A federal jury watched several videos of a nude teenager Monday as part of the case against a former Gilman School teacher accused of sexually abusing the boy — a process that highlighted the difficulty of taking child pornography charges to trial.
The videos were recovered from a folder of deleted files that FBI agents located when they searched an iCloud account belonging to the teacher, 40-year-old Christopher K. Bendann, according to evidence presented in court.
Jurors were visibly uncomfortable during the videos, some of which were several minutes long. The videos were shown to jurors but hidden from the courtroom gallery to protect the privacy of the teen, who is now an adult and testified against Bendann on Friday.
The first video was taken when the man was 16, according to metadata stored with the files and recovered by the FBI. It shows him nude from the waist down in the passenger seat of Bendann’s vehicle. Bendann’s voice was audible during parts of the video, which showed the teen masturbating, according to FBI Special Agent Calista Walker. Walker testified about the content of the videos before they were shown to jurors.
Now 23, the man shown in the videos told jurors last week that Bendann would sometimes give him rides to McDonald’s or pick him up from parties where he had been drinking. He said he was 15 when Bendann began telling the teen that he should take his clothes off and touch himself. Then Bendann started touching him, too, he said.
The Baltimore Sun is not naming the man because he says he is a victim of sexual abuse.
Bendann’s voice was audible in several of the videos shown Monday, which included some taken in showers at the homes of various Gilman families where Bendann sometimes house-sat. He also was visible in some of the videos, Walker testified. Bendann sometimes allowed teens to gather at homes where he house-sat and would summon the boy upstairs to join him in the bathroom, according to the man’s testimony.
Bendann does not deny that he had a sexual relationship with the teen, his defense attorney Christopher Nieto told jurors last week. But he contends the relationship began after the man turned 18, and that the man lied about how the relationship started after his girlfriend confronted him about his ongoing messages with Bendann. Bendann is 15 years older than the man and advised him when he was in eighth grade at the Gilman School.
The man testified that Bendann threatened to expose nude photographs of him to force a continued relationship after he graduated Gilman and left for college. Bendann taught at the private all-boys school in North Baltimore until early last year, when he was fired amid reports that he had given students alcohol and taken them to run “naked laps” in a park.
Two former Gilman students who attended the school during the same years as the man both testified Monday that they recalled Bendann driving them to run a “naked lap” at Meadowood Regional Park. The outings were presented as a trade: Bendann would drive the boys to McDonald’s, or pick them up from a party, and they would run a naked lap in exchange.
“If he had picked us up from somewhere, it was kind of like ‘I did this for you, so you have to do this back,'” one of the young men testified.
The men also said they interacted with Bendann on social media after they left Gilman’s middle school, where Bendann taught, and moved on to high school. Bendann kept in frequent contact with them on Snapchat, where messages disappear after a certain period of time. One of the men said Bendann sometimes messaged him at night during that time and occasionally questioned why the teen was wearing a shirt in his photographs.
The government also presented testimony from two parents whose sons attended Gilman during the late 2010s. Both hired Bendann to house-sit or babysit occasionally, tasks he was known for in the Gilman community.
“I had great trust in him,” one of the witnesses said.
Bendann faces federal charges of sexual exploitation of a minor, possession of child pornography and cyberstalking. The defense has conceded the cyberstalking charge, which focuses on a period of time after the teen turned 18.
The videos made up the bulk of Monday’s evidence. All five videos were recovered from a file of content that had been deleted from Bendann’s phone, according to FBI agents’ testimony. Duplicate versions of the files also were recovered from iPhone “backups” stored on Bendann’s laptops.
All five videos were created before the man at the center of the case turned 18, the agents said, citing metadata connected to the files.
The dates, times and locations of the videos are consistent with other evidence in the case, such as personal calendars where Bendann noted his house-sitting jobs. On one weekend where he wrote that he was house-sitting for a specific family, that family’s bathroom could be seen in the background of an explicit video recovered from Bendann’s phone.
Those details are key to the prosecution’s case because the defense may argue that the dates contained in the videos’ metadata are inaccurate and that the videos actually were made after the teenager turned 18.
The videos shown in court underscored the challenges of trying child pornography cases, which by their nature involve sensitive, sexually explicit evidence and a vulnerable victim. Child pornography cases rarely go to trial, according to federal sentencing data.
Senior U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar ordered prosecutors to shield the videos so they could not be viewed from the courtroom gallery. The audio could be heard throughout the courtroom but only jurors and attorneys could see the visual component.
The accuser was not present in the courtroom while the videos were played. His father, who was a witness for the prosecution, sat in court while the videos played, occasionally placing a hand over his face.
Jurors could be seen looking away from the videos at times or focusing their attention on written transcripts they had been provided to make out the audio.
Bendann watched the videos and occasionally took notes or conferred with his lawyers. He appeared to become agitated during a lengthy private discussion between the attorneys about a video that showed Bendann and the teenager in a shower together.
In a pause in the discussion, Bredar told Nieto to “ask your client to please compose himself.”
The prosecution is expected to rest Tuesday. Bendann has said he wishes to testify, and Nieto said Monday that the defense only anticipates putting on one witness, “if any.”
