Disney World Has a Child Predator Problem
In our first video about the multiple predators working on Disney cruise lines, many of you rightly pointed out that this is a problem with Disney that goes far deeper than just Disney cruises and has been going on for decades. You asked us to go deeper into Disney, and that’s exactly what we’re about to do.
In 1995, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement organized a task force to prevent child exploitation in Central Florida. The mission was specific, work directly with theme parks, which drew enormous numbers of children every year and therefore attracted predators looking for access to them. Officers reached out to SeaWorld, Universal Studios, and every major attraction in the region.
Almost all of them cooperated. They accepted training seminars. They let undercover officers work within their facilities. Disney, however, did not. According to officers who were part of the task force, as documented in the 1998 book called Disney, the mouse betrayed by Peter and Rochelle Schvitzer, Disney blocked the task force efforts at every turn.
A senior official named Doug Reeman told the Schvitzers that Disney resisted allowing surveillance agents into the park. A separate officer named Matt Irwin confirmed a Disney security employee had personally been interested in the training seminars the task force was offering, but that idea had been killed by someone above him in the company.
In 1996, the daughter of a Japanese travel bureau agent told investigators she had twice witnessed a Disney Water Park employee exposing himself. Disney officials confronted the man who matched her description and fired him. Then, according to the Schvitzers, they waited 7 hours before calling the sheriff’s office. There was no opportunity to make an arrest.
By then, the offender and the witnesses had both left. That book came out in 1998. It was not widely read. The issues it raised did not get national attention for another 16 years. >> In the summer of 2014, CNN reporters spent 6 months pulling police and court records and talking to law enforcement and a number of the men who had been caught.
What they found was that since 2006, at least 35 Disney employees have been arrested and accused of crimes involving children. The charges covered attempting to meet a minor for sex and possession of seessam. Universal had seen five of its own employees arrested in that same period and SeaWorld, two of its employees. At the time of publication, 32 of those cases had resulted in convictions.
Two of the arrests had occurred on Disney property. Both were for possession of sea. None of the cases involved children who were visiting the parks. These were people whose working lives placed them around children and were arrested for crimes they sought to commit elsewhere. Which raises a question.
If the task force that tried to cooperate with Disney in 1995 had been allowed in, how many of those 35 arrests might have come earlier? Among those 35, the jobs they held at Disney were not fringe positions. Among them were a service manager who oversaw ride repairs at the Magic Kingdom, concierge at one of the Animal Kingdom lodges, a night shift custodial manager at a resort, a gift shop worker, a security guard, and a character actor in training to become a VIP tour guide.
Robert King Solver was 49 years old. He managed ride repairs at the Magic Kingdom. He was arrested by Lake County detectives after, according to police records and chat logs, he believed he was communicating through Craigslist with a 14-year-old girl and her father. The pair was actually a single Lake County detective posing as the both of them.
He showed up at the meeting location. Those chat logs, King Solver had written, “I work for Disney, so I love to see dads having fun with their daughters. I believe in treating a lady like a princess. I treat ladies with respect because that is how I hope my daughter gets treated. He told CNN after his arrest, I’m not the monster that people are saying I am.
I’m an honest guy that I thought was trying to help and I thought I was trying to do the right thing. He plead not guilty to two charges, soliciting a child for sexual acts and traveling to meet a minor for unlawful sexual activity. 40-year-old Alan Trester worked as a concierge at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge and had previously worked at the Toy Story ride.
His online profile described him as a big teddy bear for younger Chaser. He showed up at an undercover location in July of 2014 believing that he was going to meet a 14-year-old boy. During a videotaped interrogation, Trees told detectives he had met a teenage boy online three and a half weeks before his arrest. He made the drive to Georgia, showed up at the boy’s house, and took him to a hotel.
When a detective asked him, “So, you still went for that? To have sex with him, knowing he was 14 years old?” Trester answered, “Yes.” Cedric Cuthbert was the night shift custodial manager at Disney’s Port Orleans Resort. He was arrested for downloading CS Sam on his work computer. the same time he was writing a sermon for his church where he was the pastor, pled no contest, and was sentenced to six years in prison.
