Groomers Online

Schoolteachers, including LGBTQ rights advocates, have been accused of creating and sharing child pornography, some of which was made with their own underage male students.

Editor’s Note: This article contains sexually explicit material. People should see it so that they will take the following seriously, but discretion is advised.

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When Pearl City High School in Hawaii held its annual “songfest” in 2020, Alden Bunag, an outspoken LGBTQ rights advocate and teacher, took the stage for a guest performance. When he finished singing “Corner of the Sky” from the musical “Pippin,” Bunag scampered off the floor to raucous applause from an audience unaware that he had been recording his sexual encounters with a 13-year-old boy.

I briefly covered this story as it was still developing last year for Newsweek. But with the gruesome Townhall exposé on an “LGBTQ pedophile ring” in Atlanta-area suburbs, it seemed like time for a deep-diving follow-up with new details, not least because there seems to be a pattern here. In that story, an LGBTQ-activist couple is “accused of sodomizing their young adopted sons—now ages 9 and 11—and distributing ‘homemade’ child pornography of the sexual abuse.”

In this one, investigators have accused gay men of being part of an online network creating and sharing child pornography, some of which was made with underage boys who were their students.

In a voluntary interview with law enforcement, Bunag described the boy as a “former student.” Pearl City High said in a statement that the victim was not enrolled there. Bunag had worked at multiple schools in Hawaii over the years.

According to federal court documents, Bunag admitted to uploading recordings of these encounters over Telegram and claimed to have had sex with the boy “at the school during lunch breaks.” He also admitted to sharing child pornography involving other underage victims.

Investigators found he had exchanged nearly 3,400 messages, including hundreds of pornographic images and videos of children, with a male middle school teacher named Andrew Wolf, who worked at the prestigious Springside Chestnut Hill Academy in Philadelphia.

The first breadcrumb that set investigators on the trail was a tip via the CyberTipline of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). The system receives complaints from Internet Service Providers, Electronic Service Providers, and others. These reports are reviewed by an analyst at NCMEC and sent to law enforcement for further investigation. 

On June 29, 2021, a video file was uploaded to a Dropbox attached to Wolf’s work email address. Dropbox provided investigators with two IP logins for the account, which they traced back to devices used by Wolf. According to a federal criminal complaint filed in October 2021, the video in question is nearly 10 minutes long and depicts two boys, between 10 to 14 years old, “naked on a bed, masturbating each other and then penetrating each other anally with their fingers and penises.”

While searching through his Dropbox, investigators found other files depicting “sexually explicit images or videos of unidentified apparent minors.” Below are three examples from the October 2021 complaint.

The FBI executed a search warrant on Oct. 7, 2021, at Wolf’s residence in Roxborough, Philadelphia, where he lived alone with his six-month-old daughter. The Chestnut Hill Local reported that Wolf is unmarried. The paper could not verify if he is the child’s biological parent. An FBI spokesperson told the Local that the baby was placed with Wolf’s relatives after his arrest.

Roxborough has long been ranked among Philadelphia’s safest, most family-friendly neighborhoods. Its motto is: “A Place With Roots.” It’s also a place with predators.

Wolf seemed to immediately know why the agents came knocking. He fessed that his Dropbox account had recently been closed for violating terms of service related to pornography. He also admitted to using multiple Instagram accounts. Investigators noted that at this time, his Instagram profile picture was a photograph of a teenage girl who appeared to be underage and that Wolf had been following several minor boys on the platform. 

The contents of Wolf’s iPhone were extracted by the FBI’s Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory. It contained hundreds of sexually explicit images of children, mostly boys between 10 and 14 years old. Among many heinous examples, prosecutors highlighted that the Philadelphia schoolteacher paid with a $100 PlayStation card for an underage male to produce child pornography. Court documents state Wolf received “videos of the naked child masturbating, dancing, and displaying his butt to the camera, along with a close-up video of the child masturbating and ejaculating.” Per those documents:

When the child informed [Wolf] that he was 13 years old, [Wolf] responded, “How long have u been able to cum… Like how many months since ur first time.” When the child answered that it had been about three months, [Wolf] said, “Cool,” told the victim, “Dude u are so hot,” and asked the child, “When did u get fucked and did u like it?”

While investigating Wolf, a broader network of offenders came to light that included Bunag and one other unidentified person who claimed to be a male teacher.

The FBI discovered that Wolf had been using Telegram to communicate with other users like Bunag about their shared sexual interest in underage boys, including their own students. A motion for pretrial detention states that Wolf was part of an online ring of “like-minded child predators.”

Wolf’s phone was processed while disconnected from all networks, so many files were not viewable. However, FBI agents zeroed in on three videos of child pornography sent in August 2021. They also found that Bunag had shared “non-pornographic” images of his students.

Wolf had also been in touch with another user on Telegram who claimed to be a teacher known only as “Mr. Pickles.”