BONUS SERIES: Levittown Episode 5 | The Vigilantes

The episode opens with Kayla recalling her reaction to learning that Patrick Carey was behind the website and the fabricated sexual images made from her photographs. She had known Carey as someone who regularly sent her direct messages and responded to her Instagram stories; he had never seemed strange to her. Discovering his identity made the situation worse because, in her view, his online actions had real-world consequences. The manipulated images changed how she saw her own body. Kayla says she had previously felt confident and connected to her body, but afterward she developed eating problems. She would eat only two bites before feeling disgusted by the food, by her body, and by the fact that she wanted food. The narrator describes Carey’s online manipulation as something that continued to affect Kayla offline: he had altered her body digitally, and she then had to rebuild her sense of herself. Kayla says she sought help and learned to cope, but she will never recover the person she was before. Instead, she considers herself a “whole new person.” The episode frames the aftermath as an origin story formed by abuse, recovery, and forced change.

In December 2022, Carey pleaded guilty, and local news coverage followed his appearances on charges including child pornography, harassment, and stalking. Kayla attended proceedings at the Nassau County Courthouse. She wore a long gray dress at one appearance because she did not want Carey to see her body, and later wore a bright orange outfit while trying to keep all of her skin covered. She entered the courtroom alone and found Carey already seated, without handcuffs or a lawyer beside him. The only available seat was next to him. Kayla froze and experienced what she describes as a fight-or-flight reaction. She stayed in the hallway rather than walking past him, even though he kept his head down and did not look at her. The lack of visible security made her angry: Carey had not physically attacked anyone, she says, but he had mentally and emotionally abused the victims. To her, allowing him to sit freely in the courtroom felt like another violation and a “smack in the face.” She began attending court almost every day, but the first appearance taught her that she needed to prepare for further distress. Other proceedings were also highly emotional: one victim’s father had to be physically restrained from attacking Carey, and prosecutors read graphic posts aloud, leaving Carey’s father, a former NYPD detective, visibly upset.

Kayla eventually decided to address Carey at sentencing. She says the statement came to her while she was sitting in the shower, angry and emotionally overwhelmed. She had already committed to making a victim-impact statement but did not know what to say; then she took out her phone and wrote the entire speech in about five minutes. She read it to herself three times and decided it was ready. Kayla was the only victim to read a statement at Carey’s sentencing. At the podium, about 20 feet from him, her hands shook so intensely that she could barely read her handwriting. She says the shaking came from anger more than nerves. She looked directly at Carey throughout, while he stared down at his hands and refused to meet her eyes. In her statement, she called herself the strongest person in the room because she was confronting him face-to-face, told him he had changed how she viewed her body, and said she would never forgive him. She also said she needed to heal the “inner child” whose sexual thoughts and desires he had caused her to suppress. Reading the statement again made her feel empowered because she had finally spoken every part of her anger aloud. She became involved in the case, she explains, because silence would have been unfair to all the other young women whose images had been posted.

Carey also read a statement at sentencing, though the podcast used a voice actor because Carey declined to speak with the producers. He said he regretted what he had done, rejected the excuse that he was merely a “young dumb kid,” and claimed he needed to address the social and mental issues that led to his behavior. He said only a long-term life of discipline, empathy, and routine could make him worthy of trust. To the victims and their families, he said he did not expect forgiveness and ended with an apology. Kayla rejected the apology as meaningless: Carey had already done the damage, and saying “I’m sorry” could not change it. Because he pleaded guilty to multiple charges, including three felonies, the remaining question was the punishment. Nassau County prosecutors Melissa Scannell and Kelsey Lora sought sex-offender probation because it would be stricter and last longer than ordinary probation. Carey received six months in prison, 10 years of probation, and lifetime registration as a sex offender. His restrictions included no smartphones, no camera-equipped device without prior approval, and no residence within 1,000 feet of a school or playground. As a result, he had to leave his mother’s home because it was directly behind an elementary school. The judge said Carey needed to understand the “mental violence” and “intimate and emotional theft” the victims would continue to endure.

