The U.S. Marine Corps’ nude photo-sharing may still be thriving on Facebook and other sites, two new reports indicated Thursday.
Marines have not only been sharing nude photos of their female colleagues on the private Facebook group exposed earlier this month, but they have also been sharing them on a message board since at least May 2016, according to a source who spoke to Business Insider:
The site, called AnonIB, has a dedicated board for military personnel that features dozens of threaded conversations of men, many of whom ask for “wins” — naked photographs — of specific female service members, often identifying the women by name or by where they are currently stationed.
Task & Purpose, a site covering veterans’ issues, also reported Thursday that, despite the investigation launched by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) and the promise of punitive action, Marines have already launched a new private Facebook page and are sharing photos on major porn outlets:
The new group currently boasts more than 2,300 members, the vast majority posting under their personal Facebook pages. Task & Purpose also confirmed that members are not only reconstituting the original cache of explicit photos from the original group on a new DropBox page, but posting videos to public pornography sites like PornHub.
Members of the group have struck a defiant tone in their postings, Task & Purpose reported.
“They can investigate all they want,” one member wrote, the site reported. “It’s not illegal to share nudes lol.”
In actuality, 34 states and Washington, D.C., have laws prohibiting the sharing of explicit photos without the consent of the subject. Some of the women who became aware of their photos being posted on the Marines’ Facebook group have already spoken out to confirm they did not consent to them being shared.
Capt. Ryan E. Alvis, a spokesman for the Marine Corps, said Thursday: “We are not able to confirm that Marines are participating in the site AnonIB. The Marine Corps takes every allegation of misconduct seriously. Allegations of misconduct are thoroughly investigated and handled at the appropriate judicial or administrative forum.
“We fully expect that the discovery of Marines United [on Facebook] will motivate Marines to come forward to notify their chain of command of pages like it. Things may seem to get worse before they get better; Marines will attack this problem head-on and continue to get better.”
Marine veteran Thomas Brennan, who runs the nonprofit news organization The War Horse, first reported the group to Marine Corps officials and the NCIS and wrote about the scandal for The Center for Investigative Reporting last week.
According to his report, Marines United, the initial Facebook group, had around 30,000 members and, in addition to nude photos, included instances of members encouraging the sexual assault of the photographed women.
He and members of his family have received multiple death threats since the article was published.
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