Joe Biden’s new deputy assistant secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition at the The Department of Energy (DOE) defended a criminal gay prostitution website seven years ago after it was raided and shut down by NYPD and DHS investigators.
Transvestite and “pup fetishist” Sam Brinton began his service at the DOE on June 19.
https://twitter.com/sbrinton/status/1542288527920185344?s=20&t=vIv_okOi_OfeMEos5dAmNw
An article by Brinton decrying the raid appeared in the LGBTQ site Advocate in September of 2015. It was recently unearthed by the National Pulse.
In his oped, Brinton argued that the dissolution of Rentboy.com was “more dangerous than the website ever was” because it forced boy prostitutes to move back home and face the “horrors” of “conversion therapy,” (also known as reparative therapy).
The Manhattan headquarters of Rentboy.com were raided on August 25, 2015, as part of a money laundering and state prostitution investigation. According to the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of New York’s indictment, the website did business with sex traffickers, and “very young” child prostitutes.
Seven people, including CEO Jeffrey Davids, were arrested.
“As alleged, Rentboy.com attempted to present a veneer of legality, when in fact this Internet brothel made millions of dollars from the promotion of illegal prostitution,” acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Kelly Currie said in a statement at the time. DHS was involved in the investigation in part because it involved transferring money across state lines. The seven defendants were charged with conspiring to violate the Travel Act by promoting prostitution.
Hurant pleaded guilty in federal court of promoting prostitution in October of 2016.
The indictment described a Hungarian gay sex trafficking ring with which the website did business.
One agency that RENTBOY.COM did business with was ruri by ViktorBerki, Andras Vass, and Gabor Acs. Berki, Vass, and Acs were arrested and charged with racketeering and sex trafficking in Miami-Dade County court for luring Hungarian men into the United States, and then forcing them into sexual slavery. Berki, Vass, and Acs advertised the men on RENTBOY.COM, among other places. Vass was subsequently found guilty at trial of the charges and was sentenced to eleven years in prison. Berki and Acs are scheduled for trial. When one RENTBOY.COM employee learned of the above sex trafficking arrests, he wrote in an email: “I highly doubt [the victims] are Sex slaves.”
Investigators also noted that Rentboy.com management was very lax about verifying the ages of the “escorts,” and in some cases helped potential child traffickers skirt the law.
RENTBOY.COM policies did not allow advertisements by escorts under 18 years of age; nonetheless, RENTBOY.COM did not verify the ages of all escorts advertising on the site. RENTBOY.COM had a policy that required that escorts provide identification if an escort appeared to be under21. This policy was not strictly applied. Instead, RENTBOY.COM employees generally required identification only from escorts who appeared to be under 18.
As late as 2014, RENTBOY.COM employees called age verification a gray area. RENTBOY.COM employees did not always remove advertisements when the advertisers failed to provide identification. In one case, after an escort agency failed to provide photo identification for an escort, a RENTBOY.COM employee advised the escort agency that he had deleted photographs with the face of the subject escort, but left the advertisement online and left photographs that showed only the escort’s body. In another case, after a different escort agency refused to provide identification for several escorts who appeared underage, the sameRENTBOY.COM employee suggested to [him] to crop the faces of those super young escorts.
“RENTBOY.COM employees did not report these escorts or the escort agencies to law enforcement or to any organization dedicated to helping exploited children” the indictment reads.
The website’s failure to comply with its own age verification standards was allegedly most prominent in respect to advertisements in Asia, which were free.
Starting in 2006, RENTBOY.COM employees complained to RENTBOY.COM management about the quantity of underage escort advertisements in Asia. One 2006 email to Hurant was titled “ASIA MARKET IS OUT OF CONTROL,” and stated: “So many ads/acct’s are coming through above market. They are free but the real issue is that all the boys look “very young.”
“We have to do something about these markets,” the author of the email stated.
Another employee said in an email, “Christ .. talk about copyrighted and underage pics TONS in that area … ALWAYS.”
