On April 30, 2025, A New York man named Ryan Hemphill was arrested on over 116 charges, including predatory sexual assault, strangulation, and bribery. Prosecutors allege that FetLife was among the platforms he used to find his victims — we are currently aware of six. As for FetLife, it has remained almost entirely silent.

To those aware of FetLife’s history, this should come as little surprise. Almost from the beginning, there was a deep and penetrating rot festering at the social network. The longer leadership refuses to acknowledge it, the worse it will become.

The problem starts at the top. For all that CEO John “Baku” Kopanas claims dedication to making his community a safe space for exploring kink, his actions convey a very different message.

Or rather, his inaction.

Over the years, FetLife’s users have witnessed controversy after controversy. Through it all, there has been only one constant: Baku happily ambling along, releasing an endless barrage of useless vanity features.

Safety is hard, his actions say. I don’t care enough to provide it. Have a view counter instead!

Silence That Speaks Volumes

FetLife is Baku’s brainchild. It was founded under his name, and exists under his oversight. He enjoys presenting himself as a community builder; a steward of kink and alternative sexuality.

Yet in the wake of this horrific case, he has said nothing. Neither he nor his team have issued anything resembling a public statement. Instead, as they have done so many times in the past, they have been quiet.

One cannot claim to care about safety when one cannot be bothered to uphold it. One cannot lead a community built around consent when one ignores non-consensual violence. Some might try to claim Baku and his staff are being held to an impossible standard — that it’s impossible to completely stop online abuse.

No one is asking that, though. They’re simply asking Baku to try. Instead, what they’ve gotten is a dangerous community helmed by inept, indifferent leadership.

The problem is threefold.

No Care, No Accountability

The individuals responsible for upholding FetLife’s community standards tend to receive the lion’s share of vitriol for the state of the social network. Some of them are certainly more complicit than others. But one gets the sense that many are underpaid, overworked, and poorly trained, lacking the tools they need to effectively fulfill their duties.

Because of this perfect storm of burnout, rules are frequently enforced in a manner described as both inconsistent and arbitrary. Rather than following anything resembling a standardized process, actions seem executed entirely on the whim of whatever Caretaker happens along. Granted, this is all guesswork.

The reality is that no one outside the Caretakers actually knows anything about their process. It’s a black box. Most of the time, users who report content through the website have no idea if a report is acted on or even reviewd.

Email support is hardly better. If one is lucky, they may receive a response from someone doing their best to remain fair and impartial. If one is unlucky, they may have the rules that were broken parroted back at them without action — we’re also aware of several instances where the reporting user was punished.

Protecting the Predators

On FetLife, individuals who openly spew hatred are rarely punished for their behavior. Instead, their words are allowed under the guise of preserving free speech. Occasionally, people who attempt to call out their behavior are themselves punished, usually for either kink shaming or harassment.

As a result, the same abusive users consistently engage in the same abusive conduct over and over again.

And really, why wouldn’t they? They know there will be no lasting consequences for their abuse. They can harm vulnerable individuals with impunity, only ever receiving a slap on the wrist.

FetLife cannot continue as it has been. It cannot keep giving the impression that it prioritizes the experience of these abusive individuals over the safety of its community. It cannot expect to remain viable if it continues to alienate its core users.

And yet in spite of this, Baku and his team continue on as they always have. Like the predators and trolls infesting their community, they stubbornly refuse to change. One wonders if they ever will, or if instead they will continue to cling to their old way of doing things, no matter how poorly it goes for them.

Directionless Development

To say that FetLife seems aimless would be putting it lightly. To an outside observer, Baku appears to treat his position as more of a dalliance than a career. Rather than sticking to a concrete roadmap, he irreverently wanders from unwanted feature to unwanted feature.

All the while, he cheerily ignores community members when they tell him what they actually want:

Safety tools
More control over privacy settings
A better messaging experience

He appears thoroughly disinterested in providing any of the above. Whether that is due to a lack of competence, a lack of care, or some other factor isn’t clear. Baku doesn’t seem particularly interested in elaborating either way.

