon Guffey
Right. By law, that would by law it would be sex extortion, and I was no. And he said, so why don't we leave that up to the family court to decide the egregiousness of it?
01:22:28 Brandon Guffey
Fair enough. Like, so we added that portion to it. You know, the only thing that we did now we made everything under Gavin's law is fifteen years in prison for extorting a minor or at risk adult.
01:22:42 Brandon Guffey
And the at-risk adult came from one of my my deskmate at the time who has two special needs kids,
01:22:47 Brandon Guffey
And you know that's something I would have never thought of. And it's not the sharing of the images; it's the threatening of sharing the images. And I'm very glad that we went through that process because the first person charged under Gavin's Law was a 14-year-old, and from my knowledge, it's the first person charged under an artificial intelligence use because he used an AI image to extort a classmate.
01:23:12 Brandon Guffey
And it went through family court, so I don't know what the fallout of that is. But I was so grateful that we had that conversation. That I'm not ruining some kid's life and sticking them in jail.
01:23:23 Sonny Von Cleveland
Going to spend 30 years in prison, right?
01:23:26 Brandon Guffey
Right, because it's stackable as well. If death or great bodily harm occurs, it's an additional 15 years. If you extort an adult, it's five years for the first offense, ten for a second,
01:23:37 Brandon Guffey
15 for a third.
01:23:38 Brandon Guffey
But Gavin's law is now.
01:23:41 Brandon Guffey
Which after we did that, and in South Carolina we have very strict rules that you do not name a bill after anyone because it elicits emotion,
01:23:49 Brandon Guffey
And so I never named it Gavin's Law.
01:23:53 Brandon Guffey
It was just a bill number.
01:23:54 Brandon Guffey
It passed unanimously on the House floor. I went to the Senate,
01:23:59 Brandon Guffey
And my senator, who's now soon to be Congressman West Climber,
01:24:03 Brandon Guffey
Said, "Look, in order to honor your son, I want to name this Gavin's Law." He said they're probably going to shoot it down. Senate stickler on rules,
01:24:12 Brandon Guffey
And he said as soon as I do it, someone will stand up and object. But I'm going to make the offer to do it.
01:24:17 Brandon Guffey
Come to it, he was too emotional to stand up there, and he got someone else to propose it.
01:24:21 Brandon Guffey
But they did it, and of course, senator stands up immediately. One of the senators on the Democratic side that I thought for sure is going to knock it down,
01:24:29 Brandon Guffey
And instead of objecting, they asked for the role of the Senate to be added on to that amendment, so that way no one could ever question the intent. And they named it Gavin's Law, and then they stood at ease. Everyone gave me a hug,
01:24:41 Brandon Guffey
And it passed unanimously both bodies. Gavin's Law is now national model policy. We passed it in many states. Some states,
01:24:49 Brandon Guffey
It you know, they may have sex extortion laws, but they didn't have the education portion. Yeah. So they might pass an amendment that they call Gavin's Law with the education portion, mandating that the schools, law enforcement, are taught what Gavin's Law is, sex extortion, how to report, and they have to turn in an annual report on it.
01:25:07 Brandon Guffey
That has become the biggest portion because, like I said, the kids now are brave enough to go to their parents because their parents know what sex tourism is. The kids know what sex tourism is.
01:25:17 Brandon Guffey
That bill passed, and I remember having a conversation,
01:25:23 Brandon Guffey
And I was being congratulated on how quickly the bill passed.
01:25:27 Brandon Guffey
And I said, "It didn't pass that fast. It's four months now in South Carolina. That's record history. Things do not move fast in South Carolina."
01:25:36 Brandon Guffey
To me, it felt like forever. Most stressful time in my life,
01:25:39 Brandon Guffey
And you know, being congratulated. And I don't feel like it moved very fast. So what do you mean? I said we passed this economic development deal in what ten days.
01:25:49 Brandon Guffey
I said, well, we had a deadline. I said, what's your deadline on saving children? Yeah.
01:25:54 Brandon Guffey
Like, to me, this is something laws do not move quick enough. No. Now, I I used to always say we need to be proactive. We need to be proactive.
01:26:04 Brandon Guffey
That's bullshit. We need to be reactive,
01:26:06 Brandon Guffey
And we need to be quick and nimble. We need to write the law whenever we see a problem, and if there's a problem with prosecution, or we see that something's not written right, we need to be able to edit that law and get it fixed and get it taken care of immediately.
01:26:21 Brandon Guffey
We're too busy on trying to get the perfection of a law, which no law is perfect.
01:26:27 Brandon Guffey
And after after I got that done, you know, I thought that was going to fill the hole.
01:26:34 Brandon Guffey
And me, and it didn't. Yeah. Um. And it's like, what do we do now?
01:26:39 Brandon Guffey
And I started looking at. Okay, well, I filed my lawsuit against Meta that began in January of 2024.
01:26:46 Brandon Guffey
Um. I went to Congress. I was invited to the Senate hearing, the big tech hearings where Zuckerberg and them came in.
01:26:52 Brandon Guffey
And I, I was never a fan of Lindsey Graham.
01:26:56 Brandon Guffey
Always called Lindsey Graham Flimsy Lindsey. Matter of fact, whenever I first met him, I called him. I, I told him, I said, I always called you Flimsy Lindsey.
01:27:03 Brandon Guffey
But I'm appreciative that you're taking up this fight,
01:27:07 Brandon Guffey
And I met him, and he put on the less than three pin. I have a lapel pin that I gave everyone whenever we pass the law,
01:27:14 Brandon Guffey
And he put it on his jacket,
01:27:16 Brandon Guffey
And they had me stand with a picture of Gavin in front of all the big tech people that came in,
01:27:21 Brandon Guffey
Um, and he opened up the conversation with saying,"Mr. Zuckerberg, you have blood on your hands,
01:27:27 Brandon Guffey
" And then share Gavin's story,
01:27:30 Brandon Guffey
And that started. Okay, well, we need to focus on.
