I’m rewriting this journal for better grammar and updated info. You can view older versions on the Internet Archive.
On June 20th, Kyle Carrozza, creator of Mighty Magiswords and Moobeard the Cow Pirate was arrested for owning CSEM (child sexual abuse material). Specifically 12 videos or 600 images of abuse material, possibly of the sad*stic and masoch*stic nature which can include torture and snuff. He was let go on bail for $75,000 on June 25th and his final court hearing will be on July 25th. We do not yet have his mugshot and do not know if his court hearing will be recorded. The arrest was due to an investigation by the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.
I used to be Kyle’s friend, due to him going to the same school as my parents who he is quite close with. I almost worked on projects of his such as a remake of the Moobeard pilot with a small indie studio, SICKMUTT. Thankfully, I never ended up doing work with him. The studio disbanded before any progress could be made and it ended up saving us all in the ass.
Last year, Kyle’s name got into some controversy over allegedly blacklisting an artist by the name of Angela Vondra for drawing shotacon hentai. For those who don’t know what that is, it’s a subgenre of Japanese anime p*rnographic material featuring underaged boys. Specifically Ang drew straight shota (ss), which is the pairing of adult women and little boys or “shotas”. Ang was not fired from working on Magiswords because of this since the controversy happened long after the show ended. What Kyle did was send the p*rn to other people so they were warned about Ang’s actions. Kyle was then accused of pushing Ang to suicide, although she is still alive.
During the height of this in September 2023, Kyle’s Google account was coincidentally permanently suspended for “no reason”. I was told by some that Ang took credit for it going down, but I strongly doubt this because you can’t report someone’s Google drive, only Youtube channel, and there is a huge difference between your Youtube being suspended versus your entire Google account. That would also imply that somehow Ang knew about the CSEM on his drive which is completely ridiculous. Kyle’s whole Google account was wiped, drive, channels, everything. It even had his bank information and credit cards, he basically used the drive for everything. I talked with my parent who is very close to Kyle, and they confirmed that Kyle was subscribed to Google One, Google Drive’s service that gives you more space to back up your files. He had everything on the drives, literal decades worth of work and God knows what.
For those of you that don’t know, this is a huge red flag. Kyle was stupid enough to post about it on twitter, which makes him look more incriminating. I’m glad pedophiles are stupid because it gives me evidence. The way that cloud services detect CSEM is through hash files, basically fingerprints of image files. This video by Mutahar should explain the process at the timecode. There are rarely any false positives, but there are other methods that drives and Google specifically uses to detect potential illegal material which we will go over later. Google basically ONLY does this if they detect illegal material in your drive. They don’t just suddenly delete your entire account without warning for nothing.
What I think happened is that Kyle must have synced one of his CP folders by accident, and scrambled to delete it, but it was too late. Google tripped a hash, leading to a 9-month investigation that lasted up to his final arrest on June 20th.
The hash method is generally foolproof, but there are other methods by Google like using AI image recognition to detect possible CSEM and it can also mark drawings like lolicon images as CSEM too.
The reason why at the time I gave Kyle the benefit of the doubt is because the exact same year a similar situation happened with the Japanese artist Naoki Saito that was a mistake. In spring 2023, Saito’s Youtube and Google account disappeared mysteriously overnight. He was upset and confused, but eventually came up with a sound theory: either one of his drawing WIPs was falsely marked as explicit material, or someone put something in his Google Drive that was suspicious. Saito shares his Google drive to make his YouTube videos, since a majority of his tutorials are “correction” videos where users submit their own art to be featured in his video and “fix” it to help improve. It’s possible someone uploaded explicit material to his drive, whether it be actually explicit or falsely marked as CSEM. It was likely falsely marked since it wouldn’t make sense for people to submit explicit artwork to his drive since Saito is very family friendly. Unfortunately due to the art style some characters look quite young and may have tripped the system.
Due to this possibility, Kyle could be innocent. However, I strongly doubt this. The charges on Kyle are very serious, with the charges detailing knowingly owning 12 videos or 600 images of sadomasoch*stic CSEM on his computer. I don’t know how that could be an accident. Kyle also does not share any folders on his drive to the public to my knowledge. Saito only did that for a specific reason.