One emailer downplayed the child trafficking in the Asian-market advertisements by noting: “In Asia ok to approve them … unless you see a baby … ”
The complaint stated that the website “continued to provide free advertisements in Asia and did not require age verification” up until the date it was shut down.
Despite the clear evidence of criminal wrongdoing, Brinton sided with the website.
“Rentboy.com may or may not have broken the law. I don’t know,” he wrote in his oped. “But I do know, from the frantic emails filling my inbox, that the raid on its headquarters has thrown many gay, bisexual, and transgender young adults into turmoil as their main source of income has been ripped away due to irresponsible and archaic views of sex work.”
Brinton framed the feds’ raid as an “attack on Rentboy.com” and “a devastating assault on some of the most vulnerable members of our community — young adults.”
While pointing out that “sex work disproportionately affects the LGBT community,” Brinton acknowledged that “many LGBT youth” were caught up in the lifestyle.
“Transgender people engage in sex work at a rate 10 times that of cisgender (nontrans) women,” he argued. “And many LGBT youth engage in sex work just to survive. A 2013 Center for American Progress report suggests that LGBT youth are more than three times as likely to have engaged in survival sex.”
Brinton claimed that he was being “overwhelmed with messages from GBT young men” who were “afraid of having to return to their families,” where they faced “mistreatment, and even worse,” because their “main and most secure” source of income was now gone.
They are reaching out to me because of my passion for ending conversion therapy, a set of the dangerous and discredited practices linked to severe depression, substance abuse, and even suicide. The connection is horrifying: Many of the young men were forced into conversion therapy by their families — the families to which they may now have to return without a steady income. This makes it my issue.
Brinton is reportedly the son of Southern Baptist missionaries, and claims to be a “survivor of a traumatic and torturous conversion therapy experience.”
Reparative therapy—or what Brinton calls “conversion therapy”— refers to therapeutic or spiritual attempts to help individuals with unwanted same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria to overcome these issues.
Dr. Joseph Nicolosi is considered the creator of reparative therapy.
Dr. Nicolosi, who died in 2017, was a devout Catholic and licensed clinical psychologist and academic, who rejected the fatalism of the premise that people are “born gay” and have no choice. Homosexuality, he believed, is an adaptation to trauma; it is rooted in a same-sex attachment problem that leaves the boy alienated from his true masculine nature.
Brinton is a member of sacrilegious drag queen society called the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” where he is known as “Sister Ray Dee O’ Active.”
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a 501(c)3 tax-deductible non-profit charity recognized by the IRS, has mocked the Catholic Church for decades with members adopting names such as: “Sister Porn Again; Sister Chastity Boner; Sister Sister Edith Myflesh; Sister Roz Erection; Sister Constance Craving of the Holey Desire; and Sister Risqué of the Sissytine Chapel.”
In an eye-opening interview in Metro Weekly titled “Puppy Love” in January of 2016, Brinton talked about how he likes to roleplay as a “pup handler.”
“IN THE PUP COMMUNITY, handlers function the same way dog owners do, keeping a watchful eye on their charge and reining in the pups if needed,” Metro Weekly helpfully explained. “It’s the handlers who train the pups and teach them discipline, doling out rewards or punishments based on good or bad behavior.”
The “pups” in question here are fully grown men crawling around on all fours in dog outfits.
“I actually have trouble when we transition from pup play to having sex,” Brinton told the paper.
“Like, ‘No, I can’t have you whimper like that when we’re having sex,’ because I don’t want to mix that world. It’s interesting, because he doesn’t have to come out of pup mode to have me fuck him. I personally have to bring him out of pup perception for me. But then I’m still treating him as a submissive to me.”
Because some families embrace reparative therapy, Brinton considers the home the most dangerous place for a young male prostitute.
“The rent boys weren’t harming anyone,” he argued in his Sept. 2015 oped. “But now these young men might have to return to communities and homes which have rejected who they are. And that’s when the real danger begins.”