Patrick Hogerson was 32. Disney had him playing characters and training for a VIP tour guide position. He exchanged explicit messages and nude images with someone he believed was a 13-year-old boy and the boy’s uncle. Police arrived at the location where he had agreed to meet. He ran.
During the interrogation video, he told detectives, “I work with kids. I love kids, and not in a bad way. I just have a strong connection with kids. I like working with kids. I just enjoy helping them grow.” Then there was Paul Fazio, who worked at an Animal Kingdom Lodge gift shop. He was convicted of downloading videos described in court records as showing seam with adults and other children.
and William Morero Maldonado who worked for Disney security. He was arrested after investigators claimed he was downloading CSAM videos. The CNN investigation published in 2014 documented arrests going back to 2006. The stings continued after it ran. In 2016, a Pulk County operation caught Jeffrey Eric Binder, a 26-year-old security guard at Disney World.
He arrived at an undercover location expecting to have sex with someone he believed was a 14-year-old girl. A Disney World spokesperson confirmed he was on unpaid leave when the case moved forward. In November of 2019, a month-long Central Florida Sting ended with 17 arrests. Two were Disney World employees. Donald Durr Jr. was 52 years old, a custodian at Walt Disney World Resorts.
When investigators seized his tablet, they found three images of Seam on it. He described himself to police, and I quote, “As a pervert, but not a monster.” Brett Kenny was 40 years old and a guest experience manager at Disney World. According to the PK County Sheriff’s Office, Kenny admitted to having an addiction to Seam.
In August of 2021, a six-day operation called Operation Child Protector arrested 17 people in Central Florida. Of the 17 arrested, nine already had criminal records on file. Their combined charges came to 49 felonies and two misdemeanors. Three of them worked at Disney World. Two of the three were a married couple named Savannah Lawrence, who was 29, and Jonathan Mcgru, who was 34.
Both were custodians at Hollywood Studios. Dayto-day, they cleaned the park, moving through the same spaces where families walked. What they wanted, according to investigators, was to engage in a sexual act with a 13-year-old girl and to roleplay as her steparents. Sheriff Grady Jud read from Mcgru’s messages at the press conference.
One of them said, “We want to enjoy this opportunity. We don’t want to rush. Even at the conclusion, maybe we can cuddle a little bit. The third Disney employee arrested in that operation was Kenneth Javier Kino, 26 years old. He was a lifeguard at one of the Disney World resorts. He was also a Navy veteran who had been working towards a dive team qualification.
When detectives identified him, he had left his pregnant girlfriend to travel to the undercover location. Sheriff Jud said at the press conference he left his girlfriend who is 7 months pregnant with his child to have sex with the child. That’s right. He was working toward a dive team or a steel team or some kind of special operations.
>> In March of 2022, an operation called Operation March Sadness 2 ran for 6 days and produced 108 arrests in Florida. Now, this was largely a sting that targeted J’s, but there were child predators that were thankfully caught as well. Four Disney employees were among those arrested. One of the four employees was Xavier Jackson, a 27-year-old lifeguard at the Polynesian Resort at Walt Disney World.
Prosecutors charged him on three counts of transmitting harmful material to a minor and one count of unlawful communication with a minor after investigators said he sent explicit photos of himself to an undercover detective that he believed was a 14-year-old girl. The Polynesian Resort is a full hotel and resort with pools, a beach, and water transportation directly to the Magic Kingdom.
Holt County Sheriff’s Office conducted child predator sting operations in 2014, 2016, 2019, 2021, and 2022. Disney World employees showed up in the results of each one. The stings were catching employees who worked on park grounds, but even Disney’s executive offices were not exempt.
Michael Laney, a former vice president at Disney, was 73 years old when he was sentenced in June of 2019 to 81 months in prison following a guilty verdict on four counts of firstdegree essay. His crimes had started in approximately 2009, and the victim was about 7 years old at the time, which he came forward in March of 2017. Then there was 52-year-old Stony West Morland.
You might know him as playing the grandfather on the Disney Channel series Andy Mack. In 2018, he communicated on the dating app Grinder with an undercover officer he believed was a 13-year-old boy. He ended up arrested when he went to go meet that officer in person. He reportedly told his ride share driver to wait for him because he might not be staying.
