SC Freedom Caucus' RJ May facing "child sexual abuse materials" indictments
May and the Freedom Caucus have often leaned into the idea that children are under threat from "gender ideology" or "indoctrination".
Content warning: discussions of allged sexual crimes involving young children.
Updated to add [6/14/25]: As I’ve written before, the most significant issue raised by fake moral panics over “protecting children” is that they often target the people who are actually trying to help children, and from the systemic changes that actually need to be put into place to make children safer. While the hypocrisy of May supporting anti-transgender legislation in the name of “insur[ing] that our children have no harm done to them,” while allegedly distributing child pornography is of course compelling, the larger issue is that fake moral panics provide a smokescreen for real harm to children. In this case, May’s remarks might literally have been a way to deflect from his own actions.
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Robert John “RJ” May III, former chair of the South Carolina Freedom Caucus, was indicted by a federal grand jury today on ten counts of “distributing child sexual abuse material,”1 according to multiple outlets2. You can read the full indictement for free here, thanks to support from paid subscribers. (Warning: this indictment contains potentially upsetting details about May’s alleged conduct.)
A memo also unsealed Thursday states [social media company] Kik compiled data from May’s alleged account in July 2024, with content containing 265 videos depicting child sexual abuse material. The data also showed May’s account allegedly sent or received nearly 1,150 messages with other Kik users, with some discussing trading child sexual abuse material.
While May should and will of course be legally presumed innocent until he has his day in court, it’s worth noting that May and his peers in the far-right “parental rights” sphere have not always been supportive of offering the same kind of due process rights to librarians, educators, and other public servants, even when allegations (if they are truly allegations at all) are much less serious— and in fact often involve abstract notions of “indoctrination” and “ideology” rather than actual crimes.
When the Freedom Caucus sued a South Carolina school district over never-substantiated allegations it was engaging in supposedly unlawful “critical race theory” instruction (the budget proviso cited by the Caucus does not directly forbid teaching critical race theory), May told reporters,
We sat down with a number of parents, former and current teachers who provided additional evidence that critical race theory -- a derived concept -- are being taught throughout South Carolina public schools… Parents and teachers and students deserve better than what these school districts are teaching. They deserve an education free from political indoctrination, and we're going to make sure that happens.
The Freedom Caucus’ suit, however, was thin to say the least.
Instead of logical connections between actions the district is alleged to have taken and the text of the law, the filing is heavy on emotionally charged language and (probably deliberate) misdirection. For example, the complaint reads, “It [presumably any ideology the Caucus doesn’t like] is all the same pernicious, racist nonsense. Schools that adhere to these theories teach that students are oppressors or oppressed based on skin color and sex” (brackets mine). No examples are given to support the claim…
Suing the District
This piece is Part III in an ongoing series considering parallels between the “Southern Strategy” of 1960s American politics and the current manufactured war on race- and gender-related discussions and concepts. Part I is here. Part II is here.
Ultimately, the suit was settled out of court without the district admitting fault, resulting presumably in a major expenditure of public funds without even a real investigation into the Caucus’ claims.
Similarly, another former Freedom Caucus Chair, Adam Morgan, sought to teach my students about the ways in which “Cultural Marxism” (considered by many to be an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory) were infiltrating our schools.
The general fear among some conservatives that “CRT” was somehow related to obscure German academics like Herbert Marcuse, he seemed to be arguing, should have been enough to support legislation that would potentially punish school districts and/ or educators.
The legislation, which ultimately didn’t pass, seemed doomed to create a due-process-free witch hunt for “indoctrinators” in the public school system (and, given the subsequent lawsuit against Lexington District One, it seems like the Caucus didn’t really need to pass a law to do that, anyway).
Banned Thoughts: Critical Theory
Just as people know or feel that advertisements and political platforms must not be necessarily true or right, and yet hear and read them and even let themselves be guided by them, so they accept the traditional values and make them part of their mental equipment.
The anti- “CRT” crusade, once it ran out of steam, morphed into thinly-veiled anti-trans and homophobic rhetoric that accused schools of “indoctrinating” students with “obscenity” and “pornography” (allowing lawmakers to attack, directly or indirectly, books that no reasonable person would consider to be obscene, but which dealt with either “CRT”— often depiction of racism and the perspectives of nonwhite characters— or “gender ideology”— often mere acknowledgments that LGBTQ+ exist).
"Protecting" children
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The Freedom Caucus has often taken loud policy stances arguably intended more to troll “RINOs” in the House and grab headlines than to pass legislation, and many have centered on this uneasiness with anything related to “sexual ideology” in schools.
