LUTHMANN NOTE: The common denominator here is institutional cowardice. Apple built the system. Connecticut courts enforced the orders. In both cases, children paid the price. I do not make these claims lightly. They’ve been painstakingly detailed by journalist Paul Boyne for a decade, particularly in the case of credibly accused abuser Christopher Ambrose. The affidavits are sworn. The DCF reports are signed. The psychopathy evaluation is notarized. The Apple internal memo exists. When institutions stop asking hard questions, predators thrive. Whether it’s encryption shielding digital abuse or court orders shielding sexual penetration and physical abuse, the outcome is the same. If we cannot protect children from powerful men with lawyers and lobbyists, what exactly are these institutions for? Accountability must follow. Or this gets worse. This piece is “Enabling Pedo Empires?”, first available on TheFamilyCourtCircus.com.
By Richard Luthmann with Michael Volpe
Apple Sued for a Predator’s Playground on iCloud
(WEST VIRGINIA and CONNECTICUT) – West Virginia’s Attorney General JB McCuskey has launched a first-of-its-kind lawsuit accusing Apple of knowingly letting its iCloud service become a child pornography distribution epicenter. The complaint alleges Apple chose privacy for predators over child safety.
Internal Apple communications shockingly described the company as “the greatest platform for distributing child porn” – a phrase an Apple fraud detection executive texted a colleague in 2020. Yet Apple “took no meaningful action to stop it,” the suit says.
Instead of using industry-standard scanners like Google and Meta, Apple “shirked its responsibility” under the guise of user privacy. The result? In 2023, Apple reported a paltry 267 cases of child abuse imagery to authorities, while Google made 1.47 million reports and Meta over 30.6 million.
Attorney General McCuskey minced no words.
“Preserving the privacy of child predators is absolutely inexcusable,” he said, blasting Apple for “re-victimizing children by allowing these images to be stored and shared.”
Federal law requires U.S. tech firms to report known child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, but Apple’s compliance has been anemic. The lawsuit argues this failure was a choice, not an oversight – Apple built and profited from the very system now “weaponized against children.”
Notably, Apple controls its hardware, software, and cloud; it “cannot claim to be an unknowing, passive conduit,” the complaint asserts.
Apple’s public stance has been a flat denial.
“Protecting the safety and privacy of our users, especially children, is central to what we do,” the company insisted.
Apple touts parental controls that blur nude images sent to minors and calls itself “the safest, most trusted platform for kids.” But West Virginia’s suit lays out brutal facts that undercut Apple’s self-congratulation. Until recently, Apple refused to scan iCloud uploads for known abuse images even though the data wasn’t end-to-end encrypted.
In 2021, facing pressure, Apple announced a photo-scanning tool (dubbed “NeuralHash”) to detect CSAM on user devices – only to scrap it after a privacy backlash. By December 2022, Apple killed NeuralHash entirely and instead rolled out full end-to-end encryption for iCloud, further shielding content from detection.
Apple effectively gave predators a vault, critics say, while waving the banner of privacy.
“Apple’s failure to deploy available detection technology is not a passive oversight – it is a choice,” McCuskey’s office declares.
The lawsuit seeks punitive damages and a court order forcing Apple to finally implement effective CSAM detection measures.
As McCuskey put it, “Since Apple has so far refused to police themselves… I am filing this lawsuit to demand that Apple follow the law.”
Google, Microsoft, and others have long scanned user uploads against databases of child abuse hashes, using tools like PhotoDNA. Apple’s refusal made it an outlier – and, prosecutors argue, a haven for offenders. In a chilling illustration, the UK’s top child protection charity found that predators used Apple’s services to store or exchange abuse images in more cases in one year in England and Wales than Apple reported globally. Little wonder a group of abuse survivors sued Apple in 2024 for $1.2 billion, accusing it of facilitating exploitation.
