MIAMI, Fla.—It appears that the long saga of Bryan Deneumostier, the man who posed as a woman on Craigslist and enticed straight men to come to his hotel room to have sex, which he secretly filmed and posted on his website StraightBoyz.com, has come to an end. Deneumostier pled guilty today to two counts of 18 U.S.C. §2511, "Unlawful Recordings of Individuals," which accused Deneumostier of "us[ing] any electronic, mechanical, and other device, including an Apple iphone [sic] and ipad [sic], to intercept any oral communication, as detailed below, when defendant knew, and had reason to know, that such device and any component of such device had been sent through the mail and transported in interstate and foreign commerce" in May and July of 2015. In entering his plea, Deneumostier struck a deal with prosecutors to dismiss the other crimes for which he was indicted: three violations of the federal record-keeping and labeling law, 18 U.S.C. §2257.
Law enforcement officials arrested Deneumostier on July 17 in his hotel room, where he was in the process of having sex with an underage boy, and his plea deal does not cover the state charge of having sex with a minor. However, the plea does mean that Deneumostier won't face any charges related to the 80 men who fell for Deneumostier's claim on Craigslist of being susanleon3326, a "real, heterosexual female," went to various hotel rooms and were blindfolded by Deneumostier, who told the men that "Susan" would be along shortly to service them. However, it was Deneumostier himself who provided the sexual services, and apparently the men were none the wiser—unless, of course, they happened to surf over to StraightBoyz.com, where Deneumostier posted more than 150 videos of the men he serviced, none of whom had given their consent to be recorded or to have those recordings put on the Internet.
And it's not as if Deneumostier did the postings for free. The owners of StraightBoyz.com, which is based in Madrid, paid Deneumostier $3,000 per month for continually posting such content.
But of course the reason the Deneumostier case has been of interest to the adult community is that it represented one of the very few times that someone was actually charged with a 2257 offense—and no wonder: It's not as if Deneumostier was interested in keeping records of his "conquests"—records that, if discovered by law enforcement officials, could have tied him to the illegal videos he was creating.
It's long been known that the government has tacked 2257 charges onto child porn producers essentially as a bargaining chip: Plead guilty to the primary offense of creating sexually explicit content with a minor, and the crime of failure to keep ID records of the victims would go away. The government has made just this sort of deal in dozens of child porn cases. It's rare, however, for a 2257 charge to be made against a non-child porn producer, though it appears that Deneumostier was charged with the records offenses as part of a similar scheme to gain guilty pleas on the more important crimes.
