By Michael Joseph Gross; Photograph by Glen Erler
Originally published in GQ
stop being a wuss, x told himself. x was only 15, and he didn't know a lot about girls, but he did know this:
If you wanted to get with a girl like Kayla, you couldn't be a wuss.
She IM'd him again.
will u send it? she asked.
Yes. He would. X pulled down his pants.
When he was ready, he pointed the camera, snapped a picture, and sent it.
omg, Kayla wrote. u r so hot.
now its yr turn, he wrote.
A minute later, Kayla sent a picture: shirt up, no bra, with the head cropped out.
Fuck, X thought. That's hot. Even her screen name was sexy. Kayla's Facebook page said she was a junior, and though he'd never actually met her, you couldn't know every girl in a school with 1,200 kids. The night before, Kayla friended him with a message saying she always saw him in the hall and wanted to say hi, but she was too shy.
Now she was asking for another picture.
ok, he typed. 1 minute.
X looked in the mirror and flexed. He pointed the camera, snapped, then checked the shot. Nah. He could do better.
He turned, flexed again, and snapped a few more. He picked the best one, cropped it, and sent it.
She loved it. Totally loved it.
Okay, now it was her turn. He wanted to see her face and body together, too.
sorry, she wrote, too embarrassed. :-\ She'd make it up to him, though. That was a promise.*
kids call New Berlin Eisenhower middle and high school "Ike," and they call the town of New Berlin "the Bubble," because, they say, as teenagers in suburbs everywhere say: "Nothing ever happens here." On the map, New Berlin forms a neat six-by-six-mile square in the southeast corner of Waukesha County, which prides itself on being one of the most politically conservative of Wisconsin's seventy-two counties. Most of the town's 39,000 residents are middle-class professionals, remnants of Milwaukee's white flight in the 1960s and '70s or descendants of local farming families. The New Berlin school system's self-fulfilling motto is "Expect Excellence." And last year, Eisenhower's varsity girls' softball and boys' basketball teams won state championships, the Academic Decathlon team placed third in the state, and the valedictorian went to Harvard.
This past winter, Ike's good name was befouled by a story of serial sexual extortion among its student body. An 18-year-old senior named Anthony Stancl allegedly posed as a flirtatious female on Facebook to lure Ike boys into sending naked pictures of themselves. According to the police, at least thirty-one of them did just that, and Stancl amassed a collection of explicit pictures and videos that he used as leverage in a game of sexual blackmail that eventually landed him in jail.
The week after Stancl's arrest, The New York Times ran a story about the case, headlined sex predator accusations shake a wisconsin town. In it an Eisenhower mother was quoted as saying, "It was beyond what the kids could imagine, you know? They see a lot of things, they go to the theater and everything else, but this is so shocking." Like most people in town, she sees Eisenhower as a bastion of innocents, blindsided by a monster among them. Certainly, that's the most comforting way to look at it.
*****
at 12:40 p.m. on Wednesday, November 12, 2008, two frightened Eisenhower students told a teacher, who told the principal, that they had seen the phrase bomb 11/14/08 written on the wall above a urinal in a downstairs boys' bathroom. The principal, Michael Fesenmaier, had dealt with bomb threats before, but not during his four years at Ike.
By the following afternoon, authorities had found no sign of a bomb and no solid clues as to the source of the threat. In his office, Fesenmaier had corralled a few known troublemakers in an attempt to get them to confess to vandalizing the bathroom wall. Midway through one interrogation, Fesenmaier was interrupted, and when he turned around he was surprised to see Tony Stancl.
A stooped boy of five feet eleven, Tony was a familiar figure in the school's front office. The previous year, he worked there part-time, and people thought he was pleasant enough, if kind of lazy. He was prone to officiousness, but even for him this drop-by was pushing it.
"Mr. Fesenmaier," he said sternly, "what are you doing to protect us?"
Fesenmaier assured him, "I've got it under control," and turned back around.
Rebuffed, Tony shuffled into the hall and pulled out his BlackBerry. It was against school rules to use your cell phone in the building, but Tony had been surreptitiously Twittering about the bomb threat ever since school started that morning:
7:28 a.m. School is like prison now. No one is allowed in the halls unless they are supervised.… Cops are in the hallways too.
9:04 a.m. Update: school is officially on lock down. I hate being suppressed.
