This past February, an infantryman named Brenden McDonel was standing behind a female active-duty Marine in line. He snapped her photo without her knowledge, and posted it to a Facebook group called Marines United. Within 90 minutes, a different photo appeared in the thread — one clearly taken in an intimate setting, showing the woman topless.
Thomas Brennan, a 31-year-old investigative journalist and former Marine had been tracking Marines United for weeks. He watched the group, which was originally started as a suicide-prevention and support network for veterans, turn into a forum for revenge porn.
Esquire reports that members of the all-male group had crowdsourced thousands of images of hundreds of naked servicewomen. The pictures were being posted without their subjects’ knowledge or consent, and were being used to intimidate women in the Marine Corps.
On Monday July 10, the Marine Corps announced that an unnamed Marine pleaded guilty “at a summary-court martial related to the nonconsensual sharing of explicit photos on the Marines United Facebook group” two weeks earlier. According to a United States Marine Corps press release, “The Marine was sentenced to 10 days confinement, reduction of rank by three grades, and a forfeiture of two-thirds of one month’s pay.”
A new piece in Esquire looks at Brennan’s explosive story, which was published in March to reveal one of the Marines’ biggest scandals in years.
“What made this different was the volume of photographs and the details: names, ranks, duty stations,” he said to Esquire. “They were weaponizing this stuff.”
The Esquire piece digs deep into this group, as well as Brennan’s personal life, such as his injury in Afghanistan in 2010 that caused memory loss and mood swings. He was eventually diagnosed with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. In late 2012, he had enough of the hardships he was facing, and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills.
But then he thought of his daughter, and that was enough to change his mind. He ran to the bathroom and vomited up the pills. When he told his wife, she said, “You have another chance to find a purpose.”
Brennan said that one victim defined the nude photo scandal for him. Savannah Cunningham, a 20-year-old from Phoenix, was harassed before she was even a Marine. She was a poolee, a civilian who had already signed enlistment papers but had not attended recruit training.
“Someone needs to stand up and say this does not represent the values of the Marine Corps,” she told The New York Times in March, before shipping off to boot camp, though the Marines declined to make her available for an interview for Esquire. “If not me, then who?”
Savannah reminded Brennan of his daughter; they both “have that wavy hair.”
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