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A screenshot from Marines United 4.0, one of the Facebook photo-sharing groups that sprung up after the original was taken down.

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In what one observer called "weaponized" sexual harassment, members of a Facebook group called Marines United crowdsourced thousands of images of hundreds of naked servicewomen, including selfies, creepshots, and intimate photos.
One morning this past February, a female active-duty Marine was standing in line at CIF, a cavernous supply warehouse at Camp Lejeune. It was a little past ten o'clock, and the weather outside was clear and gusty, typical of winters among the sand pines of coastal North Carolina. The woman—call her Judy—was checking into a new unit. She'd come to CIF to collect her standard issue of combat equipment.
While Judy stood among the rows of stacked body armor, Kevlar helmets, and camouflage hiking packs, an infantryman named Brenden McDonel, who was standing a few places behind her in line, pulled out his phone and started surreptitiously taking her photograph. McDonel didn't know Judy, but that didn't keep him from posting the pictures to a private Facebook group called Marines United. "Standing in line behind her at CIF," he wrote. "Who's got em?"
Within minutes of that first post, dozens of members of Marines United chimed in. "Stalker game has just been elevated," one posted. Others suggested sexual acts. "FHRITP," one proposed. "And butthole. And throat. And ears. Both of them. Video it though . . . for science." Another encouraged McDonel to "take her out back and pound her out." Several members of the Facebook group recognized Judy, and some said that she belonged to their unit. "Was on the range with her while back, pink ass jeep right." Her platoon sergeant—her direct supervisor—liked the thread.
As they advanced through the line, McDonel continued to stalk Judy, shooting photos and posting them to Marines United. Only ninety minutes after his initial request, a photo showing Judy topless was posted to the Facebook thread. The picture had clearly been taken by a lover, someone she had trusted. But its appearance on Marines United represented an obvious breach of that trust.
The topless photograph was greeted by some members of Marines United with applause ("Great job gents!"), while others seemed surprised ("Wow it actually worked . . . wtf"). Still others expressed a muted dismay ("Some of you guys are creepy as fuck").
Thomas Brennan, a thirty-one-year-old investigative journalist and former Marine, was disgusted but not surprised. For weeks he had been tracking Marines United, watching as the group, which had been organized as a suicide-prevention and support network for veterans, was transformed into a forum for revenge porn. In the course of his reporting, he discovered that members of the all-male group had crowdsourced thousands of images of hundreds of naked servicewomen. The pictures included selfies, creepshots, and intimate photos. Like the pictures at the heart of the celebrity-photo scandals on 4chan and Reddit, the images were being posted without their subjects' knowledge or consent. Here, however, they were being deployed to intimidate women in the Marine Corps.
Brennan's story about Marines United, which he published in March, revealed one of the most significant scandals the Corps has faced in a decade. When we met at his house earlier this year, he told me that he had seen isolated images of naked female service members on military-oriented Facebook pages before. But the scale and sophistication of the Marines United collection were unlike anything he'd ever encountered. "What made this different was the volume of photographs and the details: names, ranks, duty stations," he said. "They were weaponizing this stuff."
When Brennan first joined Marines United in early 2016, most of the postings were benign: active-duty Marines asking about life at one duty station or another, or veterans offering advice about transitioning to civilian life. Brennan joined the group, he told me, to get the word out about stories he was writing for The War Horse, a military-news nonprofit that he'd recently founded.
On January 30 of this year, he was scrolling through his Facebook feed on his phone when he came across a link posted to Marines United by an account that belonged to Joseph Bundt, who identified himself as a former Marine. "Here you go, you thirsty fucks," the post said. "This is just the tip of the iceberg. There is more coming."
When Brennan clicked the link, he saw that it led to a shared Google Drive folder containing thousands of images of naked women from every branch of the military. The photographs were indexed by name, which meant that the Google Drive was effectively a searchable image database. (Reached by phone, the owner of Bundt's accounts denied that he had posted the photographs to the Google Drive or the link to Facebook. He said his accounts had been hacked, and declined to comment on other details of the incident.)