1:28 p.m. Maybe we will have off tomorrow since the "bomb" is suppose to go off tomorrow…
That afternoon he walked out of the building and got in his crappy green Civic. There were times when he wished he still had his old car—a blue Audi A4 he'd kept waxed and spotless. He'd sold it the previous spring and planned to use the proceeds to do something constructive: He wanted to go to Peru that summer to build houses for the poor. He might have imagined the trip as a kind of homecoming—Tony and his sister, Stephanie, were adopted as babies from an orphanage in Lima—but his parents told him the trip was too dangerous. Instead, he bought a forty-two-inch plasma TV that he hung in his bedroom in the Stancls' effusively gabled home in Country Estates, one of New Berlin's grandest developments. Tony could be arrogant about his family's wealth. He signed e-mails "Tony $" or "To$y," and on his MySpace profile he wrote, "Some people consider me rich, but i don't like that saying, i prefer 'financially fortunate' lol."
Physically, Tony was less fortunate. Whereas his sister was a jock—she played on Ike's basketball and softball teams—Tony's most striking feature was his disproportionately large head. His efforts to connect with girls were awkward at best. "He would try to flirt with you and it would be, like, creepy," says a girl who graduated in the class ahead of Tony's. "He would say things that would bring the conversation to a total stop, and you'd look at him and wonder, What was that about?" The closest he got to sports was Academic Decathlon, where he was the team's history whiz. He was also treasurer of the Eisenhower chapter of SADD, which stands for Students Against Destructive Decisions. As part of SADD, Tony did seat-belt checks on the long row of cars driving out of Ike's parking lot after school. He stood with a New Berlin cop, stopping each vehicle to offer a friendly reminder to buckle up.
Tony reveled in following rules, and he loved ingratiating himself with adults. He was often the only person his age at Milwaukee high-tech-industry mixers (he had an after-school job as a software engineer), where he would arrive early to set up tables and chairs and he'd charm the grown-ups in the group with his deliberately precocious social skills. "He has a personality that can magnetize with people," says a 29-year-old software developer who knew Tony well. "He can tell them what they want to hear in a way that's perfect for networking."
Last summer, Tony organized New Berlin campaign volunteers for Obama. When school began in the fall, he started telling kids, "I work for Barack Obama." Everybody rolled their eyes. They were used to Tony's outlandish name-dropping: The year before, he had a relative who knew Dick Cheney. Sometimes, when they'd had enough of Tony's big talk, kids would shout "Cody Banks!"—referencing the kids' movie about an average suburban teen who led a double life as a CIA agent—swallowing the name in a cough, the way high school jocks hack into their fists when they yell "Faggot!"
Bobby (not his real name) got a certain pleasure from watching Tony get hassled. Bobby, who was a year ahead of Tony at Eisenhower, never hid the fact that he was gay and so took his share of shit in the hallways. Tony was always ready to pile on. He'd been harassing Bobby since junior high, chasing him through school and calling him a fag. Other times, Tony showed a wary fascination with Bobby. Where Tony was serious, a consummate brownnoser, Bobby was funny, flamboyant, and tough in the way that the only openly gay kid in a midwestern high school has to be. Bobby also had something else Tony would never have: a reliable posse of friends, including some of the coolest girls in Ike's "alternative" crowd.
One spring night in 2008, Bobby was chilling in his bedroom with a bunch of his girlfriends. Out of nowhere, Tony sent Bobby an IM: what r u doing?
That was weird, Bobby thought. He and Tony were not friends. Why would Tony IM him?
just hanging out in my bedroom, Bobby wrote back.
Tony answered, sounds like fun ;)
Bobby always figured Tony was a closet case, but now he was sure of it. He showed the girls the screen. At first they couldn't believe their eyes; then somebody squealed and they all cracked up: "Oh, my God! Tony Stancl's gay!"
Then Bobby let the girls take the keyboard. They crowded around the screen and read each IM out loud, rehearsing what to say next, the whole group pitching in to keep up Bobby's chat with Tony. Then, after stringing him along awhile, making him think Bobby was into him, the girls finally gave Tony what he was waiting for: an invitation to come hang out in Bobby's room.
Tony said he'd be right over.
Then the girls gave him a fake address.
The next time they saw Tony Stancl in the hall, the girls whispered about what an ass he was, delighting at the thought of him ringing some random doorbell, all hot to get in Bobby's pants—only to find out he'd been tricked.
The rumor spread like blood in water: Tony Stancl's gay.
