Cambridge, MD mayor Andrew Bradshaw convicted of posting revenge porn on Reddit (2021–2022)

Andrew Bradshaw took office in January 2021 as the youngest mayor of Cambridge, Maryland. According to the Maryland Office of the State Prosecutor, over roughly two weeks in April 2021 he posted at least ten intimate photographs of a former girlfriend to several Reddit communities, using throwaway accounts built from variations of the victim's name and date of birth, and attaching degrading captions that included racial slurs.

The Office of the State Prosecutor charged Bradshaw on 15 November 2021 with 50 counts of violating Maryland's statute against the nonconsensual distribution of private sexual images. Local reporting noted the images had been distributed across subreddits oriented toward humiliation and degradation, and that Bradshaw had used the victim's own identifying details to construct the accounts — a fact prosecutors highlighted as aggravating because it tied the abuse directly back to her real identity.

On 18 April 2022 Bradshaw pleaded guilty to five counts. The court imposed sentences of one year and a day on each count, fully suspended, along with three years of supervised probation, $5,000 in fines, $750 in restitution, and 100 hours of community service. He served no jail time. The disposition drew criticism from observers who felt the suspended sentence understated the harm of a sustained, targeted campaign by a sitting public official.

The case is notable for its clean documentary record: the platform (Reddit), the conduct, and the charges-to-plea sequence are all set out in an official prosecutor's release rather than reconstructed from journalism. It is one of the more clear-cut examples of Reddit being used as the delivery mechanism for image-based sexual abuse, and of a state revenge-porn statute being applied to it.

Bradshaw resigned from office in connection with the case. For the archive, the episode illustrates how Reddit's anonymity and disposable-account features can be turned into tools of targeted harassment, and how a relatively new category of state law — criminalizing nonconsensual intimate imagery — reaches conduct staged on the platform.