Madison Conradis was idly flicking through Facebook on her phone in bed one morning when she received a chilling message. An old high school acquaintance that she hadn’t heard from in years had got in touch to ask whether she knew nude images of her were being posted online.
Shocked, Madison asked for more information and the contact, who admitted to being embarrassed about knowing where the content could be found, signposted her to 4Chan and similar websites where women’s images were posted against their knowledge or consent and with information about their names, work and whereabouts.
‘It was the first time I realised websites like that even existed,’ Madison tells Metro over Zoom from her home in Florida.
‘It was scary. I had no idea where the pictures were posted or who was doing it. In my opinion it was worse than pornography sites, because it was alongside illegal stuff, such as non-consensual porn, child sexual abuse images, invitations to harass women and images of dead people.
‘I was looking through revenge porn and harassment forums to try and find the images and there were things there that I saw that I don’t ever want to see again,’ adds Madison, who works in marketing.
Eventually, she found two images from a photographer’s proof gallery that had been taken six years before at a modelling shoot when she was 19. To this day, she doesn’t know how the images were obtained – whether there was hacking or a software malfunction.
‘When I found the photographs, I had that sick feeling that you get in the pit of your stomach. The anonymity of it was distressing. If I had known who was doing it, it would have been bad enough, but not knowing who was trying to harm me was the scariest part of it,’ she remembers.
Alarmingly, the poster had written alongside the pictures: ‘Here is Madison. Here is her social media, her address, and her phone number. Go: Harass her.’
After her initial shock, Madison, now 36, called her twin sister Christine before deciding to ignore the post, expecting it to fizzle out. But it didn’t. She started seeing several posts on various seedy websites across a few hours, which would ramp up to hundreds daily.
Some photos were sent to her dad’s Instagram page, others to her clients’ addresses and former work contacts. If you googled Madison’s name, the image would be the first thing that popped up.
‘It was terrifying. I didn’t know who it was. It could have been anyone: a family member, a friend, the person walking behind me, a receptionist at the dentist’s office… I had no idea,’ she says.
Madison is currently sharing her story on The Girlfriends: Spotlight, a podcast from Novel, where she recalls: ‘I had a recurring nightmare where a masked person with a hood in all black was hovering over me. I couldn’t see their face. It was so realistic, and I would often wake up in the night, jump out of bed and scream. It was because of the person harassing me, stalking me and not knowing who it was.’
Unbelievably, the poster started requesting more images as Facebook users registered under fake names, even sending her direct messages demanding that she send new, explicit photos, or else they would further spread the already leaked photos. She changed her phone number, email address and deleted most of her social media, and occasionally things would quieten down.
‘For a long time, I was second-guessing everyone around me. It really affected my trust in people,’ Madison tells Metro. It was years before she went to the police because she assumed the poster would get bored and move on, but Madison also knew the police may be unable or unwilling to do anything about it, and she was proven correct. When she did make a complaint police told Madison they couldn’t do anything.
However, her sister Christine, a lawyer, was furious and went back to the police station with Madison to file a report. They opened a file, but nothing happened.
‘[Sextortion] was a fairly new crime at that time. It was just starting to be codified in police law. Education for police officers wasn’t great at the beginning. They had bigger fish to fry, and that’s probably why we didn’t have much luck,’ Christine tells Metro from her home in Florida.
In 2015, Christine also fell victim to the anonymous poster when professional images from a boudoir shoot that she had sent to her husband were put on the internet, along with her name.
With the police case seeming to go nowhere, the sisters decided to turn detective themselves and start their own investigation with the meticulously collected evidence and digital logs gathered since the first post a decade before.
They set up a digital breadcrumb map, similar to a pinboard murder map seen on crime shows, examining all the clues and evidence they had from their stalker. Among them was a strange way of typing using spaces between ellipses. Examining his posts, they also discovered he had other victims, one of whom had been disturbingly posted in her catholic school uniform.
‘There were posts soliciting someone to rape her. We zoomed in on the photograph, and Christine’s husband Dana helped them sharpen the photo. He could read the school location. It was terrifying. If we could find her, any creep on the internet could,’ Madison tells the podcast.
Then they found a connection; all the women had a Facebook friend in common: Chris Buonocore, a former college friend of Dana’s. And further evidence came when Madison went on holiday to the Florida Keys in 2016, and she posted a picture on her Snapchat showing nothing more than a beachfront sunset.
‘Almost immediately, I looked down and had an anonymous message saying: “That’s a beautiful sunset that you just saw.” I knew the only place I had posted it was Snapchat – only 39 people had seen it,’ she remembers.
The last person who saw the post was Chris Buonocore, a fraternity brother of Christine’s husband who had been to their wedding. Following almost a decade of paranoia and extortion, they had found the culprit.
‘It was really shocking, but eventually made sense. He was an outcast, a little weird and creepy,’ Christine tells Metro.
‘There was relief to finally put a face and a name to it. It was like a huge weight off my shoulders,’ adds Madison. ‘I could trust people again. And I was weirdly excited; we had worked so hard, countless sleepless nights working ‘til 3am working on this stuff.’
They had enough evidence to take him to court and press charges. In court, documents showed that, over a seven-year period, Buonocore used fictitious phone numbers, text messages, and social media accounts to harass, intimidate, cyberstalk, and attempt to extort six women, including a minor.
‘I felt very emotional. Having to speak in court about the impact of his actions was scary, and to think one judge could decide the fate of what you have worked so hard to do – put him in prison,’ Madison tells Metro.
The judge was on their side and sentenced Buonocore to 15 years in a federal prison.
His harassment campaign had involved posting thousands of sexually explicit and nude images of the victims to the internet, as well as the victims’ personal identifying information, including phone numbers, addresses, and social media account identifiers.
Buonocore also solicited individuals on the internet to contact and harass the victims, including, at times, enlisting those individuals to attempt to extort additional sexually explicit images from the victims and other times encouraging these individuals to rape a victim.
Seeing her stalker go to prison marked the end of years of stress for Madison, which had taken its toll on her career, relationships and physical and emotional health. ‘You have ups and downs of depression, and physically I had major health problems due to high cortisol, a stress hormone,’ she explains. ‘I wasn’t sleeping well, I was stressed, burnt out and suffering from nightmares for a long time.’
And to this day, Madison still doesn’t understand what motivated Buonocore to commit such a heinous crime: ‘Some people are just sick in the head. A criminal is a criminal, I guess.’
● From Novel and iHeartPodcasts, Madison and Christine tell their story on The Girlfriends on 12 May, available wherever you get your podcasts.
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