Instead, he announces new features and ideas at random, bouncing between his personal account and an “official” FetLife account. Whether there’s any rhyme, reason, or strategy to his actions is something known only to him.

What is clear is that FetLife’s servers reportedly buckle under the strain of each new feature release.

Empty Words from Headless Leadership

Since news of Hamphill’s arrest broke, several FetLife users have published writings on the matter. It was on one of these writings that we saw the closest FetLife gave to an official statement via the following Community Note:

Our Legal Team assisted law enforcement by sharing requested information on FetLife accounts that they have reason to believe were created by the person mentioned in this post. Two accounts were located and placed in the delete queue after assisting with the subpoenas per our guidelines. We actively assist and work with law enforcement from all over the world to do our part to help keep our members and the community safe.

At the time of writing, they’ve offered no other public statement. As if denying the gravity of what occurred, they’ve provided no insight into how they will try to prevent this from happening again. Instead, they assured the community that they did, in fact, follow the law.

Cooperating with a subpoena is not a sign of leadership, nor does it indicate that one cares about keeping people safe. FetLife’s leadership did not provide what they believed to be Hamphill’s account details for the sake of the community, but to shield themselves from legal liability.

It is still unclear what this community note was meant to accomplish. Legal compliance is no substitute for ethical responsibility. Nor is it a stand-in for accountability

It’s avoidance, playing into an all-too-familiar pattern of silence and inaction — and it sends a very clear message:

It suggests to survivors that they’re on their own, and FetLife will not protect them.
It implies to predators that FetLife may not act against them unless compelled to.
It indicates to the broader community that unless law enforcement’s involved, FetLife won’t act.

What FetLife Should Be Doing (But Won’t)

FetLife’s continued inaction is made all the more egregious by the fact that many have directly informed the social network of how it can build a safer community. Baku and his peers actively and intentionally choose to ignore that advice. Far from requiring them to rise to the impossible task of policing the entirety of the social network, FetLife’s leadership could make incremental improvements through the steps below.

Real-Time Public Safety Alerts: Currently, community members must spread word of dangerous individuals on their own without being able to publicly name those individuals. Instead, leadership should inform the community when someone is under investigation for a violent crime such as sexual assault or murder.
Transparent Reporting and Enforcement: FetLife’s users have often compared reporting offensive content to screaming into the void. A formalized, transparent reporting process with clear guidelines around follow-up and enforcement would go a long way toward addressing this.
Tangible Risk Reduction Tools: Most other adult platforms provide a range of verification systems, reference options, and user-controlled content filters. FetLife has, for whatever reason, resisted implementing these tools, and in so doing refused to acknowledge that it has allowed systemic danger to exist unchecked for years.
Actionable Educational Resources: When dealing with an online predator, knowledge of their tactics is often the best defense. FetLife could easily provide users with a knowledge-base covering topics like consent culture, grooming tactics, trauma bonding, and how abuse manifests in kink spaces.
Commitment to Cleaning Up Hate: FetLife is saturated with hateful content, with the worst offenders proudly and freely displaying racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and ableism. This isn’t just damaging to the community, but also to FetLife’s reputation — it’s immensely puzzling that they would allow such behavior to persist, even under the guise of free speech or kink.

Ironically, if FetLife focused on the above aspects of user safety, it would likely see increased revenue, as more people would feel safe on the site.

A Toxic Community and a Broken Brand

FetLife brands itself as a space where one can safely explore their sexuality and identity. Its real-world reputation exists in opposition to this. It is quickly becoming known as a place where abusers are given endless second chances while survivors are silenced. Rather than addressing the issue, FetLife stubbornly refuses to evolve, a decision it may come to deeply regret.

All that’s needed is for a single competitor to arise. One that takes responsibility for the safety of its users. That’s when FetLife’s consistent failures and stubborn inaction will catch up to it — and people will leave.

Because they recognize something that Baku evidently has not. A community that prioritizes surface-level features over safety will always be a predator’s playground. Hemphill was far from the first to recognize that.

And he will not be the last.

Super Loves Over Safety: How FetLife Fails its Community