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Content warning: The following story describes instances of animal abuse.
In 2017, the Des Moines, Iowa, lawyer Philip Colt Moss was facing felony drug charges after a raid on his townhome turned up marijuana, hash, OxyContin, Klonopin, Xanax, zolpidem (the active ingredient in Ambien), and “four pills that contained methylphenidate” (the active ingredient in Ritalin).
The cops found enough material that they charged Moss as a drug dealer, but Moss’ lawyer told the Des Moines Register that his client was simply someone who “needs help.” Moss had stepped aside from his work as an attorney and “checked into an eight-week inpatient treatment facility outside of Iowa,” the paper reported at the time.
“Hopefully common sense will prevail,” said Moss’ lawyer. “He needs help. He’s getting help, and he was not dealing drugs.”
Moss eventually pled guilty to a pair of misdemeanors and “two felony counts of failure to possess a tax stamp.” He got two years’ probation.
Moss started his own law firm after all this blew over, so perhaps things were turning around for him. But a few years later, he found himself caught up in a new investigation—a quite serious federal investigation—by the FBI and the federal Fish and Wildlife Service. Both agencies were extremely interested in his Internet activity on Telegram and WhatsApp.
They say that the Internet offers a gathering place for every interest, no matter how niche, and that extends even to the darkest corners of the human psyche. That was certainly true here. The government was investigating a scheme in which US citizens were gathering in a “private online group and one-on-one chats on encrypted messaging applications” to share their fantasies about making “monkey crush” videos.
The name actually makes these videos sound more innocuous than they are. While crushing a monkey to death would be terrible enough, the “clients” in this private online group wanted to watch monkeys tortured for hours. They complained when the monkeys died too quickly. They suggested dressing baby monkeys in diapers and yellow outfits, then feeding them with bottles in front of their parents—before brutally breaking bones, severing limbs, inflicting pain with fishhooks and pliers and skewers, burning wounds with lighters, gluing various bodily orifices closed, attacking them with snakes, and sexually abusing them.
And it was all actually done. In a truly heinous example of global, Internet-based outsourcing, the “client ideas” were funneled to an unnamed minor in Indonesia, who, for a few hundred US dollars sent via Western Union, would procure the monkeys, film their torture, and send the videos back to the Americans.
As part of this investigation, the government came across Telegram messages allegedly sent from Philip Colt Moss to the ringleader of one such “monkey crush” group. The messages suggested that rehab hadn’t quite stuck.
“I got whatever. You need. I got a hookup for anything you’re looking for. Uppers downers. Girls. Lol,” said one message from Moss in 2023. “From weed to mushrooms. Coke to meth. Molly to acid. Dope to tar. Xanax. You gotta remember as a defense attorney. I know all the dealers bc I represent them.”
The two men kicked around plans to meet up in Chicago and “get wild in the city.” But after Moss shared a picture of his fiancé, the conversation turned back to monkey videos.
“Do u tell her about the whole monkey shit?” asked the ringleader.
“Man I try to cuz she’s a cool ass girl and she’s a party girl,” came the response. “She doesn’t really get the monkey thing which. Makes sense but she likes that it’s a little community and it seems to make me happy.”
The happiness presumably wore off, though, when Moss was arrested on August 8, 2024. The indictment against Moss was unsealed late last week by the Department of Justice, and Moss now faces the possibility of years in federal prison.
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