The Untold Mar-a-lago Meeting To Press Trump To Fight Online Predators

Sitting on a terrace in Mar-a-Lago, a dozen people sporting MAGA hats nervously chatted. They gathered around a long table adorned with gold silverware, surrounded by ornate arches inlaid with baby blue tiles accented with gold. And they waited.

It was March 1, and the war in Iran had begun just the day before. Now they were eating lunch in the same Palm Beach resort where a makeshift command center had been set up to begin a new battlefront in the Middle East — but they weren’t there to talk about the war.

The assembled group was made up of grieving parents who had collectively flown thousands of miles to plead with President Donald Trump for his help fighting a different enemy: the grotesque online ecosystems that led to the deaths of their children.

The parents say social media companies have refused to address issues in their platforms that allow sextortion and cyberbullying to flourish, leading to deadly fallout for America’s vulnerable youth. The parents hoped their pilgrimage to the center of the MAGA universe and a chance to tell their stories directly to Trump would finally lead to action in Washington and greater protections for kids online.

“I think we needed to say, ‘Hey, these are our faces, and these are our young people that have died,’” said John DeMay, one of the attendees.

When DeMay’s son, Jordan, was 17 years old, he was targeted by a sexual predator on Instagram, his father recalled. Jordan was a straight-A student and star athlete in his tight-knit Michigan town, playing football and baseball while running track. One night in March 2022, he received a message on Instagram from a user posing as a young woman. After some back and forth, Jordan was coaxed into exchanging nude images. Then, the tone changed.

The person began threatening to share the images in an attempt to extract money from Jordan. They composed a collage of his photos, and he paid part of their ransom. But they continued to ask for more. Mere hours after the extortion began, Jordan shot himself in his bedroom.

DeMay turned his grief into advocacy, he said, and has sought to serve as “a parent survivor voice to try to help push some legislation down the line.”

When Trump walked in the door, he and the others had their chance.

The details of this meeting, which have not been previously reported, underscore how Trump’s attention is perhaps the most valuable asset an advocate, lobbyist, operative or anyone seeking something from the administration can hope to score. This dynamic isn’t unique to the Trump presidency, but it is exaggerated; Trump operates by instinct and his own whims, he is often swayed by photos and charts rather than written materials and he’s susceptible to flattery. When the political system is slow or unresponsive, Trump still has the power to kickstart it — if you know how to get him interested.

In fact, after the March 1 meeting, Trump secured the extradition of a man in Nigeria accused of sexually extorting one of the parent’s children, and pressed Speaker Mike Johnson to pass a youth safety package that has languished for years.

A White House official declined to confirm details of the meeting but told POLITICO Magazine that kids’ online safety is a priority for the administration, adding that they would like to see Congress pass requirements for verifying users’ ages on AI platforms and implementing features to prevent sexual exploitation while avoiding the federal preemption of state laws that protect children.

How Washington does or doesn’t tackle Big Tech and online safety is one of the thorniest issues in the country, often dividing even members of the same party. These parents were savvy enough to secure an audience with Trump and make their best pitch, but it’s far from certain that they’ll get to see him signing the kind of sweeping legislation they desire. After all, many of the Silicon Valley titans they’re taking on have Trump’s ear, too.

Still, the parents’ meeting offers a blueprint for other advocates seeking assistance in Trump’s Washington. Get in front of the man and deliver a combination of personal anecdotes that tug at his heartstrings, a bit of flattery and public displays of political support, and the president may embrace the cause.

These parents got in front of Trump thanks to one woman.

Lynn Shaw is the founder and executive director of Lynn’s Warriors, an advocacy organization seeking to stop sexual exploitation. A longtime producer and public relations consultant, Shaw was stirred by her experience working with victims of with domestic violence and began researching sexual exploitation in the United States, from human trafficking to sexual extortion online.

She launched Lynn’s Warriors in 2020 and began regularly traveling to D.C., making the rounds on Capitol Hill to press for stronger legislation to protect victims of human trafficking. Before long, she said, she was getting contacted by victims of sexual exploitation as well as those in the tech industry who feared their products were contributing to the problem.

“It’s all really connected: the trafficking, the domestic violence, the exploitation, the digital safety,” she said.

But she and other advocates kept hitting a wall.

After years of fruitless fights on Capitol Hill over kids’ online safety, Shaw saw the second Trump administration as a clean slate, a chance to convince the president to put his political muscle behind the issue.

“We’re not getting anywhere,” Shaw recalled thinking at the time. “The president is visual. We should get him in the room with these parents.”

She had family connections with Trump’s sister, Elizabeth Trump, and through her was able to pitch a meeting between the president and the grieving parents.

“I don’t want to cash in on friendships or ask for favors,” Shaw said. “But for parents with this situation, I’ll ask.”

She began to reach out to a select group of parents and ultimately arranged for six families — all Trump backers — to travel to Florida for a meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. The perils of online life afflict families of all partisan stripes, but Shaw figured that bringing supporters of the president would make Trump more receptive to their stories.

The families arrived in Palm Beach on Feb. 27, but when they woke up the next morning, the U.S. and Israel had begun bombing Iran.

