Mark Newton's and Peter Truong's story
What happens when an infant is purchased to be trafficked to pedophiles for sex?
Mark J. Newton and Peter Truong were arrested in Los Angeles in 2011 and convicted there two years later, on charges related to their involvement in a child exploitation conspiracy involving their then six-year-old adopted son.
Both pleaded guilty after police discovered videos showing their son being sexually abused by two American men---a 35 year old a junior tennis coach from Michigan, and a 38 year old attorney from Florida.
In 2013, Newton was sentenced to 40 years, while Truong received a 10-year reduction and is serving 30 years, as a result of his cooperation with investigators.
The two men had entered a civil partnership in Australia and thereafter purchased a male infant from Russia in 2005, paying the infant’s mother $8,000 for the exchange. The infant’s birth papers were falsified to list Newton as his biological father, paving the way for the boy to be adopted and brought to the two men’s home in Australia.
In announcing Truong’s sentence, the US district court judge who presided over the case said that she took note of Truong's willingness to work with authorities to lead them to other pedophiles and his own history as a childhood abuse victim. Truong, who was linked to offenders around the world and was part of a much larger child exploitation conspiracy operating online and in secret for almost two decades, claimed that he too had been a victim of the same network of men. The network was called Tail of the Dragon and, at the time it was discovered by authorities in 2011, had about 20 core members located around the world. All had concealed their identities using multiple screen names and aliases.
Logs from the network’s chat room revealed that Truong was an active member up until he acquired his infant in 2005. After this time, Truong maintained communication with an even more private group of men around the world, sharing and trafficking his son with a network of child sex abusers who called themselves Boy Lovers. The network was a forum for men who describe sexual abuse of boys between the ages of two and ten as a form of consensual love between man and boy. One video uploaded to the network showed the Newton’s and Truong’s son performing sex acts on Newton with a disturbing level of sophistication when he was not even two years old. When the boy turned five years old, Newton videoed himself engaging in sexual activity with him on more than a dozen different occasions in one month alone. Chat logs showed how men in his network discussed how to acquire children of their own.
Tail of the Dragon remained undetected for almost twenty years. Protected by walls of encryption and security software, members of the group assiduously worked to thwart law enforcement and evade detention, switching internet channels frequently, changing aliases and chat room names. The group used peer-to-peer networking and FTP transferring online to trade millions of images of boys being abused. Members also worked to produce fresh child pornography collections, which were highly prized by pedophiles.
Truong and Newton evaded detection for six years, until a chance discovery exposed their depraved life and their pedophile network. In 2011, New Zealand authorities discovered images revealing that their son had been used in child pornography. The couple's house was then raided by authorities just after the men and their son had left for the US. Police seized computers, electronic equipment, and documents that uncovered high-definition video and images of child exploitation.
Others in the network were also arrested by police and charged with child sex offenses. For example, Edward De Sear, then a senior partner at top NYC law firm, was arrested and charged with distributing child pornography. Married with children, the attorney had traded thousands of extreme and often violent child pornography videos and images using a P2P network. Their online communications also show that Truong personally arranged for De Sear to access his son for sex on multiple occasions in Australia, America, and in Brussels, from when the boy was as young as four years old.
Sources for this story
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-10/boy-with-henna-tattoo-network-exposed/5310812
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5087453/Cairns-gay-couple-Mark-Newton-Peter-Truong.html
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-2014-07-17-fl-oakland-park-child-porn-20140717-story.html
https://www.smh.com.au/national/paedophile-peter-truong-says-he-misses-his-son-20140310-34i66.html
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“I think commercial surrogacy should be banned completely. They're putting women at risk without even telling them the risks. There is no such thing as informed consent in this situation. There is no way to tell any young woman, so that she could actually understand the risks. The research isn't even being done to determine the risks. There's funding for fertility, but no funding to do research on the risks. It's a multi-billion dollar industry to make designer babies. There is all that funding. But no research on women like me who were surrogates. " |
Brooke's doctors and the fertility industry surely knew that as a surrogate who had already carried her own three children to term followed by five surrogate babies, Brooke was at high risk of grave injury. But in the end, none of them deemed Brooke's life, and those of the infants she carried, to be worthy of any news coverage or more than the $7,000 raised by GoFundMe to cover the cost of her funeral. --From Brooke Brown’s Story: What happens when surrogacy kills you.
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Right now, young women agreeing to egg donation cannot give informed consent because information about long-term health risks doesn’t exist. It didn’t exist for my daughter who passed away, and it doesn’t exist for anyone now. Until the health consequences are known and understood, it would be unconscionable to legalize commercial surrogacy’ given that it will greatly increase the demand for donated eggs, and risk the lives and health of many more young women.
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I don’t think surrogacy should be legal, when even the most common of serious and debilitating health risks isn’t required to be disclosed. I don’t think surrogacy should be legal, when much-needed health care for longer-term pregnancy-related harms is not required or made available. The lives of too many perfectly healthy and fit young mothers and wives are forever compromised or irreparably harmed, not only to their own detriment, but to the detriment of their families who need them. I suffer deeply, every single day, as do my children and my husband. No amount of money was worth this cost to us all. |