01:27:33 Brandon Guffey
Federal legislation. What can we do federally?
01:27:36 Brandon Guffey
In 2020, end of 2023, I get a phone call from the first lady's office. Going into 24,
01:27:46 Brandon Guffey
No, I'm sorry, end of 2024, get a call from the first lady's office.
01:27:51 Brandon Guffey
She's wanting to start the Be Best initiative,
01:27:55 Brandon Guffey
And I get an invite to come up and meet with her along with two teenagers that deepfakes AIs have been created against. One in Texas.
01:28:02 Brandon Guffey
One in California, or one in New Jersey, one in Texas,
01:28:07 Brandon Guffey
And I go up there, and it's the three of us meeting the First Lady.
01:28:10 Brandon Guffey
And because I'm so blunt, I had a friend of mine tell me,"Like Guffy, don't offend the First Lady. Just tell her she has nice shoes. Like don't talk about how beautiful she is or anything else." So in my mind, I'm thinking,"Okay, don't just say I like your shoes.
01:28:25 Brandon Guffey
" And whenever I go to meet her and go to shake her hand, I said, "I really love your shoes." And she said, "Your son's story is one of the reasons that I wanted to make this my first initiative.
01:28:35 Brandon Guffey
" And she was pushing for what is now known as the Take It Down Act,
01:28:40 Brandon Guffey
And that changed me because to go from little old Rock Hill, South Carolina,
01:28:46 Brandon Guffey
To the President of the United States office and the First Lady making this her first initiative was huge.
01:28:54 Brandon Guffey
And then in May of twenty twenty.
01:28:58 Brandon Guffey
Five, we signed the Take It Down Act.
01:29:00 Brandon Guffey
We stood up there, and that—that's actually one of my proudest moments,
01:29:05 Brandon Guffey
Because I was able to stand there with my wife and the my wife standing beside me on stage, and we're kind of standing behind the senators that worked on this.
01:29:12 Brandon Guffey
And every piece of these tech legislation, if you look at them, they're all nonpartisan.
01:29:17 Brandon Guffey
It's always one Democrat, one Republican leading.
01:29:20 Brandon Guffey
It was Senator Klobuchar, Senator Cruz,
01:29:22 Brandon Guffey
Leading this fight,
01:29:24 Brandon Guffey
And we stood there. But I made sure that my son Cohen and my son Callahan were standing there as the president and first lady signed to take it down. And one of the proudest moments was actually seeing my boys,
01:29:45 Brandon Guffey
Like, "Hey,
01:29:46 Brandon Guffey
You got to fight for this,
01:29:49 Brandon Guffey
" Because I never struggled with mental health until all this happened, and.
01:29:55 Brandon Guffey
The only thing I always say, his fathers are great at giving advice. We're just really shitty at following.
01:30:00 Sonny Von Cleveland
Yeah, true.
01:30:01 Sonny Von Cleveland
This is very true.
01:30:02 Brandon Guffey
But the only thing that got me up and got me going was thinking that if this was Cohen that lost a son,
01:30:08 Brandon Guffey
How would I want him to handle it?
01:30:11 Brandon Guffey
And I got to get up, and I'd want him to fight,
01:30:15 Brandon Guffey
And to feel like that—that sense of pride that I could just see in their eyes—that made it worthwhile.
01:30:24 Brandon Guffey
Now continue to fight for further federal legislation. the The big tech lobby is very strong.
01:30:32 Brandon Guffey
They put more money in it.
01:30:34 Brandon Guffey
Matter of fact, in 2025,
01:30:37 Brandon Guffey
It's funny. You know, Meta announces they're going to spend think 300 million going after state legislators,
01:30:44 Brandon Guffey
And then they fund these dark money groups, which are I call them I call them astroturf organization. They're fake grassroots groups.
01:30:53 Brandon Guffey
On the anniversary of Gavin's death in two thousand and twenty-five, they sent door knockers out my district. I've never had door knockers against me in my district. Paid door knockers from out of state to start door knocking to try and bash me on the anniversary of my son's death.
01:31:10 Brandon Guffey
That was just like a fu to me. So I'm constantly fighting against these lobbies and everything that they are doing this past year.
01:31:22 Brandon Guffey
I passed a bill called the Stop Harms of Addictive Social Media Shazam is what I call it,
01:31:28 Brandon Guffey
And the libertarian in me says I don't want everyone having to upload an ID.
01:31:34 Brandon Guffey
I don't want to take away your freedom to be able to search for information. No one needs to be looking if you're looking at the anarchist cookbook. We still have the Fourth Amendment. You shouldn't be able to search all my information.
01:31:45 Brandon Guffey
You know I should have that privacy, and.
01:31:50 Brandon Guffey
What this does instead of using age verification, it uses age estimation.
01:31:55 Brandon Guffey
It only applies to the companies that are two billion dollars or more,
01:31:59 Brandon Guffey
And it states due to federal court rulings. I I agree it should be under eighteen minors.
01:32:06 Brandon Guffey
However, federal court rulings have ruled that sixteen and eighteen are two different standards in many of these things,
01:32:13 Brandon Guffey
Whereas Section two thirty in COPA starts at thirteen.
01:32:16 Brandon Guffey
So. We move up the age to 16 and say, if you're under the age of 16 and you're on a platform, these companies are already marketing stuff to you.
01:32:26 Brandon Guffey
They have to go through a three-step process, but if they estimate that this is a 16-year-old on their platform,
01:32:32 Brandon Guffey
Then they have to ban you from the platform, offer a parental dashboard that a parent can allow the minor on. But even if the parent allows the minor on, we're going to eliminate addictive features. No mid middle of the night notifications, no auto scrolling,
01:32:50 Brandon Guffey
And they can't use algorithms to feed. It has to be timeline based,
01:32:55 Brandon Guffey
And it hides their friends. Just just little things that will make such a big difference.