All day they wondered, would the meeting still happen? They played golf and dined in the resort, waiting to hear whether their trek to the MAGA power center would end without face time with the president. Finally, word came down from Trump’s staff: He would meet them tomorrow.

Sure enough, as the advocates were eating lunch on the terrace, Trump stopped by to speak with the group.

Photos of the parents’ deceased children were set up in the room — a nod to the president’s well-known preference for visual presentations — and each of the attendees was wearing a ruby red MAGA hat to highlight their support for the president.

Trump spoke with the families for a few minutes, offering condolences for the loss of their children and expressed support for kids’ online safety legislation, though he did not delve into specific legislative priorities.

He also signed the MAGA hats and offered to take pictures with each of the parents. As he posed for the camera, he spoke with each in turn, learning about how they lost their loved ones, stories that they have since shared with POLITICO Magazine.

Maurine Molak’s 16-year-old son David died by suicide. An Eagle Scout and member of the church youth group, David was injured playing basketball and turned to online gaming and social media to fill the time. He slowly became addicted to life online, lying about completing his schoolwork and turning aggressive when his parents attempted to ween him off the products.

“He just couldn’t control himself,” Molak said. “It had a grip on him like nothing that we had ever seen or experienced or knew anything about,” resulting in bouts of anxiety and depression.

Then, the cyberbullying started. “That was the final match on this bonfire that exploded,” she said. Since her son’s death in 2016, Molak has been advocating for kids’ online safety laws in her home state of Texas and in Washington.

Joann Bogard lost her 15-year-old son Mason when the YouTube algorithm fed him a video of the “choking challenge,” a viral trend where one purposefully tries to temporarily cut off oxygen flow to the brain to induce a temporary loss of consciousness.

Bogard, who installed parental safeguards on her son’s devices, said that she was focusing more on what he was posting than the content he was seeing. “I didn’t realize that things could be sent to him unsolicited” via the algorithm, she said. He followed the video’s guidance, depriving his brain of oxygen. Mason died after several days on life support.

Lori Schott’s 18-year-old daughter Annalee struggled with anxiety and depression. One day, after swimming in social media algorithms that fed her content glorifying self-harm, including a live streaming of a suicide, she took her own life. “As a lifelong Republican, the meeting gave me hope that our families were finally being heard,” Schott said. “President Trump hugged me as I cried and struggled to tell Annalee’s story. I pray that he carried our stories with him after we left.”

Brandon Guffey’s 17-year-old son Gavin was online gaming on a hot July night in 2022 when he received a friend request on Instagram from someone posing as a college student. Gavin started chatting with his new online companion and eventually sent them intimate photos that led to sextortion and a ransom demand. An hour and 40 minutes after he first logged off from his game, Gavin killed himself in the upstairs bathroom, leaving his father to find him on the floor. Still, this person did not stop, later contacting Guffey’s other son and his 14-year-old cousin demanding money before moving on to Guffey himself. “Did I tell you that your son begged for his life?” read one of the messages he received.

Guffey, now a South Carolina state representative, has become one of the chamber’s leading voices on kids’ safety legislation and has since tried to influence the debate nationally. The person behind the sextortion scheme targeting Gavin Guffey was eventually found and indicted and has agreed to plead guilty. Several of the people involved in the sextortion scheme targeting Jordan DeMay have also pleaded guilty.

Spokespeople for Meta, which owns Instagram, and Google, which owns YouTube, did not respond to a request for comment.

One story in particular seemed to grab the president’s attention.

Walker Montgomery of Mississippi was a 16-year-old boy with a thriving social life who was deeply involved in the family’s local church. But in December 2022, he got caught up in a sextortion scheme that drove him to suicide.

“That was the entry point for our family to start advocating,” Brian Montgomery, Walker’s father, said. He began spreading awareness of these schemes by telling his son’s story in schools and to parents. He moved to legislative advocacy, lobbying successfully to pass two laws in his home state of Mississippi before setting his sights on the federal level.

When it was his turn to meet Trump, he introduced himself and Walker’s mom, Courtney. After they took a photo, Montgomery recalled saying, “I just want you to know we appreciate all you do.”

As Montgomery walked away, Trump tugged at his arm, “Hey, was it your son or daughter?”

“Well, it was our son Walker,” Montgomery replied.

Trump asked, “What happened?”

Montgomery told the story of how his son died. A person posing as a teenage girl and friend of a friend messaged Walker at around midnight on the first night of December. They coerced him into a sexual encounter over a video call, which, unbeknownst to him, was being recorded.

The tone quickly turned as the person began threatening to send the video of Walker to his friends and family if he did not pay $1,000. Only a few hours after the first message, at around 3 a.m., Walker took his own life.

The Montgomery family had been working with the FBI for years to track down the perpetrator. In August 2023, the alleged offender, a man in his early 20s named Adebola Festus Adekunle, was arrested in Nigeria, but the U.S. had been unable to extradite him for three years and counting.

“We can’t get him extradited,” Montgomery told the president.

Trump paused, paced around the room, and replied, “I can get him extradited.”

