A 22-year-old Carthage man was arrested last week and sits in the Greene County Jail for allegedly threatening to publicly post nude photos of a man he met through the Grindr app.
Brennan Mason Lynch was arrested on a charge of threating nonconsensual dissemination of private sexual images, a class E felony punishable by up to four years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000. The specific law making this a crime is relatively new; it went into effect in 2018.
The victim apparently was a student at Missouri State University who met Lynch on Grindr in 2019. Grindr is a dating and meeting app predominantly used by gay and bisexual men and other members of the LGBTQ+ community.
According to court records, Brennan first sent the victim photos of himself over another online app, Snapchat. The court documents do not specify if those were nude phots.
“Brennan requested nude photographs from (the document uses the victim's initials) in which (the victim) then sent him over Snapchat,” part of the charging document reads.
“Brennan then took a screen shot of the photographs and began the threats of posting them to multiple ‘Internet Websites' and the ‘MSU Website,'” according to court documents.
Lynch was charged in August of 2021. He failed to appear at his first court appearance five weeks later. Greene County Jail records show Lynch was arrested and booked on Dec. 28, 2023.
He allegedly posted photos, took them down, and then threatened victim again
The victim told a Springfield police investigator that Lynch “did this with the intent to harm (the victim's) character and associate him with sending nude photographs to minors.”
According to court records, Lynch posted the nude photographs on the internet and the victim told police he began getting messages from unknown people regarding the photographs.
The victim “said Lynch then deleted them from the internet but began threatening him again that he was going to re-post them.”
The police investigator states in court documents that he took screenshots of the threatening messages from Lynch to the victim.
“One of the messages from Brennan showed the nude photos of (the victim) and stated, ‘I'll post if you don't let me call you I will post it all over and contact the college myself and let them know.'”
Defendant's other brushes with the law
According to online court records:
In June, Lynch was charged with harassment over the phone in Joplin.
Also in June, a Jasper County judge ordered a full order of protection against Lynch. The petitioner lives in Georgia.
In December 2020, Lynch pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of harassment stemming from an incident in Cape Girardeau.
In August, 2020, Lynch was charged with harassment in the first degree, a class E felony, in Carthage.
The victim in Greene County told the investigating officer that he has a friend who says he also met Lynch on Grindr and that Lynch tried to blackmail him, too.