01:33:01 Brandon Guffey
And that was another one that we got passed unanimously in the House. Now we had the big tech lobby fight against it in the Senate, but this is one of the few bills that they have not come and challenged that we passed. In the state of South Carolina, and I think that will become national model legislation.
01:33:19 Sonny Von Cleveland
Out of my own ignorance,
01:33:22 Sonny Von Cleveland
The algorithm feeds what it wants to people.
01:33:26 Sonny Von Cleveland
And you said timeline.
01:33:28 Brandon Guffey
Timeline is just based on when it's posted.
01:33:30 Jim Cole
Chronological.
01:33:31 Brandon Guffey
Yeah, chronological.
01:33:32 Sonny Von Cleveland
So then, based off of that, they're only allowed to advertise to them based off of what they've.
01:33:36 Brandon Guffey
They don't advertise to them at all.
01:33:38 Brandon Guffey
Okay. They can only see what their friends post based on the time that it's posted.
01:33:44 Jim Cole
Okay. Instead of it, there's a problem with algorithms. Algorithms are feeding external content that wouldn't normally be on your timeline and adding it into your timeline.
01:33:55 Sonny Von Cleveland
So you're only getting the things that are from your friends.
01:33:57 Brandon Guffey
Correct. Yeah. Which would make sense. There are situations of many parents that survivor parents that, and that group continues to grow every year as we go up there for social media victims,
01:34:09 Brandon Guffey
Which is not what I want to see. It's good that we're getting an army and we're getting more people wanting to stand up for this,
01:34:16 Brandon Guffey
But there are many children that were struggling with mental health and they were searching for mental health help,
01:34:26 Brandon Guffey
Positive affirmations,
01:34:28 Brandon Guffey
And yet the algorithms feeding them suicidal ideation. Wow!
01:34:33 Brandon Guffey
And they end up taking their lives.
01:34:35 Sonny Von Cleveland
And they can't be held responsible for that. Is that what I'm understanding?
01:34:38 Jim Cole
That's different.
01:34:40 Sonny Von Cleveland
Hey, everybody. I hope you're enjoying this episode of Unlikely Allies. I wanted to take a second to invite you to come check out the Our Rescue Store, where you can find apparel, gear, and more, and survivor-made items that are made by survivors. Every purchase goes to support the mission to end human trafficking and child exploitation. Every purchase has a story. Make sure you check the link in the description for our rescue store, and you can use the code Unlikely15 to get.
01:35:10 Sonny Von Cleveland
Fifteen percent off your purchase. That code is right there. The links in the description. Let's get you back into the episode.
01:35:18 Jim Cole
So if the the crack in the armor of two thirty is if that's a that algorithm is controlled by the platform,
01:35:28 Jim Cole
Then there's there's a weakness there. There's there's an in for a lawsuit there. Okay.
01:35:32 Brandon Guffey
But these lawsuits, even though you win, yeah, like the one in California, yeah, these companies are just going to appeal it.
01:35:39 Sonny Von Cleveland
Sure, they've got the resources to bury you.
01:35:41 Brandon Guffey
Yeah, they're gonna they're gonna hold it out for five to ten years while they're collecting trillions.
01:35:46 Jim Cole
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
01:35:47 Sonny Von Cleveland
And because they don't have to alter the behavior once they appeal, they don't have to alter the behavior until the appeal goes through.
01:35:53 Jim Cole
Well, the court, the court can basically, yeah, the the court's probably gonna come in and hold it in abeyance until there's yeah,
01:36:00 Brandon Guffey
And there is there is something to be said about.
01:36:04 Brandon Guffey
What I don't want is the Trump administration has been pushing for preemption. While I stood on stage with them signing law, the following week I'm fighting against Ted Cruz, who's trying to put preemption language in the big beautiful bill.
01:36:20 Brandon Guffey
And it's funny because I was on the phone till three o'clock in the morning fighting with that, and then Cruz ends up voting against his own amendment at that time. Really, but they've put it in multiple places, and what they're trying to do is.
01:36:33 Brandon Guffey
I honestly believe we're in the middle of World War Three,
01:36:36 Brandon Guffey
Digital warfare right now, and we're in an AI arms race. What they don't want is for us to put in restrictions on the state level that will then cripple our national infrastructure on data collection in the AI race. And look, I'm all for that, but we have a responsibility to protect children,
01:36:56 Sonny Von Cleveland
One hundred percent.
01:36:57 Brandon Guffey
And on the federal level,
01:36:59 Brandon Guffey
Congress is bought and paid for.
01:37:02 Brandon Guffey
Plain and simple. We see it through poison pills. Even the best actors act like they're trying to help you,
01:37:07 Brandon Guffey
And they put poison pills in that are given to them by these big tech companies to kill legislation. And until they they are going to fix the problem,
01:37:18 Brandon Guffey
Then we've got to continue to pass legislation on the state level. Wow.
01:37:23 Jim Cole
Yeah. Well, and just for the audience, the poison pill is the the lobbyists will get a crack.
01:37:31 Jim Cole
Through a representative or a Congress person to add language. So, I mean, I've experienced this myself,
01:37:40 Jim Cole
Where you draft, you know, help draft legislation with all the things that you would want, and then they get a crack and they basically, in one paragraph,
01:37:52 Jim Cole
Give the big tech an out, so that all the rest of the provisions have no teeth.
01:37:58 Jim Cole
Yeah, and so that's a poison pill.
01:38:00 Brandon Guffey
So they make this. They take all these child safety bills, like the Kids Act, that passed Congress or passed the House.
01:38:06 Brandon Guffey
The problem with it is they take all these child safety bills. They put them in one bill. They all advertise on how they're trying to protect kids. But what they did was one of the amendments puts the word knowingly. Yep. First.