The Caucus championed an amendment by then-Vice Chair RJ May to “define ‘woman”” as part of a recognition of Women in Hunting and Fishing Day. It called for South Carolina to break ties with the American Library Association (saying the national organization promoted “transgenderism, prostitution, masturbation, erotica, and other topics that should be reserved for adults”). Multiple Caucus members voted for a bill which would have punished abortion recipients with the death penalty. They have a history of supporting bills and amendments that evoked hot-button issues popular on the darker side of the conservative internet, something several of their Republican colleagues in the House have repeatedly called out during floor debates.
May is, of course, not the first SC legislator to loudly draw attention to alleged “obscenity” and “indoctrination” in schools and libraries, despite allegations they had personally committed sexual crimes against children. For example, state senator Josh Kimbrell, who went to war on Spartanburg-area libraries, was arrested and charged for allegedly molesting his three-year-old son in 2015, after an accusation by his ex-wife.
At the time, Kimbrell told the Greenville News,
It's been very difficult to live under the criminal charge that carries a life sentence for something you know you didn't do and that you also feel like was misrepresented by the police.
The charges were later dropped by the solicitor’s office for what they said was “insufficient evidence” after a four-month investigation.
Of his ex-wife, Kimbrell said,
She's made these allegations repeatedly. So in terms of hurt there, I was largely numb to it. I was hurt by the fact that the city of Greenville would allow this to happen," said Kimbrell.
But— assuming the allegations Kimbrell’s ex-wife made against him were, as he claimed, false— this didn’t seem to give Kimbrell any empathy for the librarians he implicitly accused of engaging in an “indoctrination campaign against kids” when he called for the Spartanburg library to remove books with LGBTQ+ content.
It’s impossible to know, based on the given evidence, whether Kimbrell or May are guilty of the very serious crimes of which they have been accused, but beyond the hypocrisy of throwing around accusations of “grooming” and “indoctrination” with such accusations hanging over their heads, this also seems to be the key to understanding most of the “protect the children” rhetoric as an ongoing smokescreen for other policy goals.
South Carolina has banned more books statewide than any other state in America, and has done so using procedures that have often seemed to weigh the “sexual content” of books, like Flamer, which contain LGBTQ+ content (and no actual sex or explicit nudity) much more heavily than the content in other “classics” like 1984.
Since May’s arrest, the Freedom Caucus has disavowed him and, in a statement, expressed a hope that “justice is served”. (As recently as February, after the initial raid on his home, some members of the Caucus were making payments to May’s consulting company, so it’s unclear when the group began to distance itself from him.)
But that would arguably be a very different kind of justice than the kind they sought in schools when they sued Lexington One based largely on abstractions, or when they sought punishments for educators tied largely to potentially unsubstantiated parent complaints. And, again, crucially, these actions targeted ideas and books, while May has been accused of participating in an illegal practice that leads to the physical harm and actual sexual exploitation of children.
Although May has been quiet since federal agents raided his home in October, seizing multiple electronic devices, he has remained both a free man and a member of the SC House during that time. He has attended House meetings and participated in votes.
And his consulting firm, Ivory Tusk, still raked in major money from SC politicians. Even after the October investigation, May’s firm received, according to state ethics filings, $5,000 from Freedom Caucus member Rep. John “Jay” Kilmartin (Lexington), $5000.01, from SC House Candidate Stan Tzouvelekas, $1,000 from Freedom Caucus member Rep. Stephen Frank (Greenville), $3,800 from Freedom Caucus Rep. Donald McCabe (Lexington).
Only after a five-month federal investigation and grand jury deliberations did May face losing his job or his freedom. And he still has a legal right to his day in court to defend and explain himself.
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Further Reading:
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According to a note on today’s press release from the office of the US District Attorney for South Carolina, “The term ‘child pornography’ is currently used in federal statutes and is defined as any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a person less than 18 years old. While this phrase still appears in federal law, ‘child sexual abuse material’ is preferred, as it better reflects the abuse that is depicted in the images and videos and the resulting trauma to the child. The Associated Press Stylebook also discourages the use of the phrase ‘child pornography’.”
Additional Sources:
https://www.southcarolinapublicradio.org/sc-news/2025-06-12/sc-rep-rj-may-charged-with-distribution-of-child-sex-abuse-material (SC ETV)
SC Republican lawmaker indicted in child pornography case (Post and Courier)