I’m the 37-Year-Old Who Poses as Children Online to Identify Predators: Sloane Unmasked
Note: This piece contains sexual content and descriptions of child sex abuse that could be disturbing to some readers.
37-year-old Sloane Ryan. 15-year-old Libby. 11-year-old Bailey. 14-year-old Kait. 13-year-old Ava. For the past year, I’ve been responding to all of these names. I have multiple phone numbers and corresponding personas to go along with them. I’ve been pixelated in articles and shrouded in darkness on national news. I’ve found comfort in the camouflage, but as our work has become highlighted on platforms and internet forums and a few things have come to closure on the legal end, I can now share that I’ve been working under the pseudonym Sloane Ryan, heading up the Special Projects Team at Bark.
Sloane Ryan is a name, appearing in press and mysterious references on social media. But on paper, and to my family and friends and colleagues, I’m just Roo Powell, a regular 37-year-old they see at the office or in the school drop-off line or passing a football around in the backyard.
No secrecy. No subterfuge.
I’m in a small room at the TV studio, considering my posture as I sit in a chair facing a news correspondent. A month ago, he had traveled to Atlanta and observed our team work, watched aghast as abusive messages came in, and sat with us late into the night as a perpetrator carefully groomed my 11-year-old persona. The next morning, he had come back to our off-site location and seen me in a moment where the work had caught up to me and I was in the middle of a cathartic cry. (This happens every so often. My team is used to it and they pass the tissues.)
At this point, the camera people and the producers have all seen me in precarious moments, and there’s a sense of familiarity with all of them.
But then the correspondent asks me a question that throws me.
“Are you scared?”
I blink and rebuff a little, tossing him a line — albeit true — about how I focus on the impact the project has had.
Days prior someone had attempted to brute-force my accounts. I had received a string of blocked calls in a row. The past months have exposed me (whether as Sloane or one of my personas) to threats and degradation and harassment. A forum attempted to reverse-engineer pixelation. I’ve been identified and doxxed.
I wonder every day if I’m just a complete dumbass for doing this, I don’t actually say to him.
In moments where the gallows humor surfaces, I’m simultaneously self-deprecating and inappropriate. But in earnest, it’d be absurd if I weren’t at least a little scared. Not just me, but anyone at Bark. We’ve identified some horrible stuff over the years — predation, would-be school shootings, acts of violence, domestic abuse, child abuse — which then often results in arrests and subsequent prosecution. Surely we’ve made some enemies along the way.
And then, there’s the matter of my choices affecting people around me. My colleagues, my direct reports, and then, of course, my family.
As my 11-year-old persona, Bailey, I put on clothes from the tween section on display in the aisles at Target. The same clothes my own kids would wear. In the off-site location where the Special Projects Team works, we set-dress a room to look like a child’s bedroom. A fluffy pillow and a couple of stuffed animals. Jeans and socks strewn across the floor. A desk with art supplies. A poster with flowers and a reminder to stay positive.
The bedroom is delightful. Cheerful. Cozy, even. It’s also positively stomach-churning. It’s a constant reminder that rooms all over — just like this — are inhabited by innocent, trusting 11-year-olds who are the target of predators looking to abuse them.
I think of my own kids, and immediately change the channel in my brain. I cannot do this job without deliberately compartmentalizing.
The bedroom is delightful. Cheerful. Cozy, even. It’s also positively stomach-churning. It’s a constant reminder that rooms all over — just like this — are inhabited by innocent, trusting 11-year-olds who are the target of predators looking to abuse them.
Sure, I’m always at least a little uneasy, I should have admitted to the news correspondent. But if the other option is stopping this work altogether, I’ll take being a little uneasy.
“I feel like we’re Alice in Wonderland,” I said to Brian, CEO of Bark. “We’ve taken the red pill and we’ve seen too much and we know too much.”
“YOU FUCKING BITCH, I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU.” It’s not typed out words, but audio via Instagram. An irate person screams into his phone at my 15-year-old persona, Libby. I would not acquiesce to his demands for photos of my neck, and the threats have been rolling in at a steady clip. I press play in Bark’s Atlanta office in front of the rest of the Special Projects Team, and everyone grimaces.
The voice is unhinged.
“DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING TO GET AWAY FROM ME?”
His breathing is heavy and labored.
“YOU CAN’T. I’LL FUCKING CUT YOUR NECK OUT.”
I make a solid attempt at composure, but my heart rate quickens. Libby isn’t real, but I am. I’m not 15, but I can’t get his frantic voice out of my head. Someone reaches across my desk and grabs my forearm in an assured, non-verbal I’m-here-for-you gesture.
I’m grateful for it.
The upside of working with law enforcement at the federal, state, and local levels is that I’m afforded protection at the federal, state, and local levels. I have a direct line of contact with one of those three-letter government organizations, and I can get ahold of someone at any time of day, any day of the week.
They not only care about my safety, they’ve talked to me about my mental health and recommended resources their own agents use.
Having them on speed dial relieves a lot of the concern for my safety (for me, for my boss, for my mom).
Every threat is taken seriously. When a series of odd but benign text messages hit my phone, my contact had immediately looked into it to assess the threat. He did the same for emails and phone calls. People trying to hack in my under-utilized Facebook account.