01:38:19 Brandon Guffey
Exactly. And so then they just go to end-to-end encryption and say,"Well, we didn't know what we didn't know.
01:38:25 Jim Cole
Wow, we didn't know.
01:38:26 Brandon Guffey
Even though they're AI, whenever you send child sex abuse material." Through their end-end encryption,
01:38:32 Brandon Guffey
It says this may contain child pornography. Now, if we take that in the physical world, if I handed you an envelope and said this may contain child pornography,
01:38:40 Brandon Guffey
I should be charged.
01:38:42 Brandon Guffey
But yet they're saying because of the room. Or if I said this is a room where we can exchange it and law enforcement can't get to it, that's essentially what they're saying online. Like they can't be held responsible. Right. Wow.
01:38:54 Jim Cole
Yeah, it doesn't take a ton of language. It doesn't take like massive revisions through the whole bill. It's like they just insert one section that just gives them the out.
01:39:04 Jim Cole
Gives them the out.
01:39:05 Brandon Guffey
Gives them the out. And so, so it doesn't matter what all's written before that one word, knowingly eliminates everything.
01:39:12 Jim Cole
Yeah. So, so in some legislation that's been trudging through Congress for a while, that happened, and then.
01:39:20 Jim Cole
And again, this is not like me working. I've just been marginally involved. But and then it got. It's like,
01:39:29 Jim Cole
It's like you support a bill, and then a change happens, and then you don't support the bill, and then another change happens. Like, oh, we're back to supporting the bill, and then it gets like this.
01:39:38 Sonny Von Cleveland
I guess my first thought on this there's a human being that's putting that sentence in there, right? Yep. Yeah. They're lobbyists. We know who the human being is, right?
01:39:49 Sonny Von Cleveland
Why are is that human being not being called out?
01:39:52 Brandon Guffey
Like, how do how do you get the information out?
01:39:57 Jim Cole
So,
01:40:00 Jim Cole
The lobby is taking representatives, congressmen to lunch, to dinner.
01:40:06 Jim Cole
They're they're getting meetings, right? Because it's all big money. They're getting meetings, and they're able, and they have influence, and so they're.
01:40:16 Jim Cole
There's also a ton of like quid pro quo that goes on within. I mean, I think any government, right? Any political, right? And it's like,
01:40:26 Jim Cole
So you know, Sonny, you come in and you're a new legislator, and you're passionate about an issue, right?
01:40:32 Jim Cole
Well, you're not going to get any support. So, so it kind of works like, oh, hey, you've great idea. They're going to get plussed up. I love that. It's a wonderful idea. I'm sure you've experienced this many times.
01:40:43 Jim Cole
Love this idea. It's a great idea. Yeah, absolutely support it.
01:40:47 Jim Cole
But then, what's going to happen is one of their staff.
01:40:48 Brandon Guffey
We could make it better with this language.
01:40:50 Jim Cole
Yeah, we we could is or they're going to come to you and they're going to say,"Hey, I, you know, you want basically my boss's support on this bill. Well, you're going to have to put your name and your support to this bill. We need you to pull this audience over this bill. Maybe you don't agree with that bill. Maybe, but now you're compromising yourself because. Because if I want this, the greater good is to get this bill through. So okay,
01:41:15 Jim Cole
Right, and it just becomes and and then there, it's like a cognitive dissonance with anything else that just happens.
01:41:22 Sonny Von Cleveland
And if I try to stand my ground and say no, I'm not going to do that, yeah,
01:41:25 Jim Cole
Then my bill dies.
01:41:26 Brandon Guffey
So from speak, the lobby is the problem. Yes. Now in South Carolina, a lobbyist cannot even buy you a cup of coffee.
01:41:34 Brandon Guffey
So there's no way that they can give you something. However. Their principals, the people that hire them, so you have a lobbyist for. I'm just going to use, you know, ABC Company.
01:41:44 Brandon Guffey
ABC Company could take a group of legislators out that's nonpartisan, and then they can cover the dinner. Then, because you're on a committee, right? They can donate unlimited to dark money groups. So what I found was it wasn't the tech companies that are saying we're going to kill your bill outright. And the advantage that I have is I'm a father that actually knows the harms,
01:42:10 Brandon Guffey
Whereas some of these reps that are in other states they go after a lot harder than they go after me. They know I'm going to elicit emotion,
01:42:19 Brandon Guffey
But so the way that they have to deal with me is they will allow my bill appear that they are helping me go through on my side, or they will go to a committee chairman that can stop legislation,
01:42:33 Brandon Guffey
Or if that doesn't work.
01:42:35 Brandon Guffey
They may go to the speaker or the caucus. They may give. They can give unlimited amount of money to a caucus.
01:42:42 Brandon Guffey
Well, if they give, you know, two hundred thousand to the Republican caucus, the Republican caucus's job is to get more Republicans elected.
01:42:51 Brandon Guffey
All it takes is somebody in leadership of the caucus to say,"Nope, I'm going to put my name on this and kill it,
01:42:57 Brandon Guffey
" And we're going to hold it up. I'll use a perfect example as COSA two years ago, Kids Online Safety Act, which as we are recording this. Is going through the United States Senate once again.
01:43:08 Brandon Guffey
Kids Online Safety Act. I don't believe it is the best bill. I believe it is a starting point for many of these tech bills. But it's got simple language. It says duty of care.
01:43:16 Brandon Guffey
Whenever you design something, you have a duty of care to ensure that it is safe. If I if I gave you a product and I'm a home improvement center and it's killing people, I have to recall that product.
01:43:27 Brandon Guffey
And you know, or I can be held safety guardrails in place. But but they don't have that in tech right now.
01:43:33 Brandon Guffey
So that duty of care language, it passed the Senate, Senate ninety-one to three, two years ago.