"What made this different was the volume of photographs and the details. They were weaponizing this stuff."
Brennan took screenshots of the hundreds of likes and comments that followed the link to the Google Drive, as well as of subsequent posts that encouraged others to add to the photo collection. Within twelve hours of the first post, the number of folders on the Google Drive had ballooned from four to fifty. Brennan told me that members of Marines United were operating "like a company-level intelligence- collection team," gathering images using tactics similar to the ones that had helped Marines investigate insurgent networks in Afghanistan and Iraq.
As he watched the photo scandal unfold in real time, Brennan called Major Kendra Motz, a public- affairs officer at Camp Lejeune who had helped him with a story he'd written for Vanity Fair. Motz recognized the significance of what Brennan had found. She contacted Major Clark Carpenter, a public-affairs officer at Headquarters Marine Corps, in Washington. At Brennan's request, the information he passed along was recorded as an anonymous tip.
By February 1, the Marine Corps had succeeded in getting the link to the Google Drive and the Facebook posts on the Marines United thread deleted. In an email, Carpenter updated several senior field-grade and general officers on the situation. He wrote that he had registered a complaint with the company that employed, through a subcontractor, a member of Marines United. But he also noted that the group remained active on Facebook, and that the offending thread had been deleted before he could gather "enough information about the group or group members to link individuals or the group to inappropriate actions." The following day, Brennan asked Motz if the Corps was launching an investigation. To his surprise, she said no.
Brennan's house is in Onslow County, a thirty-minute drive from the front gate of Camp Lejeune, where he was stationed before he was medically retired from the Corps in 2012. A modest three-bedroom with a Marine Corps flag out front, it is nestled in a cul-de-sac among dozens of identical vinyl-sided homes. When I visited him this spring, his daughter, who is in grade school, had left her books and toys scattered across the living room. His wife, Melinda, was at work. Zeus, his Great Dane, drooled on my lap, and Cupcake, his epileptic pit bull, whined by the front door. Strewn across the kitchen counter were stacks of papers, a laptop, and a four-inch-thick black binder in which he kept the screenshots from Marines United. After the Facebook posts and shared Google folders were deleted, the binder became the only known record of the incident.
I first met Brennan in 2004, when I was a twenty-four-year-old second lieutenant and he was a nineteen-year-old private first class. We were both infantrymen, fresh out of training and bound for our first combat deployments in Iraq. Both of us were assigned to 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, or 1/8, and we both fought in the battle for Fallujah, in November 2004. Although I didn't know Brennan well at the time, his platoon was led by one of my best friends.
I ran into Brennan again a decade later, in New York, where he was living while studying at Columbia Journalism School. I was drinking one night at the Half King, a Manhattan bar co-owned by the writer Sebastian Junger, when a guy with a face full of stubble and tattoos climbing up his arms tapped me on the shoulder. I didn't recognize Brennan until he said that he'd been in my friend's platoon. Standing there among the sticky wooden tables, we exchanged gossip about Marines we both knew—"Did you hear Esquibel got his foot blown off in Helmand?"—and then Brennan told me about "this thing I'm trying to get off the ground": a news organization focused on military and veterans' stories. In the months to come, I pitched in a few bucks to the Kickstarter campaign for The War Horse, but I couldn't help noticing that the funding thermometer on its website remained stuck at arctic lows.