Apple’s response? It has tried to dismiss that suit by invoking Section 230 – the same legal shield that online platforms use to avoid liability for user content. In effect, Apple claims it’s not responsible for what users do on iCloud.
West Virginia’s suit aims to shatter that defense by framing Apple’s conduct as an active, knowing choice.
“This conduct is despicable, and Apple’s inaction is inexcusable,” said McCuskey.
The message is clear: if Big Tech won’t protect kids, state lawmen will come after Big Tech.
Enabling Pedo Empires: “Pedophile Protection Program” in Connecticut Courts?
Across the country in Connecticut, a parallel scandal is unfolding – not in cyberspace but in the court system. For decades, journalist Paul Boyne has railed that the Connecticut judiciary runs a “pedophile protection program,” accusing family courts of colluding to give children to abusers.
He’s hardly been delicate about it. In blog postings and incendiary rants, Boyne claimed an elite cabal within Connecticut’s family law bench “steal[s] children away from loving parents and give[s] them to rapists and pedophiles,” according to a judicial decision describing his writings.
This grotesque allegation – intertwined with ugly anti-Semitic conspiracy tropes in Boyne’s case – led to fierce blowback. Connecticut authorities arrested Boyne, 62, on 18 felony counts of cyberstalking judges, alleging he used his site (thefamilycourtcircus.com) to threaten and harass them.
After a multi-year investigation, Boyne was extradited from Virginia in 2023 and now faces trial, where his witness list reportedly includes several judges and an accused pedophile father at the center of his posts. The jury is already selected. Opening arguments are slated to begin on Tuesday, February 24.
Boyne’s rhetoric is extreme – he smeared the entire Connecticut family court as controlled by a “mysterious Jewish cabal” and worse – but the ugly core of his claim resonates with many parents: that Connecticut’s courts shield abusers and punish the protective parent.
And he presented a major problem for the Connecticut Judiciary Establishment: HE WAS RIGHT.
In case after case, mothers who allege their child is being molested by the father find themselves disbelieved, even disbarred, while custody is awarded to the accused. Boyne’s own blog (often too venomous to quote) chronicled these cases in florid detail, naming judges and lawyers he deemed complicit.
The state’s response has been to muzzle him as a dangerous crank.
“This blog… is filled with anti-semitic, homophobic and racist rants of the worst kind,” wrote Judge Gerard Adelman in one high-conflict custody ruling, noting it views Connecticut’s family court bench as bent on giving kids to predators.
Adelman himself became a target of Boyne’s ire – and indeed Adelman was the judge in one of Connecticut’s most notorious cases, which critics say perfectly illustrates a “pedo protection racket.”
That case is Ambrose v. Riordan, and it has become a rallying cry for court reform activists nationwide.
And yes, sources and documents reveal the evidence in that case involves digitally-stored child pornography.
Enabling Pedo Empires: When Family Courts Enable a Predator
The saga of Christopher Ambrose is a horror story of child abuse in plain view – aided, abetted, and even engineered by the Connecticut family court. Ambrose, once a successful TV writer (“Law & Order,” “Bones”), was by all appearances a suburban dad in Madison, CT. Behind closed doors, his adopted children say, he was a monster.
In detailed affidavits and interviews, all three Ambrose children (now teens) have all credibly accused their father of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse spanning years.
The children’s mother, Karen Riordan, a former teacher, tried to protect them – and for that, she was systematically vilified by the courts as crazy, “hysterical,” and even abusive herself.
In April 2022, Judge Adelman awarded Ambrose sole custody, branding Riordan an alienator who “coached” the kids to lie about abuse. He dismissed the children’s outcries as “not credible,” citing a police detective, state DCF (child protective services), and hospital staff who doubted the molestation claims. Adelman’s ruling blasted Riordan’s behavior as “nothing short of horrendous” – accusing her of defying court orders, secretly contacting her kids, and flooding the docket with frivolous filings.
In short, the judge portrayed the mother as the real threat. Her punishment: total removal from her children’s lives.
