Predation Is Infrastructure
On Scott Ritter, Imperial Access, and What the Class War Actually Requires
When the first essay landed, the excuses came with it. Not new excuses. The same stale script that always shows up the moment a movement is asked to hold one of its useful men accountable. The class war is too urgent. The enemy is too powerful. The voice is too valuable. The conviction was a setup. Choose your battles.
Blah blah blah.
Strip away the movement jargon, the pseudo strategy, the smug little invocations of political urgency, and what they are really saying is simple:
“I’m defending child predators.”
That is the argument. That is the position. Everything else is theater.
These are not political arguments. They are a permission structure.
They clarify nothing. They deepen nothing. They protect no one. They clear a path for impunity and call it pragmatism. They deserve a direct answer, not because the people making them are owed debate, but because the record they are refusing is public, documented, and full of our children, reduced in their telling to footnotes.
They are not footnotes.
What follows is that record. Flattened. Sequenced. Returned to institutional context so nobody gets to hide behind vagueness, charisma, or movement utility.
The Timeline They Do Not Want You to Read
The political targeting story depends on a very specific chronology. Dissident speaks truth to power. State retaliates. Conviction becomes the weapon. It is a seductive story because it flatters the audience. It lets people believe they are defending principle when they are really defending a man.
It is also backwards.
Scott Ritter’s first documented attempt to arrange sexual contact with someone he believed was a minor took place in April 2001. In a chat room, he arranged to meet an undercover officer posing as a 14 year old girl at a local business. He showed up.
September 11, 2001 had not yet happened.
The Bush administration’s march toward the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the campaign Ritter later became famous for opposing, had not yet begun. At that point, he was not a prominent anti war dissident being hunted by the state. He was a former weapons inspector who had resigned from UNSCOM in 1998 because he believed the United States and the UN were being too soft on Saddam Hussein. The hawkish resignation. The anti war public persona had not yet crystallized. The dissident martyr of later mythology did not yet exist.
The state had no reason to silence a critic who had not yet arrived in that form.
In June 2001, still months before 9/11, he was caught again, this time attempting to lure someone he believed was a 16 year old girl to a fast food restaurant. That incident led to an attempted endangerment of a minor charge.
Both 2001 cases were eventually dismissed after he completed a period of probation. The records were sealed. He did not complete the sex offender treatment that followed.
He did not complete it.
Then he built the platform. Then the whistleblower rebrand hardened. Then, in 2003, when the 2001 arrests were leaked to the press just before a planned trip to Baghdad, supporters cast the disclosure as a state smear meant to destroy his credibility. His politics absorbed the scandal. His image survived the exposure. The behavior did not stop.
In February 2009, Ritter entered a Yahoo chat room under the handle “delmarm4fun,” identified himself as a 44 year old man from Albany, and began a sexually explicit exchange with an undercover Barrett Township, Pennsylvania detective who identified herself at the outset as a 15 year old girl named Emily.
The detective told him she was 15.
Ritter briefly turned off his webcam. He typed that he “didn’t want any trouble.” Then he turned it back on and continued to completion.
The prosecution played 20 minutes of the video for the jury.
In April 2011, a Monroe County jury convicted him on six of seven counts, including felony unlawful contact with a minor, criminal attempt to corrupt a minor, criminal use of a communications device, and indecent exposure. The judge classified him as a sexually violent predator, the highest category under Pennsylvania law. He is required to register as a sex offender for life.
Three separate incidents. Two states. Eight years.
This is not political targeting.
It is a pattern.
The Law Does Not Care About His Politics
The entrapment defense and the false flag fantasy are not just morally bankrupt. They are legally incoherent.
Under Pennsylvania’s Unlawful Contact with a Minor statute, 18 Pa. C.S. § 6318, a person commits an offense if they intentionally contact someone they believe to be a minor for the purpose of sexual activity. Whether the other person was actually a minor is legally irrelevant. Whether the person was an undercover officer is legally irrelevant. The crime is the intent. The crime is the reach toward a child.
Under the Corruption of Minors provision, 18 Pa. C.S. § 6301(d), if the victim is believed to be under 16, it is not a defense that the actor did not know the actual age or believed the person to be older.
And before any of this reached a jury, Ritter had already moved to admit guilt.
After his 2009 arrest, court records show he waived his preliminary hearing and negotiated a plea agreement to plead guilty to a single count of Unlawful Contact with a Minor. The Commonwealth filed a one count Criminal Information in reliance on that agreement. Then Ritter withdrew the plea. Only then, after already moving through a guilty plea process, did he construct the elaborate defense that he believed he was engaging in adult roleplay fantasy. When that defense faltered, he produced a second, contradictory explanation from the witness stand: that he knew all along he was speaking to police and had staged his own arrest as a cry for help.
