A Whitman man who posed as a teenage girl on social media was sentenced on Monday to 33 years in prison and 10 years of supervised release after he pleaded guilty to five counts of sexual exploitation of children.
Matthew Murphy, 25, was also ordered to pay restitution of $920 to two of 15 victims who cooperated with law enforcement.
Murphy, a former Boy Scout leader, “is every parent’s worst nightmare: a predator hiding in plain sight,” wrote acting U.S. Attorney Nathaniel R. Mendell in the sentencing memorandum.
Prosecutors began investigating Murphy in November 2018 after a middle school boy came forward to law enforcement, claiming that Murphy was extorting him on the social app Snapchat to get nude pictures, prosecutors say. Murphy, then 22, was arrested and charged in 2019.
While 15 minors identified Murphy, law enforcement say they found subpoenaed records from Snap Inc. that he had reached out to hundreds of other minors on the app.
After obtaining nude pictures of the victims, Murphy used the photographs to get them to take more explicit and sexual images, such as wearing women’s underwear or hurting themselves. If the boys failed to do so, he threatened to expose their photos to family and friends, records show.
Boys and male victims of sexual exploitation tend to go unreported, due to shame and society’s stigma surrounding the identification of males as victims, as explored in an ongoing investigative series by the GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting.
The Murphy investigation only began because one victim came forward due to the exasperation and stress induced by Murphy’s threats, prosecutors say.
“The fact that more than one victim contemplated suicide as the only way to escape the defendant speaks volumes,” Mendell wrote in the sentencing memorandum. “The seriousness of this defendant’s crimes cannot be understated. The scope of his offending is both breathtaking and heartbreaking.”