01:43:40 Brandon Guffey
It goes over to the House. It starts off in a committee,
01:43:44 Brandon Guffey
And it's obvious they don't want it moving.
01:43:46 Brandon Guffey
The members of that committee, the subcommittee, sit there and say, "I don't agree with these changes and markups that have been done,
01:43:53 Brandon Guffey
But this bill needs to be heard. We're going to push it forward.
01:43:56 Brandon Guffey
" Then it goes to the full committee.
01:43:57 Brandon Guffey
You can tell members within there. Did not like the language that had come out of the subcommittee. They didn't like the changes that had been made, but said we're still going to push it through.
01:44:07 Brandon Guffey
The bill had been neutered by the time it got through that, but they said we're going to push it through, meaning it should go to the floor. Now,
01:44:16 Brandon Guffey
There's only two people that could keep it from being heard on the floor. That's the Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise.
01:44:23 Brandon Guffey
They can keep something from being heard.
01:44:25 Brandon Guffey
That bill never made it to the floor,
01:44:27 Brandon Guffey
And then the clock runs out. And we had to start a whole new session and start all over. So I go to Louisiana and I'm running radio commercials,
01:44:35 Brandon Guffey
Like "Hear it now.
01:44:37 Brandon Guffey
" I'm in politics. I understand. I'm also a father, but if I, whenever I speak to leadership on that level,
01:44:46 Brandon Guffey
And I say,
01:44:48 Brandon Guffey
"This is your first year in leadership,
01:44:51 Brandon Guffey
" I understand your job, your success, is shown because as a leader.
01:44:56 Brandon Guffey
You have to represent the good of the entire body, not just your beliefs.
01:45:00 Brandon Guffey
Understand? In order for you to be successful, number one thing you need is members, so you have the majority to get any agenda done.
01:45:08 Brandon Guffey
And you're going up against the richest lobby,
01:45:11 Brandon Guffey
And that maybe they told you,"Look, we'll help you out and make sure that all the Republicans get reelected again.
01:45:16 Brandon Guffey
" But this bill does not move forward.
01:45:19 Brandon Guffey
I can accept that,
01:45:21 Brandon Guffey
But I want your word that as soon as we come in session, we're going to push it forward.
01:45:25 Brandon Guffey
Right, no problems that we have is with language.
01:45:29 Brandon Guffey
If its problems are with language, handle those amendments on the floor.
01:45:33 Brandon Guffey
We can have those amendments and still protect our children.
01:45:36 Brandon Guffey
That never happens. And then I get mad and I go to Louisiana and start running radio ads and press conferences and everything else,
01:45:45 Brandon Guffey
Which causes a conflict, of course.
01:45:47 Brandon Guffey
But to me, it's not party related. I'll never put caucus above calls or party above people.
01:45:53 Brandon Guffey
And at the end of the day, my life's mission.
01:45:56 Brandon Guffey
I didn't plan to be in politics.
01:45:59 Brandon Guffey
The biggest problem I have is people that really want me there say I don't care enough about it,
01:46:05 Brandon Guffey
Because my entire focus is saving as many children as I can to the day that I die.
01:46:10 Sonny Von Cleveland
And why would that not be the focus? I guess my,
01:46:13 Sonny Von Cleveland
I get I get frustrated with here is a bill to save kids and help with online safety.
01:46:21 Sonny Von Cleveland
Why would you not want to just pass it through as quickly as possible and say,"I don't care if big tech doesn't like it,
01:46:27 Sonny Von Cleveland
Sign it through"? And is that because big tech is lining pockets over here to say,"Hey, don't let that happen"?
01:46:32 Brandon Guffey
I'll use this as an example: Section two hundred and thirty. If I was in office whenever the COPA and Section two hundred and thirty passed in nineteen ninety six, I would a hundred percent agreed with it that these companies cannot be held responsible. But we didn't have social media. We didn't have. Algorithms speaking on themselves. Like we need protections to where these people are just hosting a space and they can't get sued. We don't want everyone lawyer happy, right? Sure. But they have weaponized 230, and you have companies that are,
01:47:04 Brandon Guffey
To quote Dave Chappelle, the habitual line steppers,
01:47:07 Brandon Guffey
And that's like Meta's the one who always crosses that line,
01:47:11 Brandon Guffey
And then it feels like other companies have to follow to stay in pursuit, essentially. But at the end of the day, we've got to get back to saying if you're going to provide a product that is harmful for children, and you're going to allow children on there, you know, their whole argument is that it's a parent's responsibility.
01:47:32 Brandon Guffey
Yep. And look, I don't disagree. Parents have to be involved, but there's no law that keeps a 13 year old from walking into a Walmart buying a device.
01:47:39 Brandon Guffey
Right. There's no law that that stops them from being able to connect and agree to a contract at 13 years of age. Right. If you think I am lying, try to do a twelve-year-old.
01:47:49 Brandon Guffey
They want to let them agree because they're twelve. They allow it at thirteen because that law written in nineteen ninety-six. In nineteen ninety-six, it took me an hour to download a Wu-Tang Clan song from Limewire. Like that's how much technology has changed. Yeah, sure. And yet we've got many members that were still in office now that were there then that do not understand what's going on.
01:48:14 Brandon Guffey
I even met with some of the highest, you know, and the conversation was, well, you know, people are mean to me online, but I'm older. I know how to deal with it. It's like you just really don't have a clue.
01:48:25 Sonny Von Cleveland
Yeah, wow, that is how this clueless response you could get.
01:48:28 Brandon Guffey
And look, as a legislator, I have, especially people that lose children, they want to come to me and they want me to champion their bill,
01:48:35 Brandon Guffey
And I just have to be honest with them and say, look,
01:48:38 Brandon Guffey
I don't have the bandwidth to do this.