The jury got to watch him try both stories.
They also got to hear what he actually said to the person he believed was 15.
He asked whether she had tasted her ex boyfriend’s penis.
He asked her favorite sexual position.
He asked whether her ex boyfriend had ejaculated inside her.
He asked, just before performing a sex act on camera, “you want to see it finish?”
When Ritter testified that he believed he was participating in consensual adult roleplay, Assistant District Attorney Michael Rakaczewski answered with two words: “Are you serious?”
The jury deliberated for two days.
Then they convicted him on six counts.
But the most legally devastating part of the 2011 trial was not only the 2009 conduct. It was the treatment of the 2001 record, a ruling later affirmed in full by the Pennsylvania Superior Court.
In its March 20, 2012 opinion, the Monroe County Court of Common Pleas found that the 2001 New York incidents demonstrated a “common scheme or plan” and established Ritter’s propensity for internet sexual exploitation of children. The legal phrase matters here. This was treated as signature behavior. The court found that the 2009 conduct was not an isolated aberration but a mirror of the 2001 conduct: same medium, same target profile, same escalation, same attempt to arrange a meeting.
More importantly, the trial court also held that even without the 2001 evidence, the Commonwealth had already presented enough evidence for the jury to find Ritter guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The earlier incidents strengthened the case. They did not create it. The 2009 conduct already stood on its own.
A common scheme. A signature. A pattern that two levels of court recognized as legally meaningful.
Among the evidence drawn from the 2001 transcripts was one line Ritter told one of the minors he believed he was speaking to:
“You can never tell anyone you did this.”
Sit with that line.
That is not the language of entrapment. That is not the language of confusion. That is not the language of a man tricked into impropriety by a state conspiracy.
That is the language of secrecy.
The language of grooming.
The language of someone who understands that silence is part of the mechanism.
For the false flag fantasy to work, one would have to believe the state made him type those words in 2001, before he was any anti war threat worth neutralizing. One would have to believe the state then made him move toward a guilty plea in 2009, withdraw it, build a fantasy defense, offer a contradictory second defense at trial, and ask a person he said he believed was an adult what sexual acts she had performed on her ex boyfriend.
The sentencing judge said it plainly: “I think what it would be like if it were my niece, Mr. Ritter’s daughters or someone else’s daughter in this very courtroom who was on the receiving end of that chat. Children need to be protected.”
Yes. They do.
“You Can Never Tell Anyone You Did This”
That line from 2001 deserves more attention than his defenders want to give it.
It tells us that years before he became a recognizable anti war voice, years before the state had any reason to construct a martyrdom narrative around him, Ritter was already coaching a child he believed he was exploiting into silence. He was already fluent in the operational grammar of abuse: establish contact, escalate, extract, secure silence, protect access.
The class war reframers. The “my enemy’s enemy” apologists. The entrapment evangelists. None of them want to sit with that sentence because it blows a hole straight through the mythology. It predates Iraq. It predates the dissident narrative. It predates every excuse built to protect him.
It is simply a man telling a child she must never tell.
That this line was documented, admitted as trial evidence, upheld on appeal as part of a common scheme, and still is not the first thing people cite when they rush to defend him tells you everything about how male impunity operates inside political movements.
The evidence exists.
People have chosen not to look at it.
Predation Is Infrastructure
Scott Ritter served as a UN weapons inspector from 1991 to 1998. That role took him across Iraq and through the institutional culture of international peacekeeping, a culture the UN itself was eventually forced to publicly confront because the record had become too large to hide.
The record of sexual exploitation and abuse by UN personnel is not marginal. It is not anecdotal. It is not a minor stain on an otherwise noble apparatus. It is documented across missions, across decades, and across the very structures through which Ritter moved.
In Cambodia, during the UNTAC mission of 1992 to 1993, the number of sex workers reportedly rose by an estimated 300 percent during the mission. When concerns surfaced, the head of operations shrugged them off with the phrase “boys will be boys.” Many of the women and girls caught in that surge contracted HIV/AIDS, previously rare in the region. The institutional response was silence and dismissal.
In Bosnia, during UNPROFOR and UNMIBH operations through the 1990s, a 2001 UN Office of Internal Oversight Services investigation confirmed that peacekeeping personnel were major customers at brothels where women and girls were being held as sex slaves. Documented cases included civilian staff members exchanging school fees for sexual access to 17 year old refugees. Documented cases included peacekeepers raping minors.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, OIOS investigations covering 2004 to 2005 confirmed that peacekeepers regularly exchanged sex for food, sometimes two eggs, sometimes one to three dollars, sometimes access to work itself. Internal reviews uncovered more than 150 allegations involving girls as young as 11 to 14. The Zeid Report of 2005 concluded that sexual exploitation and abuse in peacekeeping was systemic and caused, in its own language, “great harm” to the integrity of the missions.