After Carey’s conviction, prosecutors hoped to persuade the website administrator to remove the victims’ images. Most of the reposted material was not illegal under the law at the time because it involved deepfaked images, even when the people depicted were minors. The website had disappeared before prosecutors could act, which initially seemed like a victory. The takedown had actually been pursued by Will Wallace, a private investigator in New Zealand who had grown tired of finding individual posters and wanted to eliminate the entire platform. Wallace examined the site’s domain history and found an old burner email address in an early registration record. By matching that address against databases of hacked email information, he connected it to a CafePress account and recovered an unusual shared password. Searching for other accounts using that password led him to email addresses associated with a real person, but Wallace still needed stronger evidence. He then paid the site’s $99 fee to remove an account or image. The credit-card transaction identified Cloud Cyber Services LLC, which a British business registry showed was registered to Scott Trent Costa. A Louisiana business record linked Costa to another company used by the site. Wallace described the discovery as the milestone that finally connected the abusive website to a specific operator. He sent the information to reporters and law enforcement and published his findings, but initially received no response.

Wallace found allies in the Reddit forum Ban Female Hate, which had more than 20,000 members and had evolved from reporting misogynistic image-sharing groups into a broader online-abuse watchdog. He contacted a prominent anonymous user called Claudia Lopez, who had independently investigated the same website and previously pressured a host to remove a child-sexual-abuse-material site. Claudia posted Wallace’s findings to the forum, prompting a campaign against Costa’s site. Users complained to hosting and domain providers, while Wallace contacted a hacker known as Pom Pom Purin, who was operating Breach Forums, a major marketplace for stolen data. Pom Pom Purin and associates found Costa’s old college email account and a photograph of his driver’s license. They obtained a mugshot and police report, created ScottTrentCosta.com, posted the mugshot, harassed Costa’s family, and helped pressure advertising and hosting companies. DDoS Guard ultimately ended its relationship with the site, and the website went offline. Wallace was pleased but did not regard the takedown as a model for ordinary enforcement; he argued that this platform was a severe harassment operation and that law enforcement should decide when the volume and nature of abuse requires intervention. The campaign also exposed a disturbing contradiction. Pom Pom Purin was actually Connor Brian Fitzpatrick, a 20-year-old from Peekskill, New York, who was arrested by the FBI for operating Breach Forums. Investigators found child sexual abuse material on his devices. Fitzpatrick pleaded guilty, was initially sentenced to 20 years of supervised release with two years of house arrest, and was later ordered to be resentenced after the government appealed. He cannot use internet-connected devices. The episode stresses that online vigilantes may target real abusers while hiding serious wrongdoing of their own.

The campaign drove Costa further underground. According to a hacker who saw his financial records, Costa began moving between Airbnb rentals. In a short email exchange with the producers, Costa objected to being named, claimed images could be removed from his site for free, and asked them not to “name and shame” him. The hosts point out the irony: his complaint about public exposure came from someone whose website was built around naming, shaming, and displaying intimate images without consent. Within weeks of the original site disappearing, a near-identical replacement appeared under the name TributePrintedPix.com. Claudia reported it to Cloudflare and then received hostile emails from an address she believed belonged to Costa. The writer mocked her reports, insisting that a fully clothed image was not child abuse, and tried to persuade her to stop contacting providers. The replacement site has appeared and disappeared under several URLs since summer 2023, sometimes displaying a request for donations. In August 2024, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement seized the website and said it was actively investigating, although the exact subject of the investigation remained unclear. Costa’s mother later told the producers that two Secret Service agents had visited looking for him over online threats against President Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The hosts then traveled to Los Angeles to find Costa at a high-rise address but learned he had already moved. Instead, they discovered another address connected to Sole E-Commerce, the apparent owner of DrawnNoods.io. The final episode will investigate cases resembling the original Levittown story.