01:48:41 Brandon Guffey
You only get so much political capital to begin with. And while I'm,
01:48:45 Brandon Guffey
I'm sympathetic to your calls,
01:48:49 Brandon Guffey
I can't be the champion because I'm championing this. Sure. And there's not enough legislators that will do that. They'll tell you like I'm going to carry your calls, and they'll just file a bill and never worry about it moving.
01:49:01 Brandon Guffey
Yeah. Because they earn your trust because they filed the bill, and then they can blame everyone else because the bill never got to move.
01:49:07 Sonny Von Cleveland
Yes. They'll do something to get your vote. Yeah, but then not follow through with it because they already got your vote,
01:49:12 Brandon Guffey
So right in Rock Hill, we always said, "Don't talk about it, be about it." One hundred percent. And I'm always about,
01:49:20 Brandon Guffey
And and I'll file twenty bills and see which one gets to moving, but I know I've got some political capital to weave it through the process. Yeah.
01:49:29 Sonny Von Cleveland
Wow. Yeah. It's it's again, it makes me hate politics at the same time. It makes me. It. I just. I'm disgusted by the fact that we can stop a. A kid from going in and buying a a pornography magazine.
01:49:43 Sonny Von Cleveland
Why can't we stop them from going in and buying a device that they have to sign a contract for before they even understand what a contract is?
01:49:50 Sonny Von Cleveland
Well, can sign up to use a device that will expose them to danger.
01:49:55 Brandon Guffey
Right, and even the age gating to get on the pornography websites. Right, right. It passed in certain states, but it took a court ruling to uphold before we can enforce it. We can enforce it. On adult websites, however, we cannot enforce that on social media because their primary goal is not to share pornography,
01:50:17 Brandon Guffey
Even though pornography is on there. Like I had every because my question there,
01:50:21 Sonny Von Cleveland
So that is why. Yeah, you can't log on in some states. You can't log on to a pornography site without uploading an ID, doing an age verification, doing all that. Why can't we do the same thing with every platform that can potentially expose you to harmful things?
01:50:36 Brandon Guffey
Because if you wanted to just do a Google search,
01:50:39 Brandon Guffey
Do you want to have to do? Do you have to upload your ID in order to do so? And then is Google responsible for everything that might pop up on your browser that might be adult content related? That becomes the blurry line. And I'll use the example of morphed images, artificial intelligence image.
01:50:57 Brandon Guffey
As we started to debate it, seems very simple. No CSAM created through AI.
01:51:02 Brandon Guffey
However, if you got a Calvin and Hobbes sticker on the back of your car and it's peeing on a Chevy symbol, is that child pornography? It's a drawing, no different depending depending on how realistic. So you have to define. Does Wally the Coyote get charged with murder because it dropped a boulder on Roadrunner? You know, I mean, it's it's imagery, it's art.
01:51:24 Brandon Guffey
To an extent, until it becomes pornographic.
01:51:26 Sonny Von Cleveland
At what point does common sense take over?
01:51:29 Sonny Von Cleveland
Is that like they're like law? That's not that's not law, so you can't technically do that.
01:51:34 Brandon Guffey
Law is not common sense. Law is very black and white, and it's all about the interpretation, which is why our government works with a three tier system. We've got checks and balances. However, and that's what I mean by us being reactive. We've got to be able to get back to where we see this didn't work, but this is the true intent.
01:51:54 Brandon Guffey
Of the law, the true intent of Section 230 in COPA was correct. The implementation of it, with it taking artists' artists' rights away,
01:52:04 Brandon Guffey
Them using all the information to train, they're they're taking your technology and you're not getting compensated for it. Like at the end of the day,
01:52:13 Brandon Guffey
It should be like NIL, name, image, and likeness.
01:52:17 Brandon Guffey
Athletes get paid anytime their name, image, and likeness is used.
01:52:22 Brandon Guffey
People, if they're going to use our name, image, and likeness in any way,
01:52:26 Brandon Guffey
We should be compensated.100 percent, and then someone is held responsible for it. But things are moving so fast, I I would be surprised if we even are carrying around cell phones within 10 years. Sure, I think more of it's going to be wearables. Yeah. So, are we going to waste time trying to pass laws based on a device that might be obsolete in 10 years?
01:52:48 Brandon Guffey
You know. Or do we focus more on the safety by design and who owns it? Sure. And there was, you know, I was talking about the lobby and some of their tricks, and there was something that was really important. I was going to say, and now it's just completely blown my mind. I was going to go back to it. I was like, no, that's very important. I need to explain that. Now I'm just completely blanking out on.
01:53:10 Sonny Von Cleveland
So you don't come back. Yeah. What is is the your your hope? What is your ultimate hope and vision in the next five years?
01:53:21 Sonny Von Cleveland
What are you hoping to accomplish in your career? What are you hoping to accomplish for people, for teens, for parents? So,
01:53:28 Brandon Guffey
My life's you know I I wear this crusaders cross. It took me forty years to find my faith,
01:53:35 Brandon Guffey
And it's because I thought everyone was either perfect or a hypocrite,
01:53:38 Brandon Guffey
And it wasn't until I learned that we all fall short.
01:53:41 Brandon Guffey
And my the only way I can move forward in life, I live by the motto of don't. Don't anticipate, participate. I'll be where God wants me to be. I had plenty of people trying to convince me to run for Senator Graham's seat whenever he passed.
01:53:55 Brandon Guffey
And while I was not a fan of Lindsey before, the more I got to know the man,
01:53:59 Brandon Guffey
I still disagreed on a lot of the policies. But there was not a better champion, and now we've lost that.
01:54:05 Brandon Guffey
So I felt like, man, I should really go for this. I had tons of money backing and everything else. But whenever I prayed about it,
01:54:12 Brandon Guffey
Feel like I'm being told, sit still.