In Haiti, between 2004 and 2007, at least 134 peacekeepers from a single contingent operated a sex ring involving children as young as 12. A later Channel 4 investigation found more than 1,700 allegations across a 15 year period of UN peacekeeping activity, with only 53 uniformed peacekeepers jailed for sexual offenses. Personnel were repatriated instead of prosecuted in the places where the harm occurred.
The UN Secretary General’s Bulletin ST/SGB/2003/13, issued in 2003 in response to these scandals, defined sexual exploitation as “any actual or attempted abuse of a position of vulnerability, differential power, or trust, for sexual purposes.” The Bulletin recognized what should have been obvious all along: sexual relationships between peacekeeping personnel and host country populations are inherently exploitative because power imbalance is not incidental to the encounter. It is the encounter.
This is the institutional culture Ritter moved through from 1991 to 1998.
A culture that managed exploitation through silence.
Through repatriation.
Through soft language.
Through bureaucratic dispersal.
Through the old patriarchal shrug of boys will be boys, repeated until the body count of harm became too visible to deny.
His 2001 arrests happened after that career ended. His domestic conduct is what was caught and documented. The question of what access looked like in the field, in conflict zones, in countries fractured by war, sanctions, occupation, and extreme asymmetry, where the distance between credentialed international official and local child is not theoretical but absolute, is a question the public record cannot answer.
It is also a question the public record does not allow us to dismiss.
The class war defense collapses here.
Because the infrastructure of sexual predation, institutional impunity, differential power, the rendering of vulnerable people as available for use by powerful men, is not separate from the machinery of empire. It is one of its operating systems. The UN documented that. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia documented that. Human rights literature documented it across major peacekeeping operations of the 1990s.
So when defenders invoke class war to shield Ritter from scrutiny, they are not protecting anti imperialist struggle from distraction.
They are reproducing imperial logic inside the language of liberation.
The Courtroom Performance
At sentencing in October 2011, Scott Ritter told the court: “I’ve asked my wife for forgiveness, and I’ve asked my daughters for forgiveness, and they have given it to me.”
His wife, Marina, testified in his defense at trial. His twin daughters, Victoria and Patricia, attended the proceedings at Monroe County Common Pleas Court in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.
His daughters were 18 at the time of the trial.
They were 16 at the time of the 2009 offense.
The person he believed was Emily was 15.
He asked Emily about her sexual history. He asked about her ex boyfriend. He asked her to watch him. Then he stood before the court and explained that he had sought forgiveness from his own daughters for conduct directed at a child one year younger than they had been when it happened.
His daughters, at 18, sat in that courtroom and watched their father seek leniency for conduct aimed at someone younger than they were at the time of the offense.
This does not humanize him.
It names the machinery.
It shows how patriarchal protection works. How the love, loyalty, and impossible emotional position of the women closest to an abusive man are folded into his public defense. How their presence is made to signal rehabilitation. How their grief becomes mitigation. How family is staged as evidence that the man should be restored to legitimacy.
Their complicated love does not exonerate him. Their presence does not cleanse the record. Their impossible position is not proof of his innocence. It is proof of how thoroughly patriarchy recruits intimate relationships into the work of laundering male violence.
The judge was not persuaded. She sentenced him to a minimum of 18 months and a maximum of 5.5 years. She classified him as a sexually violent predator. She said children need to be protected.
He was paroled in 2014.
By 2024, he was a featured speaker at anti nuclear rallies, a near daily guest on political podcasts, and a welcomed presence on alternative media platforms whose audiences overlap directly with Palestinian solidarity and anti imperialist organizing.
The daughters in the courtroom did not change what he was.
They showed how this works.
These Are Only the Ones He Was Caught For
Three documented incidents. Two in 2001. One in 2009. Caught because law enforcement was looking. Caught because the interactions left digital traces. Caught in sting operations specifically designed to identify this kind of behavior.
What the literature on recidivism, detection, and institutional abuse makes clear is that the detected record is the floor, not the ceiling.
Lisak and Miller’s 2002 work on undetected rapists showed that serious repeat perpetrators can remain completely outside convicted samples while continuing to offend in socially ordinary settings, especially settings where institutional trust, access, and prestige function as shields. The John Jay 2004 research on clergy abuse showed that institutional authority, secrecy, and unsupervised access can incubate abuse for years before a single case becomes visible. Lievore’s 2004 work documented how reporting, investigation, and prosecution each create separate attrition points where cases disappear, so that by the time a conviction exists it reflects only a fraction of a fraction of actual harm.
