34-year-old Andrew Buzzell lives in West Rutland, Vermont, and until recently held two titles that were supposed to mean something. He was an elder at a local Baptist church, and he was the State Director for Vermont’s chapter of the Child Evangelism Fellowship, an organization whose entire reason for existing is running religious programs for kids.
Federal prosecutors say he was also using the messaging app Kik to distribute CSAM, and that in a conversation with someone he believed was a like-minded stranger, he discussed traveling to have sex with a 10-year-old. That someone was an undercover FBI agent, which is the closest thing to a silver lining this story has to offer.
For anyone who hasn’t had the misfortune of needing to know, Kik is a messaging app that’s been a magnet for sex offenders, pedophiles, CSAM collectors, and child traffickers for over a decade now. It lets people create accounts without a phone number, run multiple usernames, and talk to strangers in ways that are much harder to trace back to a real identity than a normal text message.
Buzzell allegedly ran several of these anonymous usernames, and used them, according to court documents, to share child sexual abuse material with other users back in November 2024. He was finally charged earlier this month, appeared in federal court on August 10, and was released to 24-hour home incarceration while the case proceeds. If convicted of distribution, he’s facing up to 20 years.
The Child Evangelism Fellowship, to its credit, did not try to spin this. A spokesperson told local media that Buzzell has been terminated and that the organization has “zero tolerance for such misconduct.”
However, I want to talk about that job title. State Director isn’t a volunteer badge you get for showing up to enough Sunday school sessions. It’s a position of actual authority inside an organization built around access to children, layered on top of an eldership at a church, which is its own position of trust and moral authority in a community.
Two separate institutions handed this man keys to rooms full of kids, and he was allegedly spending his downtime trading CSAM with strangers online and negotiating a trip to molest a fourth-grader. That takes planning, patience, and a comfortable assumption that nobody would ever look twice at a church elder.
Not to mention a huge amount of political energy over the last few years has gone into convincing parents that drag queens and trans people are the threat lurking around their children, that story hour at the library is where the grooming happens, and that a trans teacher or a trans neighbor is the danger you need legislation for to protect your kids.
I’m not naive enough to think one Vermont case disproves a moral panic on its own, and I know plenty of these stories exist across plenty of different backgrounds. But I have gone looking, more than once, for the version of this story where the accused is a drag performer or a trans person running a CSAM operation off an anonymous messaging app, and I haven’t found it.
What I keep finding instead is men like Buzzell. Straight, cisgender, embedded in respected religious institutions, using the actual anonymous tools of the internet to do the actual thing the moral panic claims someone else is doing.
The people writing legislation about drag queens near schools might want to ask themselves why the Kik indictments keep having names like Andrew and titles like “elder” attached to them and why that never seems to be the threat anyone’s holding a press conference for.
(Source)
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