01:54:14 Brandon Guffey
If I ever let my own ambition get ahead of me, then it's time for me to step away. Sure, I've got to lean on my faith, and that's a hard thing because it's a constant battle every day to not get big-headed, not you know keep that ego. Let your yeah, keep the ego in check. Try to be a better man tomorrow than I am today, and every day I fail,
01:54:36 Brandon Guffey
And I'm trying to be better, but I have to keep that in check.
01:54:41 Brandon Guffey
So whenever it comes to ambition, I don't. Have ambition.
01:54:45 Brandon Guffey
I'm racing till the day that I die,
01:54:48 Brandon Guffey
With a sole mission of saving and protecting as many children as I can,
01:54:53 Brandon Guffey
Until that day.
01:54:54 Brandon Guffey
Regardless of whether that's in the legislature, whether that's private,
01:55:00 Brandon Guffey
However it may be,
01:55:03 Brandon Guffey
I want to look back and say that I made this world, this country,
01:55:08 Brandon Guffey
A better place.
01:55:10 Brandon Guffey
At the end of my time,
01:55:11 Brandon Guffey
I spoke at my son's funeral.
01:55:14 Brandon Guffey
And after everyone came up and talked to him,
01:55:17 Brandon Guffey
Said it's it's hard for me to fathom that a seventeen-year-old had made a bigger difference on people's lives than I've made in forty years,
01:55:29 Brandon Guffey
And it kind of lights a fire under you,
01:55:31 Brandon Guffey
Like get up, get moving.
01:55:33 Brandon Guffey
It's about making that difference. And then my my biggest fear is I'm going to get in my own way.
01:55:38 Brandon Guffey
I'm going to end up messing up and hurting my message.
01:55:42 Brandon Guffey
You know, I I joke around and say I pray for the day that someone tries to blackmail me.
01:55:47 Brandon Guffey
Someone tries to leverage. I seriously do. Even if I'm messing up, let's say if I was having an affair and somebody wants to blackmail me on it,
01:55:56 Brandon Guffey
I would hold a press conference. I would admit where I'm wrong,
01:56:00 Brandon Guffey
And I would call it out just to teach teens like, do not allow shame to direct your life.
01:56:06 Sonny Von Cleveland
Hundred percent. Because that's the way that you kill it. If you do something wrong and you screw up, and someone comes at you, listen. I will do. I will go live on every possible platform.
01:56:16 Sonny Von Cleveland
I screwed up.
01:56:18 Sonny Von Cleveland
I did this thing,
01:56:20 Sonny Von Cleveland
And whether it's going to cause me shame, guilt, fear, you don't hold the cards. You don't get to dictate what happens in my life. I will own it. I will hold it, and I will deal with the consequences like a man. I will step up myself and own it. You don't get to dictate that. You won't get nothing from me. Right.
01:56:36 Brandon Guffey
And and I'll say the only good thing I don't want to say good thing, but one thing that I learned whenever we lost Gavin,
01:56:44 Brandon Guffey
I could stand out in front of my home with everything I've worked for my entire life,
01:56:50 Brandon Guffey
And watch it all burn to the ground, and do it with a smile on my face.
01:56:55 Brandon Guffey
As long as I've got my boys there with me,
01:56:59 Brandon Guffey
And I'm protecting my family,
01:57:01 Brandon Guffey
You know that that becomes.
01:57:05 Brandon Guffey
It puts everything into perspective that none of this stuff matters. Yeah, it's about what are we? We we we get in this rat race and we're trying to do all of this,
01:57:14 Brandon Guffey
Things like, things like what you have done in your career.
01:57:21 Brandon Guffey
Matter, matter. You don't get the accolades,
01:57:24 Brandon Guffey
But you've made the world a better place.
01:57:28 Brandon Guffey
You've saved people.
01:57:30 Brandon Guffey
What you're doing with with your story, and You don't realize how many men,
01:57:36 Brandon Guffey
You know. As I I do these men retreats,
01:57:38 Brandon Guffey
Men's retreats,
01:57:40 Brandon Guffey
The one thing, whether it's marital problems, whether it's life problems, mental health,
01:57:46 Brandon Guffey
Many of these men were sexually abused as a child,
01:57:50 Brandon Guffey
And they're carrying that shame, and it's causing so many other problems.
01:57:54 Brandon Guffey
Your voice is so powerful, and your story so powerful.
01:57:58 Brandon Guffey
That's what makes a difference. That's what's going to make this world a better place.
01:58:03 Brandon Guffey
And that's what we've got to have more of.
01:58:06 Brandon Guffey
I call it in politics. I call it the eight mile approach.
01:58:09 Brandon Guffey
I don't hide. Like I was such a hellion that the only way I knew to do it was to say, you know what? Yeah, that's me. These are all the ways that I messed up.
01:58:18 Sonny Von Cleveland
I, without fail, do that. Like within five minutes of meeting me, you will know I've been in prison for eighteen years. I was horribly abused because I I wear it like like an armor. Right, you can't use it against me because I've no.
01:58:33 Brandon Guffey
No one's going to say I messed up more than you have.
01:58:36 Sonny Von Cleveland
Right, I've already told you, but it's not about what I've done; it's about what I'm doing,
01:58:41 Sonny Von Cleveland
And that's the message that I think kids need to know as well. But parents, abuse survivors,
01:58:46 Sonny Von Cleveland
Everybody needs to know that. Right, it's not where you've been; it's what you're doing now, and where you're going to go,
01:58:52 Sonny Von Cleveland
And the lessons you learn from it. But that lesson is to be shared. Right, that wisdom is to be shared. Our knowledge is—you don't get to take this with you.
01:59:00 Sonny Von Cleveland
This is your one experience that you get to run through, and the legacy that you leave behind is the lesson that you learn from the losses that you've endured,
01:59:07 Sonny Von Cleveland
Right? And that's to me is is the the definition of nobility in a successful life.