He was originally indicted on one count of coercion and enticement to engage in sexual activity with a minor, which carried a minimum of 10 years in prison. He pled guilty to a lesser charge and was sentenced in June of 2022 to 2 years in prison. After his release, he was placed under 10 years of supervised release and required to register as an offender for 25 years.
Disney fired him from the show shortly after his arrest. Disney’s public response to each of these arrests followed the same pattern. Zero tolerance for this type of behavior, no longer employed with a company, cooperating with law enforcement. The statement covered a custodial manager downloading CSAM at his desk while writing a sermon for his church, a married couple of park custodians trying to essay a child, a lifeguard texting explicit photos from a resort surrounded by families.
The statement did not change across eight years of documented arrests, and the arrest did not stop. In 2014, Ernie Allen, then president of the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said of Disney’s record, and I quote, “It’s hard to imagine any company that’s done more, that cares more, that’s trying harder on these issues.
” He meant that as defense of Disney. He also said, and I quote, “It also indicates that there is that interest present, that there are people who have sexual interest in children and will be at risk of offending against a real child. Disney can have put genuine effort into its hiring process and still have a predator problem.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive.” The record shows the effort, whatever it was, was not sufficient. And each time that was demonstrated, the response was the same sentence, not a new approach. The employees caught in sting operations are one category of the problem in these parks.
The guests are a separate one altogether. In Florida, state law does not outright ban convicted offenders from visiting theme parks once their probation is finished. Florida statute 948.30 30 prohibits offenders of this type who are on active probation from visiting theme parks or playgrounds without the probation officer’s approval. Florida statute 856.
022 prohibits them from loitering within 300 ft of a place where children congregate. But if an offender is off probation and they are not loitering, the law as written does not bar them from buying a ticket. Disney’s own guest policies state the resort reserves the right to deny admission to its property.
Defense attorney Richard Hornsby, who has represented clients on Florida’s offender registry, told reporters that some of his clients had Disney season passes revoked after the company became aware of their status. But Disney, Universal, and SeaWorld all declined to publicly share the specifics of how they identified registered offenders among their millions of annual visitors.
Here’s what’s confirmed. Gerald Humans was 52 years old and had been designated a predator following a 2004 conviction for exposing himself to a child in Palm Beach. He held a Disney annual pass and was later arrested by Orange County deputies after they said he exposed himself to a child at Aquatica, which is a SeaWorld Orlando water park.
That case raised the public question directly. Can offenders visit these parks? Disney, Universal, and SeaWorld offered no answer and their policies were not disclosed and their screening methods were not disclosed. In mid 2023, a man named Justin Colemo was arrested in Florida. According to details from a federal case presentation obtained by Forbes, Colemo had visited Disney World in Orlando with a GoPro camera attached to his body.
He filmed children inside the park and he also filmed children at a lease one middle school. He then fed that footage into an AI image generator. Thousands of clips of children on rides, walking through the park, and standing in line with their families. Using that model, he produced seam from the footage of the children who had no idea they were being recorded.
KMA was also separately facing charges for the harm of his two daughters, the covert recording of minors, and moving CESAM through the dark web. As of August of 2024, when Forbes reported the story, no separate AI sees production charge had been filed against him, though producing such material is illegal under federal law.
Disney said it was not told about what Cole had done at the park. In April of 2024, Florida Governor Ronda Santis signed five bills into law targeting child exploitation. House Bill 1545 makes it illegal for adults to maintain a pattern of explicit communications with minors. House Bill 1131 creates a grant program within the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to fund online sting operations.
House Bill 1235 introduces stricter offender registration requirements. House Bill 305 expands what evidence can be admitted in essay trials involving minors and increases penalties for trafficking. A sting operation following the bill’s signings arrested 16 individuals, some of them employed at theme parks.
On May 18th, 2023, a tweet went viral that said, “Did you know that Disney was sending kids to Epstein’s Island for snorkeling trips? The Disney cruise ship stopped at Little St. James Island for day trips for years despite Epstein’s history of the tweet was viewed more than 800,000 times. It spread across platforms and spun off articles and videos that circulated for months. Little St.
James Island is the private island in the US Virgin Islands that Jeffrey Epstein purchased in 1998 and owned until his death in 2019. Claim was that Disney cruise ships were deliberately taking families, children included, to this island. Multiple news outlets have investigated a previous version of the same claim in April of 2022, and all of them rated it false.