Bobby loved hearing people say that. But did he ever feel any sympathy for what Tony was going through? "Are you kidding?" Bobby says. "Karma's a bitch."
According to Ike's popular girls, the gay rumors ruined Tony's already shaky image. "None of the boys in our friend group," one says, tossing her blond peekaboo bangs, "would talk to Tony after that."
Tony would never be popular, but he'd earned some grudging respect for being smart and mature, and for being the kind of geek who wasn't afraid to put himself out there. Now he was practically an outcast. By the time school started in the fall, Tony's stock had dropped so low that all he could do was count the days until he could get out of town. Maybe he'd join the Marines (his favorite uncle was a Marine), or go to UW in Madison, or start a Web company and make some money right away. On the first day of classes, he Twittered, *sigh* back at school. time for senior year. Graduation seemed a million years away.
*****
a former college wrestler once nicknamed the Rhino, Paul Kreutzer is a pugnacious, compact man who at 25 became the youngest high school principal in Wisconsin and at 29 the state's youngest superintendent. Every morning, Kreutzer snaps his cuff links into place, adjusts his double-Windsor tie knot, and checks the shine of his Kenneth Cole shoes. Though he's been superintendent of New Berlin's schools for almost two years, he habitually mispronounces the town's name—it's New Ber-lin, not New Ber-lin—but he's less out of touch than students think. On the screen of Kreutzer's iPhone, a Bible application sits next to a beer-pong game.
In recent years, Ike has suffered a string of petty embarrassments that were magnified online: Their head football coach was suspended after a video showing him shoving a student on a rival team was posted on YouTube; the next year, a cell-phone picture of the JV football team urinating on an opponent's field ended up on the sports site Deadspin.com. (Kreutzer says he declined "Dr. Phil" McGraw's offer to come to New Berlin to help the school "process.") Then Kreutzer had his own brush with YouTube fame when a group of Ike boys set up a living room suite in his driveway—and recorded the fit he threw ("What the fuck are you kids doing?!") when he caught them in the act.
Still, Kreutzer sees computers as a force for good in his students' lives, and all that fall he'd been channeling his personal ambition into making Ike a national model of innovation. For months, Kreutzer had been working to persuade AT&T that Ike should be chosen as the pilot school for their mobile-learning initiative, which would provide every student with an Apple iPhone or iPod touch loaded with educational applications. If Kreutzer landed that program, New Berlin would be on the fast track for the future, and he would be the envy of every superintendent in the country.
That prospect briefly crossed his mind on November 13 as he was trying to decide with Principal Fesenmaier whether to cancel school the next day, Friday the fourteenth—the date named in the bomb threat. Fesenmaier's interrogations were a bust, police had zero evidence of explosives, and they wondered if the threat was idle.
Then, at five forty-three, Kreutzer, Principal Fesenmaier, and an Eisenhower science teacher simultaneously received an e-mail from an unfamiliar address:
Good luck tomorrow. Boom. It won't be your average one either. It will be one that is manned. Not by me, but by those who follow me. New Berlin Eisenhower High School.
They canceled school.
The next day, after a bomb unit swept the building, Kreutzer went out for lunch at Stir Crazy, an Asian restaurant at the Brookfield Square mall. He was taking the first bite of his pot stickers when his cell phone rang.
The cops. They had some news. The e-mail had been traced to an IP address at the New Berlin public library, where an employee saw an Eisenhower student at the computer around the time the message was sent. According to police, the student, a senior named Anthony Stancl, had confessed to sending the e-mail.
And why wouldn't he confess? As he told police, he'd done everyone a favor. He'd saved lives. He sent the e-mail because he didn't think the bomb threat (which he insisted he didn't make) was being taken seriously. He sent the e-mail "to make it a better story." If anything, the police should be grateful.
Police questioned him for the bomb threat and released him without making his name public. But soon the whole school knew about it via Facebook. The news brought shock and relief. (Tony was suspended, and would later be expelled.) Everyone enjoyed a long weekend and returned to school on Monday determined to get back to normal.
Then Kreutzer's phone rang again. The cops again. There was more.
*****
where is she? he wondered. All through school the next day, X kept looking for Kayla in the halls, but he never saw her. Then he ran into a buddy, and they hung out between classes. The friend told him that the night before, he'd been chatting on Facebook with Emily, a girl they both recognized from school. He told X that Emily came on strong about sex, talking dirty. Even her screen name was sexy. When he told X Emily's screen name, it hit him like a punch in the stomach.