What happened next is like a dystopian thriller. Under their father’s exclusive care from 2019 to 2023, the Ambrose teens spiraled into despair. According to sworn statements, the kids began self-harming with cutting and substance abuse, behaviors they say stopped when they were with their mom but resumed under Ambrose’s roof.
One son, Sawyer, allegedly told professionals his father sexually assaulted him – “he was like touching me right here,” the boy demonstrated on video to private investigator Manuel Gomez, describing anal penetration. (That video is now evidence.)
Gomez, a retired NYPD detective turned PI, was so alarmed that on May 29, 2023, he wrote to the FBI and U.S. Attorney detailing proof that “Ambrose had molested his children,” urging federal intervention.
The children themselves took desperate action: they ran away. In spring 2023, 16-year-old Mia fled Ambrose’s house, soon followed by her twin brother Matthew and younger brother Sawyer. They hid with their mom and then with relatives out of state, terrified that if forced back to their father, they’d be hurt again.
“Over the three years we were trapped there…it got to a really bad point,” Mia said. “I thought if I didn’t get out now, I never would.”
Connecticut’s system responded not by listening to the children, but by hunting them down. Armed with court orders from yet another judge, Thomas O’Neill, authorities pursued the runaway teens across state lines like fugitives.
At one point, a 20-person SWAT team raided a house with guns drawn, acting on Ambrose’s tip that Riordan was hiding the kids. (She wasn’t; the teens had moved again.)
In New York, police cornered the children and warned them that if they didn’t go back to Ambrose, they’d be sent to a violent foster facility where “rape and violence” were likely. Even facing these threats, the teens refused to go with Ambrose. They ran again. Three weeks later, Ambrose paid high-priced attorneys to concoct a restraining order against relative John Laurenzi to force teens from a safe haven. Faced with these options, the teens surrendered themselves to their abuser.
To date, the two teenage sons, one over eighteen and the other still a minor, remain with the abuser. Now 19, Mia Ambrose has escaped, refusing to live with “Christopher,” a man she says is “not my father.”
Since then, Mia Ambrose has been vocal about her father’s sexual abuse of her and her brothers. The Connecticut Judiciary still will not listen.
Enabling Pedo Empires: A Systemic Failure
The Ambrose case lays bare a systemic failure. Start with the court-appointed guardian ad litem, Attorney Jocelyn Hurwitz. As the GAL, Hurwitz was supposed to represent the children’s interests; instead, she became, in one observer’s words, part of Ambrose’s “winners circle.”
Paid handsomely by Ambrose, Hurwitz, and a coterie of court-appointed therapists and evaluators, “promised him his kids” and delivered – for the right price. Hurwitz effectively oversaw the removal of the kids from their mother and pressed for Ambrose to have sole custody.
Her close alliances with Ambrose’s attorney and the court psychologist were such that when Riordan’s lawyer, Nickola Cunha, cried foul – accusing Judge Adelman, Hurwitz, and others of bias and of burying evidence of abuse – Cunha was summarily disbarred.
The message to any attorney who might challenge the racket was clear: do so at your peril.
As for Judge Jane Grossman, she handled crucial proceedings as the crisis unfolded. By multiple accounts, Judge Grossman ignored the children’s voices just as Adelman had. Even after the kids filed their own formal complaints of abuse in juvenile court, Grossman and company brushed them aside.
In August 2023, a family court judge granted Ambrose full legal authority over the teens despite their pending abuse petitions – essentially greenlighting Ambrose to retrieve them by force. That ruling was the final straw that sent the teens running to their grandfather’s house in Rhode Island.
And when Ambrose continued to “terrorize his teenage children” by pushing for their capture, Judge O’Neill answered his call. In October 2024, O’Neill found Riordan in contempt and extended a no-contact restraining order, buying Ambrose another year of control. O’Neill did this under Connecticut’s new Jennifer’s Law – a domestic violence law meant to protect abuse victims from coercive control, which he perversely invoked to label Riordan as the abuser who “coercively controlled” the kids into defying their father.
