A South Carolina Republican Representative was arrested on Thursday morning, charged with the accusation he has lobbed time and again at the LGBTQ+ community: dealing in child sexual abuse.
Rep. RJ May (R-SC) has been charged with nearly a dozen federal cases of distributing child sex abuse material. The 38-year-old Congressman, both a husband and a father, allegedly used the screen name “joebidennnn69” to exchange 220 different files of toddlers and young children involved in sex acts on the Kik social media network during spring 2024, as reported by the Associated Press.
The charges allegedly link him to uploading the images and photos via his home wi-fi network and cellphone.
Prosecutors have found May’s Kik account to contain a staggering 265 child sex abuse videos, as reported by South Carolina television station WIS-TV Channel 10. Because some of the imagery featured adolescent victims around the same age as his own offspring, prosecutors have asserted that May “has a sexual interest in children the same age as his own children.” The prosecution’s recommendation is for May to be held without bail until his trial.
Additional charges allege that videos have been found on May’s laptop of the representative having sex with three underage girls from Columbia. Using a Mega account, a social media storage site like Dropbox, May would allegedly send messages to the girls that, per the court indictment against him, “consisted largely of arranging ‘meet up’ dates, time, price negotiations, and rules regarding the videoing of sexual encounters, all of which are indicative of sex work.”
May’s lawyer claims that investigators found no child sex abuse images on his laptop, and that the messages found on Kik were not proven to be linked to him. If any of the evidence found convicts May, he could spend over a decade in prison. Kik holds a level of anonymity for its users, which does not require an email or phone number to make an account. Law enforcement, however, can still obtain IP addresses connected to the messaging with a court order.
May, formally the co-chair of the state’s ultra conservative Freedom Caucus and an honoree of anti-LGBTQ+ extremist hate group Moms for Liberty (M4L) as their 2023 Legislator of the Year, once compared Medicaid funding for gender-affirming care to the state paying for “lifestyles” like drug addiction. “We as legislators have an obligation to insure that our children have no harm done to them,” May said during a House floor debate on the bill.