He pointed at Margo Martin, a White House aide and communications adviser, and called her over. “The man that murdered their son, we’re gonna get him extradited,” he said to her. Turning his attention back to the Montgomery parents, he said, “Margo’s gonna get it done.”

As Trump began to walk off, Montgomery recalled him saying, “I’m sorry for your loss. You seem like such a nice family.”

Martin took down their information and within a week they were in contact with White House Counsel David Warrington who then referred them to the State Department. Montgomery said the State Department then sent a letter to Nigeria’s attorney general urging Adekunle’s extradition. Neither the State Department nor Nigeria’s attorney general responded to a request for comment.

Within a few weeks, Montgomery began hearing from the FBI that they were more confident that a judge in the country was going to consider the man’s extradition. On July 7, they received a call informing them Adekunle was going to be extradited. Upon his arrival in the United States, he was charged with “sexual exploitation of a minor resulting in death, coercion and enticement of a minor, and interstate threats with intent to extort,” according to the Department of Justice. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial; his attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

“The process for almost three years has been just a roller coaster of ups and downs,” Montgomery said. “Once the president got involved, it became a higher priority to everybody.”

Shaw had another ask of Trump during the meeting: Make a call to the speaker of the House. Parent advocates had been attempting to meet with Mike Johnson, to no avail. Trump promised to put in a word.

Although their children had died because of predatory behavior on the social media platforms, tech companies enjoy broad immunity in the American legal system for content circulated on their products. If the companies no longer had such immunity, however, they’d likely be incentivized to establish new safeguards. Tech industry trade groups have argued that doing so would force them to impose unprecedented barriers to content, effectively spelling the end of the largely unrestricted internet.

Advocates have long pushed Congress to pass a national safety framework law to shield kids from the worst of the web and impose stricter liability on the social media companies. They’ve made the rounds on Capitol Hill, meeting with lawmakers to tell their stories. They’ve attended numerous hearings where lawmakers grilled tech CEOs and where they have given their own testimony blaming social media for their children’s deaths. In one now-famous Senate hearing in 2024, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stood and turned to face an array of parents holding pictures of their dead children and apologized.

For all the headlines they’ve garnered, it hasn’t been enough to enact a law. Two years ago, the Senate did pass the “Kids Online Safety Act,” or KOSA, on a vote of 91-3, but it died in the House due in no small part to a lobbying blitz by Meta and its industry allies who argued the bill would threaten free speech by encouraging platforms to censor content.

Now, the parent-activists were hoping to jolt Congress with help from Trump. A Johnson spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment, but his office reached out to one of the parents to help set up the meeting shortly after Trump promised he would call the speaker, Shaw said.

On May 14, some of the same parents who met Trump sat down with Johnson in his Capitol office. During the meeting, Johnson said that Trump told him he wanted Congress to pass a kids’ online safety bill by the end of the year, according to three people in attendance who were granted anonymity to discuss details of a private discussion.

What happened next is either progress or the illusion of it, depending on who you ask.

In June, the House passed the KIDS Act, a package of kids’ online safety legislation that includes a version of KOSA. But the bill does not include a “duty of care” standard, a legal tool that requires tech platforms to mitigate potential harms to children. Skeptics of the provision, which include many Republicans and some Democrats, are convinced that it would incentivize tech platforms to be overzealous in removing content to avoid liability, thus increasing censorship and potentially violating the First Amendment.

But without that language, a coalition of children’s safety advocates had vocally opposed the measure before it came to the floor. “We want the bill to have a good, strong duty of care,” Bogard said.

Meanwhile, a competing Senate proposal, which was approved by the Senate Commerce Committee in August and has yet to see a floor vote, does impose the “duty of care” requirement. Key senators on both sides of the aisle have also vowed to oppose the House bill over the provision’s omission.

Trump has so far been unwilling or unable to bridge the divide.

Back in July, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), one of KOSA’s sponsors, and Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) met with Trump at the White House to discuss a package of online safety bills and limited preemption of state AI laws. For weeks, negotiations had been ongoing between kids’ safety advocates, tech industry officials, lawmakers like Blackburn and Cruz, as well as White House officials. In the end, they couldn’t come to a consensus on the makeup of a final package.

The Oval Office meeting with Blackburn and Cruz confirmed the deadlock and seemed to mark an end to the White House’s involvement: They emerged from the meeting pessimistic any legislation could pass, and Trump did not offer an endorsement.

Blackburn and Cruz did not respond to a request for comment.

With only a few weeks left in the post-election, lame duck legislative session, the latest effort to protect American kids from the most vile corners of the internet may end up as simply another in a string of failed attempts to codify new tech regulation.

Especially with tech CEOs making high-profile appearances at the White House, some of the parents who met Trump at Mar-a-Lago have begun to question where the president’s priorities rest: with them or with the companies they blame for the death of their children. “It’s just so frustrating to see them all dining together,” said one of the parents, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Still, they maintain hope that their efforts will not be for naught.

“We have to find a middle ground somewhere,” said DeMay. “I really hope the president is the person to do that.”