In short, Connecticut’s judiciary used a law for abuse victims to punish an abuse victim.
Amid this jaw-dropping saga, several experts tried to raise the alarm. Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a renowned forensic psychiatrist (of Yale fame), evaluated the Ambrose family and was so disturbed that she halted her assessment of the mother to administer the gold-standard psychopath test on the father. Dr. Lee found Christopher Ambrose scored 32 out of 40 on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist – a level indicating a clinical psychopath most often found inside secured, walled institutions.
“Already, from what I had, he reached a full diagnosis of psychopathy,” she wrote, warning that such individuals are often profoundly dangerous. Her report documented Ambrose’s chilling behavior: pathological lying, a lack of empathy, even alleged acts of sadism – she noted he killed the family dog (a beloved Lab named Cody) and the children’s pet crabs, apparently as a cruel ploy to traumatize the kids and then claim their distress as “parental alienation” against him.
Dr. Lee concluded the children were in danger and urgently recommended that the court hear her findings or appoint an expert of its own.
The court’s response? Silence. Judges refused to let Dr. Lee testify or even consider her report.
Her warnings to child protective services also went unheeded; Lee later lamented that the failure of CPS in this case felt “intentional.” The courts thus blinded themselves to a mountain of evidence – from Mia’s notarized affidavit detailing sexual abuse and teen drug use under Ambrose’s care[23], to police and medical records, to the children’s own letters begging to live with their mom.
Instead, judges like Grossman and O’Neill clung to a narrative that the mother was the problem and the father was “innocent.” In doing so, they may have enabled ongoing child victimization under color of law.
“The courts have emboldened an abuser,” one observer wrote of Ambrose’s case.
Indeed, far from being held accountable, Christopher Ambrose has weaponized the system to silence anyone who exposes him. He has filed numerous defamation lawsuits against Dr. Lee, against the journalist covering his case (Frank Parlato of Frank Report), and even against the children’s godmother for speaking out. The latter case was laughed out of court – dismissed with prejudice – but not before inflicting $20,000 in legal costs on an innocent bystander. The former are still pending.
Sources say that Ambrose is also in regular contact with New Haven State Attorney Jack Doyle, the man who is prosecuting journalist Paul Boyne for exposing the Connecticut Pedophile Protection Program. Ambrose appears on the State of Connecticut’s witness list.
Sources say State Prosecutor Doyle is prepping Ambrose to testify against Boyne as a state witness, along with other Connecticut judges who defended the abuser, including Elizabeth Stewart, Jane Grossman, and Thomas Moukawsher.
Connecticut justice has become a veritable DARVO theater of the absurd, spliced in with equal parts sadism and child sexual abuse.
Ambrose is now suing Dr. Bandy Lee for diagnosing him as a psychopath and reporting him as an abuser. He cast himself as the victim of her “defamation.”
“He’s turned institutions of law into instruments of cruelty,” Frank Parlato said.
The Ambrose saga illustrates in painful detail what Paul Boyne’s crude slogan alleges: a system that protects the predator, not the child. And the sick part is, Christopher Ambrose is but one of hundreds in the Nutmeg state, if not more.
It’s the kind of rot that makes the public ask: What is wrong with Connecticut’s courts?
Enabling Pedo Empires: A Reckoning for Big Tech and Big Justice
The twin scandals of Apple and Ambrose carry stark warnings – legally, economically, and for public trust. For Apple, the West Virginia lawsuit could be just the tip of the spear. Other state attorneys general are watching closely, and McCuskey has expressed hope that more will “join the lawsuit.”
If Apple is found liable for facilitating the spread of child sex abuse material, the financial penalties could be crushing. West Virginia is seeking hefty statutory and punitive damages, and a successful case would open the floodgates for victims to sue Big Tech for harm caused by user-generated child abuse content.