It was the same as Kayla's.
X didn't say anything, but he couldn't stop thinking: Then who's Kayla?
The next time Kayla texted him, X sent a message back saying he didn't know who she was, that another girl was using that same screen name, so she must be some kind of fake. He did not want to hear from her again.
A few minutes later, his phone lit up. I don't know if I would say that, Kayla wrote, because I have those pictures of you, and you don't want me to send those out.
X freaked. Was she psycho? He read the text again. Then he really started to panic.
Kayla sent another message. She said not to worry, she wouldn't really send out those pictures, under one condition: He had to let her friend Tony suck him off.
What…? Tony? Who's Tony? This girl, whoever she was, was insane. He tried to ignore her, but she kept texting, kept taunting: It's your choice. Make a decision.
What the hell was he supposed to do?
Everyone knew what happened to pictures like these. He could not believe how stupid he'd been. If this girl sent his pictures around, his life would be over.
He didn't know what to do, and now Kayla was pressuring him to decide. Letting those pictures out was not an option.
Then he got a text from Tony, who talked him into meeting at the public library.
It was going to be okay, Tony said. If they did this, Kayla would delete the pictures.
X went to the library, and he and Tony went into the men's room and into a stall. Tony got down on his knees. X looked down and saw that Tony was holding a camera. What the fuck?
It's okay, Tony told him. Kayla just has to see proof.
For a couple of days, X thought he was in the clear. Finally, it was over. He'd learned his lesson. Now please let him move on.
Then he got another text. This one from Tony. Bad news. He messed up. He deleted those pictures from the library by mistake. Kayla still needed proof. She wanted them to do it again.
He deleted them? That dumbshit! X thought his head was going to explode. He wanted to tell him off, but he couldn't risk it. So X agreed. He would meet Tony a few days later, before school started, in the downstairs boys' bathroom at Ike.
They did it again, and Tony took another picture. They were finished. He texted Kayla, told her he'd met her conditions—and even let Tony take the pictures to prove it. This was the end. He was done.
Then Kayla got scarier. She texted back that that picture was not good enough. Oral was not good enough. She wanted to see more. She wanted Tony to put it inside him, and if he didn't let that happen, she was going to send the pictures to all his friends.
Now X was more trapped than ever. It was getting worse. Fast. This was so far out there he felt totally lost.
So a few days later, he let Tony come over to his house, and they went to his bedroom, and Tony took a picture of them doing that, too. But even that didn't make it stop. Kayla said they had to do it again—so he let Tony come into his bedroom to do it again.
Then Tony asked X to take naked pictures of his brother—and that pushed X to a line he would not cross. He turned around and did the only thing he'd never done with Kayla, or with Tony.
Finally, he refused.*
*****
at the very same time New Berlin cops were questioning Tony Stancl about the bomb threat, X walked into the police department with his own story to tell.
Police continued to interview Tony, only now their focus was on the sexual allegations. On November 17, the police asked to examine his cell phone and computer. Tony was permitted to return home unaccompanied (he didn't want his parents to know about the investigation) so he could retrieve his cell-phone memory card and laptop and turn them over to the police for a forensic evaluation.
The next day, he returned to the police station to drop off his written statement, and while he was there he asked for his computer back. The officer told him it would take a week. Tony wondered if he'd ever get it back. The officer assured him he would, "as long as no child pornography…was discovered during the examination."
"There shouldn't be any child porn on it," Tony replied.
What the police say they found was a collection of more than 300 nude images and masturbation videos of Eisenhower boys, all as meticulously organized as a lepidopterist's box. Dozens of folders were individually labeled with the first and last names of students who ranged in age from 13 to 18. Police say the computer also contained records of IM exchanges conducted under at least three pseudonyms: As Kayla (a wholly fictional identity) or one of two Emilys (both Eisenhower students, one of whom considered Tony a close friend), Tony flirted with more than four dozen boys in New Berlin. Of that group of roughly fifty boys, thirty-nine sent pictures of themselves at least partially undressed. Thirty-one of them sent pictures that police deemed "sexually explicit."
A few boys who chatted with an "Emily" now say they wondered if it was really her. One boy says that "Emily" messaged him on Facebook last spring, and she flirted so aggressively—requesting naked pictures within ten minutes of chatting—that he decided to ignore her. Other boys persuaded "Emily" to send her picture first, but when they saw them, they thought the proportions of the body in the picture were different from those of the real girl they'd seen at school.
