If you’ve somehow managed to miss the slow-motion implosion of former South Carolina state legislator RJ May, congratulations on your healthy media diet. For the rest of us, the case has finally reached its grim and unsurprising conclusion.
RJ May, once a Republican lawmaker and co-founder of the ultra-conservative South Carolina Freedom Caucus, is going to federal prison for a very long time. On January 14, 2026, U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie sentenced him to 17 and a half years behind bars for distributing videos of CSAM. That’s a little less than the 20 years prosecutors wanted and a lot more than the five years May thought would be sufficient for himself.
Before we get to the sentencing, let’s rewind, because this story is one of those that somehow manages to get worse every time you think it’s done.
Kik is a free mobile messaging app that bills itself as a simple way to chat. In practice, it has spent years earning a reputation as a digital dumping ground for sex offenders, pedophiles, CSAM collectors, and child traffickers. It requires little to no identity verification, makes it easy to spin up throwaway accounts, and has long been favored by people who want anonymity more than accountability.
Yes, Kik does send cyber tips to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. No, that has not stopped it from becoming a recurring character in federal CSAM prosecutions across the country. Think of it less as a safety feature and more as the smoke alarm that goes off after the house is already on fire.
In May’s case, it was Kik’s own tip that set the whole thing in motion.
Prosecutors say that over a five-day period in late March and early April 2024, May used a Kik account with the subtle, very mature handle “joebidennnn69” to distribute CSAM. Not a few files. Not a one-time lapse. Two hundred and twenty unique videos sent a total of 479 times to users in 18 states and multiple countries.
The forensic trail was not subtle. The account was accessed nearly a thousand times from May’s home Wi-Fi and his phone. His devices lit up with hundreds of Kik notifications. Messages asking for specific types of abuse lined up neatly with his browsing history. When other users suggested additional encrypted apps to trade more material, he installed them. When things heated up, he deleted them.
This all happened while he was still doing his day job. Emails about political consulting went out. Texts followed. Searches about national politics popped up in between Kik trades. According to prosecutors and later the judge, May had no trouble switching from campaign talk to CSAM and back again.
This was not a panicked spiral. It was routine.
After his arrest, May insisted he had been hacked. At one point, his legal team floated the idea that a political enemy accessed his Wi-Fi because a password appeared in the background of a Facebook photo. Later, May fired his public defenders and convinced a judge to let him represent himself, from jail, on ten federal felony counts.
That went about as well as you’d expect.
Court filings laid out chat excerpts, device logs, notification counts, VPN usage, and timestamps so tight they bordered on embarrassing. Prosecutors showed that if this were the work of a mysterious adversary, that adversary would have needed continuous physical access to May’s phone for days.
Eventually, reality arrived.
In September 2025, May pleaded guilty to five counts of distributing CSAM. The remaining counts were dropped as part of the deal. He admitted that “joebidennnn69” was his account and that he sent the videos.
On January 14, Judge Currie delivered the sentence. Seventeen and a half years in federal prison. Twenty years of supervised release afterward. Lifetime registration as a sex offender. Permanent loss of voting rights and the ability to hold office. Restitution totaling $58,500 to identified survivors whose abuse was depicted in the videos he sent.
Currie did not mince words. She called the case more severe than any CSAM matter she had seen in more than three decades on the bench. The videos, she said, included incest, force, pain, and humiliation. Toddlers. Infants. Prepubescent children.
She also made clear that the five-day window investigators could prove did not look like a beginning. It looked like the middle of something. May knew who to ask. He knew what language to use. He knew how to find exactly what he wanted.
“This was not a one-off,” the judge said.
Prosecutors drove the point home with victim impact statements. One survivor described the ongoing trauma of knowing strangers still watch and trade videos of her abuse. Another wrote that her normal life was taken from her long ago, and that people like May keep taking it again every time they click send.
May, for his part, cried. He blamed a chaotic childhood, untreated mental health issues, testosterone therapy, screen addiction, and pornography addiction. He apologized. He talked about his failed marriage and the children he won’t see grow up.
The court was unmoved.
As the prosecutor put it, if May truly wanted to help the children in those videos, he could have reported them. Instead, he distributed them because he wanted more.
There were other details aired at sentencing that are worth noting. Investigators recovered videos from May’s devices showing him having sex with young women during trips to Colombia. Prosecutors argued the footage showed coercion; May’s attorneys said it was consensual. The judge declined to factor those videos into the sentence because the parties disagreed on what they showed. No charges were filed related to that conduct.
There’s also a separate state case still pending, where May has admitted to evading income taxes for multiple years.
And yes, he floated plans to start a nonprofit after prison to raise awareness about the harms of CSAM. File that under things that sound better in a sentencing memo than in real life.
RJ May built a political brand around “family values” and moral panic. He warned his voters about cultural rot and corruption lurking somewhere out there. Meanwhile, according to federal prosecutors and a judge who has seen just about everything, he was one of the people making that rot profitable.
Now he will spend the better part of two decades in a federal cell thinking about it.
No slogans. No spin. Just evidence, victims, and a sentence that barely matches the scale of the harm.
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Real Crime with Trench Reynolds 
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