"I couldn't be a normal child," victim says to man charged with online abuse of 30 girls

“I couldn’t be a normal child or teenager because of your actions. I was constantly in survival mode,” reads the victim statement of the victim whose report initiated the case against Gianni de W. (25) from Etten-Leur. He is charged with sexually abusing 30 girls, 28 of whom were minors, online. The Public Prosecution Service (OM) linked 171 victims to the man. The youngest victim so far identified was 12 when he started sextorting her.

The Noord-Holland girl sent De W. 9,981 photos and 1,072 videos, the file revealed on the first day of the trial in the court in Breda on Tuesday. “You approached me on the internet at a vulnerable time in my life,” said the victim, who was 15 years old when he first tricked her into sending him nudes and then started threatening to publish them online if she didn’t send more. “It started innocently, but you soon had nasty intentions and asked for sexually explicit images of me. You took advantage of my ignorance and made me very scared with your threats.”

After a while, the girl blocked De W., but he continued to threaten to distribute her photos to friends and family via other social media and did so, too. She went to the police when De W. approached her 14-year-old sister. De W. promised to stop if she made a sex tape for him with a friend. She agreed, following De W.’s far-reaching instructions. He continued to extort her.

The girl lived in constant anxiety and feared that the world would find out everything. “You never left me alone. I was harassed 24/7 with messages and phone calls. I had to keep this a secret all these years.” She is now getting psychological help.

“I realize that I really behaved like a tyrant,” De W. responded to her statement. Earlier in the hearing, he told the judge that he didn’t know why he continued to extort his victims. “I can’t explain it, I don’t know,” he said, according to the Omroep Brabant liveblog of the hearing. “I didn’t think about the other side at all. I wasn’t at all concerned about what it does to the other person.”

The second girl had to send photos in her underwear to what she believed was a casting agency. Later, “Bryan” (De W.’s alias) made her kiss a friend in her bra. She did so to prevent him from circulating her photos. “I’m girl 2. Photos 645, videos 362. You probably don’t even know who I am anymore,” she said, looking right at the suspect. “I hope you now feel as trapped as I have felt for so long.”

The third victim did not want to speak in court. The fourth victim said: “I had a terrible feeling of fear and powerlessness during the time you blackmailed me. I know where you go to school, you said. You kept me up at night. Everything took about three to four weeks. I barely slept. I was so ashamed,” she said. “It is reassuring that you are in custody.”

The 12-year-old victim dealt with De W.’s sextortion on top of her mom dying in 2020. She sent 229 sexually explicit photos and 142 videos. When she initially refused to send nudes, De W. became mean, she said. She said she had to secretly take her phone upstairs at home, “otherwise, Bryan would get angry.”

The court handled eight of the 30 files on Tuesday. At the start of the trial, the judge again expressed his horror at the scope of this case. “It concerns 172 adults and minors. The identities of 40 girls have not been established. The police were able to identify 92 underage girls. 27 reports have been filed. There was already a report in 2014, and it was included in the case. So, 28 underage girls. And two more adult young women,” the judge summed up the 30 cases handled in this trial.

When the police searched De W.’s home on 9 August 2022, they found mountains of images. A cell phone with the username Bryan on it contained 187,000 photos. “Mostly porn,” the judge said. Another phone had over 1,800 videos and more than 129,000 photos. The police found a computer with 108 terabytes of files. “I’m shocked every time by how much it is.” According to the judge, De W. has confessed to almost everything.

De W. said he doesn’t know why he forced dozens of girls to send him nude photos. “I don’t know what made me do it. It is a form of control I have always wanted to keep over people,” he told the court. He had a girlfriend and a full-time job while he instructed children to make sex videos in the evenings and at night under his alias, Bryan. “I was able to separate that,” De W. said when the judge asked him how he could be kind to his girlfriend while sexually abusing so many girls. “When I was with my girlfriend, that other thing wasn’t there. I don’t know how I did that either.”

He also harassed his own girlfriends with his alias. They’d come to De W. and tell him that they were being threatened online. “When I saw that person in front of me in a friendly context, I wasn’t concerned with what Bryabn was doing,” the suspect said. He saw a difference between in-person contact and contact via a screen. He dared more from behind a screen, he said.

The police arrested De W. on 11 October 2022. He thinks that he would still be going if that didn’t happen. He said he felt a sense of shame, and it was already too much for him. “The easiest choice was to continue.” He continued to collect nudes until his arrest.