01:59:13 Sonny Von Cleveland
He hates the term hero, but this man is my hero, right? Like I'm, shit, I'm gonna get emotional now,
01:59:20 Sonny Von Cleveland
Because I didn't have this man when I was a kid,
01:59:24 Sonny Von Cleveland
Right? I endured so much shit.
01:59:27 Sonny Von Cleveland
That nobody cared about. That nobody was there. And when I saw, I didn't know these kind of people existed.
01:59:33 Sonny Von Cleveland
I didn't know your kind of people existed. And you men inspire me every day to be like, dude, I can do so much more. I can do so much more in this in this fight. I can do so much more every day. I can. And I'm so honored to be in your presence, to be in his presence every day. Like,
01:59:51 Sonny Von Cleveland
I'm blessed beyond comparison, and it's because of the suffering that I went through. Because suffering ceases to be suffering the moment you give it a meaning, right? And that's that's where we're at.
02:00:01 Brandon Guffey
What I would say to teens most importantly is tomorrow needs you.
02:00:07 Brandon Guffey
It's the most powerful words that no mistake that you make will ever define who you are,
02:00:14 Brandon Guffey
But it will help you become the man or the woman that you're meant to be.
02:00:19 Brandon Guffey
And having that bravery, having that ability to step up, and to know that.
02:00:23 Brandon Guffey
Not only have you failed, you will fail.
02:00:26 Brandon Guffey
But you know what? Tomorrow is a new day.
02:00:28 Brandon Guffey
And if you ever get in the point to where you feel like your mistakes will define you or always follow you,
02:00:36 Brandon Guffey
Don't believe it.
02:00:37 Brandon Guffey
You're sitting or you're watching this with men that have far greater mistakes.
02:00:46 Brandon Guffey
And to me, that's the most powerful message. If you are facing extortion, never pay a penny.
02:00:53 Brandon Guffey
Reach out to an adult,
02:00:55 Brandon Guffey
Get it taken care of. You even have the ability now to claim that was AI,
02:01:01 Brandon Guffey
Whether it was real or whether it was AI.
02:01:04 Brandon Guffey
But you have the ability, and the stats are so high now that you are not alone.
02:01:11 Brandon Guffey
And there is many adults out there. If you don't have the family members, go to a teacher, go to a law enforcement professional,
02:01:17 Brandon Guffey
Reach out to me directly.
02:01:19 Brandon Guffey
I am happy to help.
02:01:22 Brandon Guffey
And the most important thing is, if that if you can't stand up,
02:01:26 Brandon Guffey
Then we don't have a tomorrow.
02:01:27 Brandon Guffey
Because if we aren't fighting for our kids, then what are we even fighting for?
02:01:31 Brandon Guffey
With parents, I would say,
02:01:35 Brandon Guffey
Talk to your kids,
02:01:36 Brandon Guffey
Love your kids.
02:01:37 Brandon Guffey
If you're too scared to talk to your 11 year old about what sex torsion is,
02:01:43 Brandon Guffey
Whenever the average child is seeing pornography at a younger age,
02:01:48 Brandon Guffey
Imagine how scared they are to come to you.
02:01:51 Brandon Guffey
And talk to you,
02:01:53 Brandon Guffey
Whenever they're caught up in a sex extortion scheme,
02:01:56 Brandon Guffey
Or they're caught up in an adult situation.
02:01:59 Brandon Guffey
Offer forgiveness, offer grace. Remember what an idiot you were. Your parents told you don't drink, don't smoke,
02:02:06 Brandon Guffey
Don't stay out after curfew, and yet you still broke those rules.
02:02:10 Brandon Guffey
Offer that grace. Thank your child for being brave enough.
02:02:15 Brandon Guffey
And whenever it comes to the mental health aspect with parents, just as I tell the teens, tomorrow needs you.
02:02:21 Brandon Guffey
Tomorrow needs you as parents.
02:02:24 Brandon Guffey
Our children right now are guinea pigs in this new generation that's being raised completely digital.
02:02:32 Brandon Guffey
So it's up to you to make that difference. You've got to get up, stand up, and fight for tomorrow because tomorrow does need you.
02:02:41 Sonny Von Cleveland
You know what a fantastic conversation. I think what you are doing is helping the world. You have taken just. An unimaginable tragedy, and have saved lives. It is saving lives, and and that is the most noble and honorable thing that you can do. Thank you so much for your time for coming out. I know you have to be a busy man.
02:03:03 Sonny Von Cleveland
Thank you for coming out. We'll put links to you and everything that that we have associated with it in the description of the video.
02:03:10 Brandon Guffey
I do have the you know I have my first book coming out, trying to tell the story of turning pain to purpose.
02:03:18 Sonny Von Cleveland
What is the title of that book?
02:03:19 Brandon Guffey
It's called "Tomorrow Needs You: A Father's Journey of Turning Pain to Purpose," and it is the hardest thing I've ever done because not only are you reliving trauma,
02:03:30 Brandon Guffey
But you are rereading it, and trying to write it down as real and as raw as possible. And it doesn't come out until October.
02:03:39 Sonny Von Cleveland
We'll be sure to drop a link to it. In this video, or how they'll be able to get it, we'll send a link to you your website. However, they can can get that book. I look forward to reading it as well. Legislator Brandon Guffey, thank you so much, man.
02:03:54 Brandon Guffey
Thank you, man. Yeah.
02:03:55 Sonny Von Cleveland
And what an incredible episode!
02:03:58 Sonny Von Cleveland
If you take something away from this,
02:04:02 Sonny Von Cleveland
Learn it, use it, apply it, put it in your life, teach your kids, talk to your kids. If you're the kid and you're watching this. It's never too late. It's never over. There's never a mistake that you have made that you cannot come back from.
02:04:16 Sonny Von Cleveland
For Brandon Guffey, for Jim Cole, I'm Sonny von Cleveland. This has been Unlikely Allies, and we will see you on the next one.