One of the real Emilys was perplexed. In study hall one day, she finally had to say to a group of boys, "What the heck are you guys looking at?" One replied, "I heard you sent a naked picture of yourself."
Between fall of 2007, when police say Tony's female personae started chatting with these boys, and his final conquests in November of 2008, Tony allegedly winnowed the group of thirty-one, threatening roughly half of them with public exposure if they did not have sex with him. Of the boys Tony threatened, at least seven of them agreed to his demands.
*****
through november, December, and January, every time police knocked on another door in New Berlin, they wondered what they would hear next. Two of the boys who said they met Tony for sex were 15 years old, three were 16, one was 17, and one was 18 at the time of the encounters. The meetings took place in their houses, in the Ike parking lot, in subdivisions under construction, and in public parks—including one directly behind the police station.
Until the time of the bomb threat, when X was finally compelled to tell police what happened between him and Tony, not one single boy in New Berlin breathed a word of Tony's extortions. Apparently, every boy that had sex with Tony had kept it secret. But now the confessions were piling up. Police alerted the superintendent and principal (without disclosing the victims' names), and as the scale of the allegations grew, security at Ike tightened.
Immediately after the bomb threat, the school hired round-the-clock armed guards. During winter break, security cameras were installed. Boys' restroom doors were propped open during the school day and locked after the last bell. All volunteers at school events, including parents, had to undergo background checks. At first kids thought the crackdown was about the bomb threat. Then, as cops questioned more boys, word leaked out. Remember when Emily was asking for everybody's pictures? That wasn't Emily. That was really Tony Stancl.…
Tony was exceptionally cooperative with the police. He would meet detectives at Starbucks to tell them what he had done. He expressed remorse and told police that he was bisexual and that he was uncomfortable approaching boys he was interested in at school. He said the year before had been difficult and that he'd been teased by students who thought he was gay.
When police asked Tony about the story X had told them, according to the criminal complaint, Tony "initially claimed that 'Kayla' was not him, but was a friend of his." Eventually, though, Tony admitted that he had created the online persona of "Kayla," tricked the boy into sending pictures, and threatened him as he'd described.
Finally, on February 2, Waukesha district attorney Brad Schimel announced at a press conference, broadcast live by Milwaukee's NBC affiliate, that Tony Stancl had been arrested and jailed on twelve felony charges, including possession of child pornography and sexual assault. If convicted on all counts, he would face up to 293 years in prison.
*****
immediately, Ike's rumor mill went into a frenzy. Wired magazine posted the criminal complaint against Stancl on its Web site, and kids downloaded the document, which identified the victims by their initials and dates of birth. Then the kids went to Facebook and searched the Eisenhower network by plugging in birth dates. Within minutes they had a full list of the names of the alleged victims, which made the story even more incredible. These were not wayward, damaged boys. They were athletes. Leaders. Popular, college-bound, bright-futured kids. Boys so unimpeachably straight that there was no way you could imagine them doing the things they were supposed to have done with Tony Stancl.
Everyone wondered, How could these boys let this happen?
At the courthouse, a middle-aged secretary in the clerk's office said, "When I was in high school, boys like Tony Stancl got the crap beaten out of them. Why didn't they beat the crap out of him?"
Another secretary said, "Maybe he was a cool kid."
The first secretary raised her eyebrows and touched her heavy gray turtleneck. "I saw his picture," she responded, "and he does not look cool to me."
Furious at the exposure of their sons' identities, the parents of the seven boys now collectively known as "the victims" demanded an explanation from the D.A. How had their sons' names been made public? The answer to that question, and to so many questions about this case, was that the Web has changed everything. To protect a defendant's constitutional rights, a criminal complaint must identify the victims. Traditionally, minors in Wisconsin have been ID'd with initials and birth dates, the D.A. says, "and we've always gotten away with it because no one ever comes down to the courthouse to get a copy of the criminal complaint." (At the D.A.'s request, Wired.com later redacted the victims' initials and birth dates.)
In other ways, too, this case was unlike most high school sex scandals. When boys are seduced by female teachers or a group of kids get caught getting naked at a Holiday Inn, envy adds some sting to the public outrage. The Stancl case was perhaps more horrifying because these boys were seduced by another boy—and because it triggered parents' preexisting fears about their kids' vulnerability to the predators they knew were lurking online.
