38-year-old Doug MacAlpine seemed like just another disgraced teacher story back in March 2025. A Rock Hill (SC) Schools employee got arrested on six counts of second-degree sexual exploitation of a minor. The district put out its standard reassurance that no students were involved, and MacAlpine was booked on a paltry $25,000 bond.

The York County Sheriff’s Office said the material was digital, that no local kids were identified in the files, and that MacAlpine himself hadn’t produced it. Fine. He was just a guy who downloaded CSAM, the story seemed to say, which is somehow supposed to make you feel better.

Except investigators weren’t done combing through his devices, and eleven days later they found something else. This time it wasn’t kids on his phone; it was a coworker. Investigators say MacAlpine secretly filmed a colleague’s legs under a table while she wore a dress. It was footage taken without her knowledge or consent. Prosecutors charged him with peeping.

A sheriff’s office spokesman put it about as plainly as you can. She had every right to expect she wasn’t being filmed by a coworker inside her own school.

New court documents from that same stretch of the investigation also alleged MacAlpine had uploaded a file showing a child engaged in sexual activity back in January 2025, with other uploads tracing to the previous October and November. So the timeline was already ugly. A guy with access to middle schoolers had apparently been sitting on CSAM for months before anyone noticed, and once they started looking, they kept finding more.

At this point it should come as no surprise that MacAlpine turned out to be a Kik user, because at this point it would be more surprising if he weren’t. Kik is a messaging app that lets people create accounts without a phone number, hide behind usernames instead of real identities, and join anonymous group chats that essentially function as trading floors for sex offenders, pedophiles, CSAM collectors, and child traffickers. 

It’s been a fixture in these cases for years now because it was built for privacy first and safety somewhere around fourteenth, and predators noticed that gap a long time before Kik’s own moderators did anything meaningful about it.

Federal prosecutors caught up with MacAlpine earlier this month, and a grand jury in Columbia indicted him on five counts of possessing and distributing CSAM. The DOJ says he used Kik at least four times in the fall of 2024 to send CSAM to other users, and that when investigators finally got into his phone and his Kik accounts, they found hundreds of files.

The indictment also alleges he possessed CSAM as recently as March 2025, meaning he was still at it even as the first set of state charges was closing in on him. All of it traces back to the same original investigation that started with his March arrest; the peeping charge, the new upload allegations, and now the federal indictment are all branches off that same root.

He’s currently detained pending trial and facing up to twenty years, a quarter-million-dollar fine, tens of thousands more in special assessments, lifetime supervision, and a spot on the sex offender registry if he’s convicted.

Rock Hill Schools keeps repeating the line about holding employees to the highest professional and ethical standards, and I believe they mean it, but the sentiment doesn’t do much for the kids who spent years in a building with this man walking the halls.

This is the same story I’ve written dozens of times now. A predator found a job that put him near children and used the trust that comes with it to keep himself invisible for as long as he could manage it. That trust always works, right up until it doesn’t.

(Sources)

• Rock Hill teacher, coach accused of sexually exploiting children
• Rock Hill Schools track coach charged with sexual exploitation of a minor
• Rock Hill Schools teacher and track coach arrested again on secret peeping charges
• Former Rock Hill track coach facing more child sexual abuse material charges
• Former Rock Hill track coach indicted for possession, distribution of child sexual abuse material