Apple’s stockholders should take note: the company’s infamous stance on privacy may soon clash with the immovable object of child protection law.
“Apple designed, built, and profited from” a system that became a safe harbor for pedophiles, the lawsuit asserts. That is a public relations nightmare and potentially a materially damaging one. Already, Apple faces a separate class-action suit by survivors of child exploitation.
Its attempt to hide behind Section 230 immunity underscores the risk – a Congress outraged by Big Tech’s failures could strip those protections (as proposed in bills like the EARN IT Act).
Internationally, Apple’s plan to roll out full encryption is drawing fire from governments who warn it will blind law enforcement to child abuse. Even Meta Platforms, which reports millions more CSAM cases than Apple, has been pummeled by lawmakers for moving toward encrypted messaging. The bottom line: regulators’ patience is at an end. Tech giants will be forced to choose – invest in robust child-safety measures or face legal and financial obliteration.
As the Guardian noted, Apple’s peers have managed to scan for CSAM without “backdoors for government censorship,” but Apple delayed and dithered. Now Apple’s dithering may result in new laws mandating compliance, eating into the very “privacy” selling point it has banked on.
In Connecticut, the repercussions are more societal but no less severe. Confidence in the family court system has been shattered for many. Mothers and children see the courts not as protectors but as a threat – a “safe haven for abusers with money, influence, or a convincing sob story,” as one reporter put it.
Good judges do exist, but secrecy and lack of oversight allow bad actors to fester.
“There’s no one who oversees these judges, no one watching what they’re doing,” says veteran court reformer Peter Szymonik. “Judges make mistakes and… when they make mistakes, they’ll never admit it.”
That toxic impunity erodes the very concept of justice. In the Ambrose case, it has created a bona fide public safety issue – three at-risk teens on the run, a diagnosed psychopath roaming free, and an outraged community watching a tragic farce of “justice” play out.
Connecticut’s government faces mounting pressure to investigate its judiciary. Whispers of a federal DOJ inquiry into family court practices have grown louder. Lawmakers are being forced to confront whether Jennifer’s Law – intended to protect abused women – was cynically perverted to punish one.
The economic toll of these court wars is also staggering: the Ambrose custody fight burned through over $1 million in fees, much of it lining the pockets of lawyers, evaluators, and the GAL[72][73]. Taxpayers indirectly subsidize this via clogged courts and, in this case, multi-state law enforcement mobilizations – all to chase children who said they were being hurt.
It is hard to quantify the cost of shattered childhoods and public trust, but it is surely immense.
Ultimately, the parallels between Apple’s scandal and Connecticut’s are about accountability. In Cupertino, a trillion-dollar company allegedly looked the other way while child rape images proliferated – all to preserve a marketing narrative of “your privacy first.”
In Connecticut, a clique of court professionals may have looked the other way (or worse, actively covered up) while children were abused – perhaps to preserve their own power, fees, or reputations.
In both cases, the ones who suffer most are society’s most vulnerable. Children were betrayed, whether by a tech ecosystem that failed to flag their ongoing exploitation, or by a legal ecosystem that handed them to a predator. These revelations demand a reckoning.
As one family court whistleblower wrote, “Connecticut’s family court system has become a safe haven for abusers… The truth is out. Now it’s time for justice to catch up.”
Apple, for its part, may soon learn that lofty mottos about protecting children mean nothing if predators view your platform as a sanctuary. The company built the house; West Virginia says it’s liable for the horrors within.
From Silicon Valley boardrooms to New Haven courtrooms, the mandate is the same: protect our children or be prepared to face the consequences. The public will not tolerate a “pedo empire” – neither the digital one enabled by a rotten Apple, nor the real one enabled by a rancid Nutmeg State.
The time for excuses has long passed. It’s now a moment for action, accountability, and the radical notion that children’s safety should come before predators’ privacy and predators’ rights. The eyes of outraged parents and investors alike are fixed on these cases, waiting to see if justice will finally be served.
