(Content Warning: SA and Domestic Violence)
A DeKalb County, Georgia, grand jury recently indicted 42-year-old Julius Hunter on rape, aggravated sodomy, and kidnapping charges, and he’s now sitting in the DeKalb County Jail without bond after being extradited from Fort Lauderdale.
Back in July of 2016, a 19-year-old woman answered a craigslist ad offering $300 for an overnight babysitting job. The man behind the ad arranged her a rideshare. She got there and found no kids, just two men waiting for her. She tried to leave right away, but Hunter allegedly held her captive and raped her for hours before finally letting her go the next morning. She was able to get into a cab, asked the driver to call 911, and ended up at a hospital where a rape kit was performed.
That kit sat with unmatched male DNA in it for years because CODIS, the national database, had nothing to compare it against. Prosecutors say the same DNA later matched two other rape kits collected in DeKalb and Gwinnett counties in 2016 and 2017, all tied to craigslist ads soliciting women for babysitting, modeling, dancing, and massage work.
Nobody could put a name to any of it until 2021, when Fort Lauderdale, Florida, police arrested Hunter for beating his girlfriend with his fists, a beer bottle, and a bathroom door while she was on the floor; strangling her with his knee; and forcing her to perform oral sex on him.
He pleaded no contest to sexual battery and got eleven years of probation, a slap on the wrist, but his DNA went into CODIS as part of that case and immediately matched all three Georgia kits. Investigators still haven’t been able to connect him to the other two despite the DNA hit, which means somewhere out there are at least two more women whose cases are still sitting open.
Craigslist isn’t the bogeyman it was in 2016. Most people looking for gig work or a babysitting job now scroll through Facebook Marketplace, Indeed, or some app that didn’t exist a decade ago, and craigslist has quietly become the platform your uncle still uses to sell a lawnmower.
So what’s the warning supposed to be now that the thing I spent years warning people about barely matters anymore? The answer is that the platform was only part of the problem. The tactic, however, has persisted.
Someone doesn’t need craigslist to post a vague job offering cash and arrange a rideshare so you can’t leave on your own and get you alone somewhere they control. All they need is an app, a DM, or a flyer, and every one of those things exists right now, doing exactly what craigslist used to do.
What concerns me now is that nobody has built a safety net to replace the one craigslist lacked. There’s this idea floating around that if you’re using a “real” platform with a company behind it, a background check or a review system or a support team is somehow standing between you and a guy like Hunter. It usually isn’t.
Facebook Marketplace doesn’t vet in-person job postings any harder than craigslist did. Neither does a rideshare-adjacent gig app or a DM slid into your inbox after you posted your resume somewhere.
The craigslist-specific warnings I used to give have an expiration date, but the underlying risk doesn’t. I’d rather have people recognize the red flags rather than a brand name that stopped being relative.
A vague job description that pays in cash that’s a little too generous for unskilled work with someone else arranging your transportation to a private residence instead of a real workplace, and pressure to meet immediately are the same five things they were in 2016. They just don’t come with a craigslist logo attached to them anymore.
(Sources)
Leave a Reply