Here is what was reported as actually happening. a third-party tour operator that sold excursions to Disney Cruise passengers offered a snorkeling tour in the St. Thomas and St. John area of the US Virgin Islands. In the operator’s written description of that tour, they listed the names of landmarks and islands in the snorkeling area, including Little St.
James, which sits near Buck Island and Turtle Cove, both of which were also named. The tour involved passengers snorkeling in open water in that region. Allegedly, there is no evidence that they docked at or accessed Little St. James Island in any way. However, if you look at the listing here, which is still up on magical kingdoms.
com, you will see that Little St. James Island is directly referred to as the snorkel spot. However, there is no mention of visiting the island itself, and the excursion itself, based on the description, appears to be purely confined to the boat and the water. Disney’s statement on the claim was, “The island as well as another location were included in the description of a third-party tour so that participants could identify the areas where snorkeling would be available.
The tour had no connection to the island itself, and Disney has never had plans involving the island. There are other bits of info that are important to mention surrounding this, though. Around the time Richard Cook became the chairman of Disney Studios, the name Richard Cook was found on Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs.
Now, I know there’s going to be people saying that mainstream media work together to help cover this up. And given everything that has taken place and what we know about Epstein’s poll and the powerful people involved with him, I certainly don’t fault you if you do feel that way. But all we can do currently is work with the information that we have.
Cover-ups are definitely a thing that happens, but we try to be as evidence-based as we possibly can. And when there’s an absence of evidence, we are hesitant to declare something as fact. We did do some digging and we could really only find that flight log. We couldn’t definitively conclude if it was the same Richard Cook who was the chairman of Disney or not.
However, the timing of this certainly fueled speculation. Even if Richard Cook was flying to Epstein Island and taking part in all those heinous things that went on there, we couldn’t find anything suggesting that the snorkeling expedition was cover for any sort of trafficking. It is very tempting to speculate with things like this, but I can only go off the information I have.
Many people who shared that tweet were not conspiracy theorists. Some of them had seen the Sting headlines as well as the cruise ship arrests and thought that this must be true. Given everything we know about Epstein, can you really blame them? In May of 2023, the same month that the tweet went viral, Little St. James Island was sold.
Epste’s estate sold both Little St. James and the neighboring Great St. James to a financeier named Steven Deckoff for $60 million through his firm SD Investments. Plans were reported for the islands to be developed into a resort destination. The anti-trafficking nonprofit Love 146 does direct work with youth who face trafficking and exploitation risk factors.
At some point, their team applied that same framework to Disney princesses. What they found was this. Rapunzel was 17 with no one in her life outside her captor and got out by running off with the first stranger who offered her a way out. Snow White was 14, fleeing a family member who tried to have her killed, and found housing with a group of older men she had never met before.
Ariel was 16, had a father whose temper was volatile, and her most vulnerable moment, she was approached by someone who appeared to want to help her, but was actually trying to exploit her abilities. Belle ended up in a textbook case of Stockholm syndrome. Now, Love 146 was not accusing Disney of deliberate harm with us, and we’re not either.
I mean, I love Ariel and Belle. They are who I grew up with. What they were noting is that the stories Disney built its brand on, the ones children all over the world grew up with, follow almost exactly the same patterns that they see in real exploitation cases. We’re not saying Disney designed its stories to groom children. That’s not the point.
The point is that the same company that built the princess mythology, the castles, the magic that promised that there is a place in this world designed entirely around the safety and joy of children. That company has spent more than 30 years being caught with predators on its payroll at every level in its parks, on its ships, and in its executive offices.
And its response to each individual catch has been the same sentence. zero tolerance, no longer employed with a company and cooperating with authorities. A sentence it has repeated across 35 sting arrests and three separate seam buss on cruise ships in a single year. And a VP level executive who violated child for years. The question was never whether Disney had bad employees.
Every company has bad employees. The question is whether the response was proportionate to what was being found and whether the answer to that question is the same press release issued in 2014, in 2019, in 2022 and 2026. The answer is no. It was not proportionate. And the families who paid for the promise of the safest place on earth deserve better than a press release.