At the Half King, Brennan never mentioned that he couldn't afford to bring his wife and their daughter to live with him in New York. Nor did he say much about the combat injury that ultimately ended his career in the Marines. But when we met this spring, he told me about the rocket-propelled grenade that had exploded a few feet from his head in 2010, during an ambush in a wisp of a town called Musa Qala, in Afghanistan's Helmand Province. The injury caused memory loss and mood swings. Military doctors eventually diagnosed him with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
While on leave and awaiting his mandatory medical retirement from the Corps, Brennan started a job as a newspaper reporter in Lumberton, North Carolina, a hundred miles from his house. He had a vague notion that he wanted to tell other people's stories. Every Monday morning, he left Melinda and their daughter to spend the workweek at a studio apartment he was renting in Lumberton. At the paper, he spent most of his time mechanically reporting on mundane happenings about town. The job was unsatisfying, and Brennan's imminent discharge left him feeling that his true purpose—to make a career as a Marine—had been snatched from under him.
"Someone needs to stand up and say this does not represent the values of the Marine Corps."
By late 2012, Brennan had had enough. Three days after Christmas and two days before the end of his military career, he was at his apartment in Lumberton when he decided to write Melinda a letter. "To the woman I love with my whole heart and soul: You are finally free of the terror I have caused in your life," Brennan typed on his laptop. "I am sorry for everything I have done to you. I deserve every bit of sorrow I feel. Never forget how much I love you and cherish the times we spent together." The letter finished, "I'll hopefully see you on the other side." Brennan left his laptop open, swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, and lay on his bed.
His thoughts turned to his daughter. He imagined her growing up without him, and what it would be like for her to find out that her father had quit on himself. The vision was enough to change his mind. He rushed to the toilet, pushed his fingers down his throat, and vomited up dozens of little white pills. Before driving himself to the local hospital, he stood staring at his phone. He needed to tell Melinda what he'd almost done. "I stood for a long time trying to call her," Brennan recalled. Eventually he summoned the nerve. Once he explained everything, the line went silent until Melinda said, "You have another chance to find a purpose."
After his suicide attempt, Brennan quit his job in Lumberton and found a position closer to home, at the Jacksonville Daily News. At Melinda's urging, he left North Carolina in 2014 to attend Columbia. He returned home to Jacksonville after finishing his journalism degree and turned his full attention to The War Horse.
In February of this year, not long after he discovered the cache of Marines United photographs, Brennan called Anna Hiatt, an adjunct professor at Columbia. Hiatt had supported Brennan's vision for The War Horse, even agreeing to serve as its editor, and now she encouraged him to write about the photos as a journalist. "There was a sense of disbelief," Hiatt told me. "He wanted validation that what he was seeing was, in fact, very wrong. But his first instinct wasn't to write about it. That idea felt like a break from the tribe."
Motz, too, encouraged him to write about the photos. "The more I talked to Kendra," Brennan told me, "the more I could hear frustration in her voice." He recalled Motz telling him, "There are only so many opportunities to do the right thing."
Early on, Brennan tried to make contact with the victims. "You don't have to say anything," he promised. "Just listen." An active-duty staff noncommissioned officer who had served in the Corps for a decade told Brennan that she already knew her photos had been posted. She thanked him and asked to be left alone.
Savannah Cunningham, a twenty-year-old from Phoenix, wasn't even a Marine at the time she was harassed. She was a poolee, a civilian who had signed enlistment papers but had yet to attend recruit training. "Someone needs to stand up and say this does not represent the values of the Marine Corps," she told The New York Times in March, before shipping off to boot camp . (The Marines declined to make her available for an interview.) "If not me, then who?"
"Savannah is what made it real to me," Brennan told me over breakfast at his house. "Her pictures being in there is like the ultimate welcome to the family." He considered a photograph of his daughter that was held to the fridge by a magnet. "She reminds me of Savannah," he said. "They both have that wavy hair."
As Brennan reported his story, he spoke often to Anna Hiatt. "I kept saying to him, 'This is going to be big,' " she said. "He didn't really believe me. What he kept saying was, 'Guys I know are probably going to come after me,' which I didn't really believe."
"I kept saying to Brennan, 'This is going to be big.' He didn't really believe me."
