Senator Calls for Hearing Over Marines Nude Photo Scandal

Since Jan. 30, dozens of women have been identified – by their full name and rank – by photos posted to the group, according to Reveal.

The video is in response to a scandal involving a private Facebook group called Marines United, where many of its almost 30,000 members were found to be passing around nude photos of female Marines without their consent, or photos stolen from their colleagues’ Instagram accounts. A friend told Butner about the site in August 2016. “We will not be silenced”. “As a rape survivor, I can tell you that this exact behavior leads to normalization of sexual harassment and even sexual violence”.

Green said he could not speak in-depth to immediate next steps the Marine Corps plans to take, citing the ongoing Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation into the Marines United scandal. Senior officials quickly acknowledged the investigation, as well as the distribution of photographs of active-duty and veteran women through the page and links to Google Drive.

Last year, when people heard she had gone through infantry training, someone took benign pictures of her from her Facebook profile and posted them in a closed group without her knowledge, prompting a slew of harassing remarks a fellow Marine eventually alerted her to, she said.

“Victim-blaming and the excuse some people are giving that boys will be boys needs to stop”, Butner, 23, told a roomful of reporters and flashing cameras. In 2013 and 2014, the Marine Corps Times and the military website Task and objective wrote stories about the Marine Facebook group called “Just the Tip of the Spear”, commonly known as JTTOTS.

Allred said she sent a letter to U.S. Marine Commandant Robert Neller to ask him to personally meet with Butner, Woytek and maybe other victims..

As a young Marine lieutenant serving in Iraq, one of us, Kate Hendricks Thomas, carried spray paint to paint over graphic and violent pictures that depicted her in sexual positions on the walls of porta-johns from Fallujah to Taqaddam.

The 30,000 members are now being redirected to a new page Marines United 2 or MU2, which promises to expose whistleblowers about the site, and includes comments by members jeering at the federal and military investigators, according to screenshots provided by a former Marine and journalist, former Marine Sgt. James La Porta to CNN.

“I felt like my privacy had been taken away from me”, former Private Kally Wayne said. I love the Marine Corps. It is said to have nearly 30,000 members, including both American and British Royal Marines.

She thanked Neller for a video he posted on a military images website on Thursday. “We will do what’s right, and we will do what’s legal to take action on these individuals”, he said, including that those implicated could face charges such as “indecent viewing, visual recording or broadcasting”. “It’s embarrassing to our corps, to our families and to the nation”.

He urged the victims of harassment or abuse “via social media or otherwise” to report the incident to their chain of command.

“This is vile. This is risky and this is dishonorable conduct by those who have called these women the usual disgusting names”, she said.

High-profile attorney Gloria Allred said Butner and Woytek are strong, courageous women who wanted to speak out about the scandal.

Meanwhile, a former Marine, Erin Kirk-Cuomo, said servicewomen have been reporting websites like Marines United for more than 10 years but were ignored.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, ranking member of the subcommittee on military construction and veterans affairs, told Green she isn’t satisfied with what she called a “muted response” to the troubling allegations that female troops are being harassed, stalked and victimized by their male counterparts.