Brian has the same instinct. I am reminded of this when a particularly high-risk week came around, and he had private security shadow me everywhere. I had slipped into the ladies’ room at Starbucks, and when I walked out, I found all 350 pounds of Pete standing by the door, arms folded, silently intimidating throngs of people clutching their macchiatos.
We’ve been sitting on this mini-documentary for months. When we first launched the Stonefish project, we knew right away this was something we’d have to document. We fumbled with iPhones and handheld testimonials, but then filmmakers came on board to help tell this story and we knew they’d tell it well.
Jamin, one of the filmmakers, adjusts the lav mic on the collar of my shirt and asks me to speak to test the audio. After a few check, checks, into the mic, I sit on a couch and field texts from a 44-year-old man who insists my 11-year-old persona must be a model.
“I bet you have the cutest feet and the nicest legs,” he texts, tipping his hand on his particular fetish.
I sigh, kick off my shoes, and adjust the hem of my denim shorts. I know what happens next. He’ll ask for photos. I’m suddenly aware that Jamin is documenting this for the world to see and I quickly become self-conscious.
Would I send a predator a photo of me winking or smiling or of my legs stretched out on a couch if it meant potentially helping a bunch of kids?
Yes, I remind myself resolutely. But it’s not without cost. There’s the cost of willingly exposing myself to abuse, the cost of allowing myself to be objectified, the cost of knowing my photos are being used as masturbatory material, but there’s also the cost of what my peers will think. What strangers will think. What my colleagues will think. What my kids will think.
My first Medium piece, written under the name Sloane Ryan, went — by most standards — viral. It was viewed over 7 million times, shared and tweeted and translated into four different languages. I was anonymous in that piece, and my photos were pixelated due to some pending investigations.
One personal upside of pixelating my photos was eliminating (or at least minimizing) one path where people could criticize me. She doesn’t look young. This bitch is so into herself.
“Don’t read the comments,” Brian tells me more than once. A simple directive, but not an easy one. I keep seeing my own (pixelated) face and my own article shared and re-shared in my Facebook and Twitter feeds.
The Child Rescue Coalition references a study that says predators typically abuse between 50 and 150 victims over the course of their lifetimes. If the true number is even half or a tenth of that, it’s still enough motivation to steel myself against comments and angry emails.
After the story made national press, we weighed the pros and cons of my identity being revealed. “A plus side for killing the pseudonym,” Haley, another member of the Special Projects Team pointed out, “is that everyone will know you’re a Bark lifer, not some actor hired to work on this project.”
It was a good point. Brian and I had been sitting around a conference room table, struggling with how to demonstrate the pervasiveness of predation online. In spite of working in this field and seeing tons of cases of abuse, sharing what we knew about the issue to help parents understand its urgency continued to elude us.
“What if we just set up fake accounts ourselves to demonstrate to parents what can happen online?” Brian asked.
It was a simple question that spurred on a project that has since resulted in photo shoots, fake names, late nights, meetings with law enforcement, and multiple arrests. I went from Head of Creative, leading a team of nine, to also absorbing a new, quiet role: Special Projects Lead, managing a team of six.
After the original story aired, internet sleuths put two and two together, and my real name and face started surfacing. Concurrently, a pending legal case reached a point of closure. The proverbial cat was out of the bag and there was no getting him back in. After a moment of panic, I relaxed. Haley was right. At least people would know this was real, this was genuine, and I’ve been the woman behind the curtain. People who know me know my commitment to child safety. My past work has pointed to it in a variety of ways. Years ago I volunteered with an NGO and sat with undercover investigators in brothels in Southeast Asia to write about sex trafficking.
And now I work for a tech company that helps keep children safe, online and in real life.
If I could wave a magic wand and get the results I want from this work and from this miniature documentary, here’s what it would be: parents and guardians all over would understand just how pervasive predation is online, predators would recognize that they’re harming children and would stop and get help, social media companies would see that they have an obligation to make their platforms safer, lawmakers would advocate for better legislation, and not a single victim would ever be blamed.
“[In] every case of abuse,” I had written in the Medium piece, “a child is never at fault.”
“It’s somehow soothing to hear this,” a commenter writes. “Now I realize [my abuse] wasn’t my fault. I was young and scared.”
The emails continue to hit my inbox. Some are from survivors. Some are from parents. Some are from concerned citizens. I make a mental note to print out the lines that mean the most to us as a team. The gist of most of them? Please keep going.
From a parent: Pause when you need to. Rotate out when you need to. But please don’t stop.
From a survivor: I feel grateful, also stronger, way less alone and motivated to want to do my bit.
From a child psychologist: The hurt, confusion and damage I’ve seen afflicted to children by these predators is overwhelming.
And so while my team lives on dually as the Creative Team and the Special Projects Team, these words continue to ring in our ears — even on our worst days.
So here’s us sans pixelation. Here’s a glimpse into our work. Thank you for bearing witness to our toughest nights.
37-year-old Roo Powell is Head of Creative and leads the Special Projects Team at Bark. Using the pseudonym Sloane Ryan, she recently wrote a Medium piece about her experience posing as an 11-year-old online.
Visit stonefishvideo.com to learn more about the project. To reach the team, contact stonefish@bark.us.