On February 6, nearly a week after Brennan first reported the Google Drive to the Marine Corps, he scheduled a meeting with Motz and her boss at Camp Lejeune. Brennan presented them with the binder of screenshots. Journalistic due diligence was part of the reason, but he also feared that the organization, one he cared deeply about, wasn't prepared for the fallout.
Still, Brennan told me, "the scariest part was that there was no recourse for victims of this type of harassment." Although the Corps had programs in place for victims of sexual assault or for those who faced workplace sexual harassment, the Marines had no specific programs for victims of cyber harassment. In May 2013, Jackie Speier, a Democratic congresswoman from California, had sent a letter to General James F. Amos, the Marine commandant at the time, about online sexual harassment. In his response, Amos wrote that "the anonymous nature of social media, the use of online pseudonyms, and the magnitude of available sites presents key challenges to curtailing inappropriate postings." The Marine inspector general, he told Speier, "lacks the resources and infrastructure to actively and consistently monitor the countless, ever-evolving social media sites."
Through his reporting, Brennan had compiled the online profiles and identities of forty-nine Marines who had shared photos through the Google Drive and Marines United. Three quarters of the participants were or had been commissioned or noncommissioned officers, including three drill instructors, one recruiter, a major who served as a fighter pilot, and a former member of HMX-1, the helicopter squadron that flies the president. At Camp Lejeune, Brennan again pressed the Corps to initiate an investigation, and he asked it to confirm the names he'd provided. The Corps did neither. It did, however, invite him to meet officers at Headquarters Marine Corps in Washington later that month.
While Brennan worked on his story, he continued to monitor Marines United. He was working at his kitchen counter on February 16 when he saw the photo McDonel posted of Judy. Brennan documented the stalking as it occurred, taking screenshots on his laptop while simultaneously attempting to contact Judy on Facebook.
He also called Anna Hiatt. "We didn't know what to do," Hiatt told me. "I was worried that if he called Marine authorities that he'd expose the entire story, but he felt he needed to alert someone." Brennan then contacted Motz, who notified her superiors at Headquarters Marine Corps. Motz, now acting in her capacity as a victims' advocate, alerted Judy about the incident. Two days later, Judy agreed to meet with Brennan at a coffee shop off base. She brought a friend. Brennan showed her his screenshots. McDonel, she noted, was "standing close enough to smell my perfume. This is going to follow me—just like he did."
"Marine leadership seemed more concerned with killing the story as opposed to striking at the root of the problem."
I spoke to Judy this spring. The day after the incident, she told me, the officer in charge of her unit, a male first lieutenant, called her into his office. He explained that she was being transferred to a unit that would not be deploying abroad. "Why am I the one being punished?" Judy asked him. "I am a tier-one Marine and I deserve to be here. I want to deploy. That's why I joined the Marine Corps." The officer said that she had been in the unit for only two days and had already caused problems. Later, she was removed from a scheduled training exercise in Arizona.
Judy considered "requesting mast," a process that allows junior enlisted Marines to circumvent their immediate chain of command and seek a direct audience with a senior officer. "They only let me stay because I forced the issue," Judy told me. When I asked whether her superiors talked about removing the men involved, she guessed at their thinking: "It'd be too many spots to fill if they ask the men to leave. So let's just pretend like it didn't happen." She went on, "That's the way the Marine Corps works: sweep the problem under the rug and don't make it a bigger issue."
Brennan, meanwhile, continued to hound the Marine Corps. He wanted it to confirm the names of the forty-nine individuals he'd identified, as well as Brenden McDonel. Four days after the stalking, Brennan received a response. Citing difficulties with its records systems, the Corps told him that McDonel was the only Marine it could identify. McDonel, however, had finished his enlistment and was being processed out of the service. As a private citizen, he would remain outside the jurisdiction of the Uniform Code of Military Justice so long as he was not on active duty.
The Facebook posts from the stalking incident were taken down, once again leaving Brennan with the only known copies outside official channels. "Marine leadership seemed more concerned with deleting everything and then killing the story as opposed to disciplining those involved and striking a
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