Cambridge, MD mayor Andrew Bradshaw convicted of posting revenge porn on Reddit (2021–2022)
2021–2022
Andrew Bradshaw, the newly elected mayor of Cambridge, Maryland, posted intimate images of an ex-partner to Reddit with degrading captions; he was charged with 50 counts under Maryland's revenge-porn law in November 2021 and pleaded guilty to five counts in April 2022.
What happened
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.
Impact
The prosecution is a documented application of a state revenge-porn statute to conduct carried out on Reddit, with the platform and the throwaway-account method named in the official charging record. It underscored both how disposable accounts enable image-based abuse and the gap critics perceived between the seriousness of the offense and a fully suspended sentence. The case also became a local-government scandal, ending the political career of a sitting mayor.