Ritter had years of international travel under institutional cover. He had credentials that granted trust in rooms most people never enter. He had a career inside a peacekeeping culture already documented as structurally permissive toward the sexual exploitation of vulnerable populations. Then that international access ended. Then he was caught domestically. Twice. Then again.
The conduct that was detected follows a pattern so consistent that the Pennsylvania Superior Court treated it as signature behavior.
So the question of what may have preceded detection is not a smear.
It is what the literature requires us to ask.
They do not defend the full record because the full record destroys their argument. So they reduce it to 2009. One 2011 conviction. One punishable episode. One man who already did his time and should be welcomed back. But the record is larger than that, the pattern is older than that, and the institutional context in which he operated makes that narrowing impossible to take seriously.
The documented record is the minimum visible edge of a larger structure.
That is what detection means.
Why Children Are the Floor, Not a Distraction
Here is the argument without euphemism:
You cannot build a liberation movement on the same logic of disposability that empire runs on.
Empire governs through managed vulnerability. It decides who will be protected, who will be legible, who will be grievable, who will be useful, and who will be made available for extraction. The colonial project, the carceral project, the military project, the economic project, all of them rely on a category of people whose exposure is treated as a resource.
Children in conflict zones.
Women in occupied territories.
Communities stripped of institutional protection.
People whose pain is negotiated around instead of addressed.
A class war politics that cannot say “not our children” has already surrendered the architecture. It has already accepted that some vulnerability is negotiable if the stakes are framed as high enough. It has already accepted that some people can be absorbed as collateral while the movement keeps marching. It has already agreed that the protection of the most exposed is a luxury.
That is not class war.
That is class rule with different branding.
The UN eventually codified part of this reality, however badly and however late. It formally recognized that differential power makes real consent impossible, that exploitation operates through vulnerability, and that protecting the most exposed is not secondary to mission integrity. Then it failed to enforce its own standards and amassed 1,700 allegations with 53 convictions across 15 years of peacekeeping abuse.
That failure matters. But so does the line they were eventually forced to draw.
If an institution as compromised, state serving, and saturated with imperial management as the United Nations had to admit that exploitation through unequal power is definitional, what does it say that people claiming anti imperialist politics are still arguing against drawing that line?
Abolitionist politics does not mean the abolition of all consequence. It does not mean predation becomes politically irrelevant if the perpetrator says the right things about NATO. It does not mean every man remains entitled to platform, access, and legitimacy regardless of what he has done or to whom.
Abolition asks what protection looks like beyond cages.
It asks what accountability looks like beyond state punishment.
It asks who bears the cost of harm.
It asks who is expected to swallow that harm quietly so the movement can keep its favorite men.
It does not ask us to hand microphones to a man with a documented pattern of targeting children and call that solidarity.
Protecting children is not a distraction from the class war.
It is the proof of concept.
It is the point where rhetoric either becomes ethics or collapses into fraud. It is the place where we show whether we mean what we say when we claim to be building something different. Different not at the level of slogans. Different at the level where empire is most intimate and most violent, in the bodies and safety of those with no institutional protection, no prestige, no strategic value, and no way to make their violation matter except by naming it plainly.
Every microphone handed to a predator sends a message to a survivor.
The message is simple:
We already decided who matters more.
That is not the class war.
That is the thing the class war is supposed to end.
Primary Sources
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. William Scott Ritter, 975 EDA 2012 (Pa. Super. Ct. 2013).
18 Pa. C.S. § 6318 (Unlawful Contact with a Minor).
18 Pa. C.S. § 6301 (Corruption of Minors).
UN Secretary-General’s Bulletin ST/SGB/2003/13, Special Measures for Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse (2003).
Hanson, R. K., and Bussière, M. T. (1998). Predicting relapse: A meta-analysis of sexual offender recidivism studies. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 66(2), 348-362.
John Jay College of Criminal Justice. (2004). The nature and scope of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests and deacons in the United States, 1950-2002. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Lisak, D., and Miller, P. M. (2002). Repeat rape and multiple offending among undetected rapists. Violence and Victims, 17(1), 73-84.
Lievore, D. (2004). Prosecutorial decisions in adult sexual assault cases. Australian Institute of Criminology.
United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services. (2005). Report of the comprehensive review of the issue of sexual exploitation and abuse in United Nations peacekeeping operations (The Zeid Report). A/59/710.
Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein. (2005). A comprehensive strategy to eliminate future sexual exploitation and abuse in United Nations peacekeeping operations. United Nations General Assembly.
Thank you for reporting this! I’ve seen him pop up recently on podcasts such as Danny Haiphong’s and would never have known that off the bat. Abusers need to be locked away, not featured out in public.