During the previous year, law-enforcement officials in at least fifteen states formally investigated teenagers for incidents of so-called sexting. (Kids use the word only when contemptuously quoting adults.) But none of those stories seemed as sordid as what happened at Eisenhower. Moreover, the incident drew even more attention than it might have, because Tony was arrested the day after MySpace announced that it had banished 90,000 registered sex offenders from its network and piously called on Facebook to follow its lead. For talk radio, blogs, and op-ed writers, the Stancl case became the most lurid example so far of the worst possible outcome of teenagers trading naked pictures online.
Local leaders used the language of predatory terror to describe the case. The D.A. called Stancl's scheme "sinister" and "malicious." A respected columnist at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel suggested that true justice would come when Tony was turned over to the ultimate sex predators, prison rapists: "Has Stancl pondered the possibility his cellmates will have some schemes of their own to spring on him?"
In New Berlin, the hysteria spiraled. Two hundred parents crowded Eisenhower's auditorium for a seminar on cybersafety the week after Tony's arrest. (The school held a similar seminar the week before the arrest; two parents came to that one.) Asked to name the second-most traumatic thing that had happened at the school, the principal stared blankly and halfheartedly mumbled about a teacher who died of cancer the previous year. Asked the same question, Ike's head counselor thought for a while and then remembered a season of suicides in the 1980s. Seven people died, she thought, maybe eight.
After agonizing over whether to talk about the case to GQ, one school employee finally justified the decision by saying, "This may ruin my career, but if I can help save just one more kid from getting ass-raped, it will be worth it."
Inside the superintendant's office in Ike's boxy 1969 brick building, two deep lines furrowed on the bridge of Kreutzer's nose when he scrunched his forehead. He asked, "Is this the Columbine of texting?"
*****
new berlin's kids are weathering the deluge a bit differently.
A 17-year-old female student said, "It's kinda like, you know, people will say, 'Everybody must be so devastated. The school must be so, like, ridiculous.' But, like, I don't feel any difference at all."
Some who were more closely touched by Tony's actions seem astonishingly casual about the experience. A senior boy said that he was talking with some friends about what Tony did. At the end of the conversation, one of the guys leaned over and confided, "I sent Tony naked pictures of myself."
Did that guy seem upset? I asked.
"No."
Did he say anything else?
"No."
What was the expression on his face?
"Just normal."
It just seems odd that he would make that confession without any emotion, without saying how he felt about what happened.
There was a very long pause, as if the boy was trying to translate his thought from one language into another. Eventually he blurted, "It would not be very much like a teenage boy to say how he was feeling."
Even the core group of Tony's seven alleged sexual-assault victims are, by most accounts, coping well, though a number of them are in counseling. Many of those who did not have girlfriends before November have girlfriends now. As one senior boy explained, "It's understandable. After something like this, most people would get a girlfriend to make themselves feel better. They may not be thinking they are proving a point, but naturally they do."
The kids' resilience raises what may be the most disturbing implication of what happened here: The phenomenon of teens trading naked pictures with one another is something they at least think they can deal with.
Brad Schimel, Waukesha County D.A., says he hopes the Stancl case will be "a two-by-four upside the head to parents," encouraging them to get involved in their children's lives online. Tony, whose lawyer declined to comment on the case, pleaded not guilty to all charges at his arraignment in March. At press time, a trial date had not been set. None of the seven alleged victims indicate any willingness to take the stand, though, and Schimel would like to avoid making them testify. Most people in New Berlin would probably prefer a plea bargain to a trial. Says Michael Fesenmaier, "We just want to get back to normal."
But what does normal even look like anymore? The Stancl case, extreme as it is, offers an unsettling answer: What happened here is shocking because it was not all that shocking. In the beginning, when Kayla and Emily asked these boys for naked pictures, the majority of them thought little of saying yes. This exchange was within the range of what kids—lots of kids—consider normal. Online, a boy chats with a girl he's never met. Pants go down. Pictures are sent. And a chain of unpredictable, unknowable consequences is set in motion.
Whatever else he may be, Tony Stancl is an opportunist. He rode the big wave that more and more kids ride, out to a place where every flesh-and-blood kid is also a phantom, where adolescence isn't so lonely, where you don't have to wonder, Isn't there anybody who wants what I want? In this world, no IM goes unanswered—and for every teenager who types the question will u send it?, there is another typing, Yes.
*Scene re-created based on court filings and police reports.
michael joseph gross is working on a book about love and technology.
courtesy of GQ
