According to MarketSplash, an estimated 850,000 adults in the United States are cyberstalking victims every year, while 78% of them know their stalkers in some way and over 50% of victims have never contacted law enforcement for help. Only 12% of cyberstalking incidents are reported to the police, but that doesn't mean that they are taken seriously.
After being ignored by the police when they approached law enforcement about a cyberstalker, the Conradis twins took matters into their own hands and worked hard to build a case against the offender.
It all started over 10 years ago. Madison Conradis got a message from a Facebook account that she wasn't familiar with. She did not at all expect what that message contained.
The message informed Madison that there were nude photos of her on the internet. They were from years ago; behind the scenes of a photo shoot she had done while in college.
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Madison, who was just starting a new marketing job in Florida, was highly alarmed. The photos from her former modeling and acting career were never supposed to be shared publicly.
The pictures, her name, and her contact information were visible to anyone on 4chan, which is a lawless website that allows people to anonymously post things, including explicit content. But the devastation for Madison didn't end there.
She started receiving messages from Facebook users with fake names. They would demand that she send them new explicit photos or they would spread her nude photos across the internet some more. Madison waited for two years, hoping that a new law against cyberharassment would be passed. When it wasn't, she took everything to the police, but was told that what she was experiencing wasn't criminal.
She eventually found out that other women were also experiencing the same type of harassment by the same man. So she and her twin sister, Christine Messier, took matters into their own hands and built an entire case against the offender. Their case included lawsuits, subpoenas, and other victims.
Because of how detailed and thorough the evidence was, the FBI took over the case in 2019. The man was eventually charged with six counts of cyberstalking in December 2020.
In November 2021, the man was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison, which is four more years than what the prosecutor requested. His identity remains undisclosed.
