TikTok Surrogacy Influencer Revealed to Be Child Sex Offender
Surrogacy influencer Brandon Keith Riley-Mitchell is a convicted child sex offender and former school teacher
One half of a widely celebrated gay surrogacy influencer couple on social media has been identified as a convicted child sex offender and former high school teacher.
Brandon Keith Riley-Mitchell (née Mitchell), of Seven Valleys, Pa., previously taught at Downingtown West High School. He sent sexually explicit messages to an underage male student and solicited graphic content from the minor. The 39-year-old was convicted in 2016 for possession of child pornography and the sexual abuse of children.
Riley-Mitchell has worked at Eurofins since 2018 as a team leader, overseeing chemists who conduct biopharmaceutical product testing. The company featured him and his husband in their Pride celebration social media posts just last year. Riley-Mitchell made the career pivot after his child sex conviction ended his teaching career in childhood education.
Logan Steven Riley, 34, is the other half of the social media influencer couple. He was an elementary school teacher in Baltimore as recently as 2020, though it's unknown if he is still working in education since relocating to Pennsylvania. The married couple owns a 2,200-square-foot, four-bedroom home in Seven Valleys, Pa. where they make LGBTQ+ pride-themed social media videos featuring their toddler.
In October 2020, the couple turned to GoFundMe to try to raise $50,000 to help cover the costs of commercial surrogacy.
From the now-deleted GoFundMe:
Brandon (my fiancé) and I are looking to expand our family by using a gestational surrogate. In gestational surrogacy, the child is not biologically related to the surrogate mother. Instead, an embryo is created via in vitro fertilization (IVF) using an anonymous donor egg. The embryo is then transferred to the gestational surrogate who carries the baby as if it were any other pregnancy. Once the baby is born, the intended parents (Brandon and I) would have full legal custody.
As you can guess, the process of using a surrogate is expensive. The costs include:
In vitro fertilization (IVF)
Donor Eggs
Surrogate Compensation/Medical Insurance/Travel Expenses
Legal Counsel
Social Worker Evaluations
Genetic Testing
Fertility Medications
All of these necessary steps can cost upwards of $100,000 and the money must be paid in full upfront. Brandon and I are taking out substantial loans to cover the upfront cost and are now more budget conscious in our daily lives saving every penny we can. We are looking for any generosity to help us in our exciting journey to extending our family!
For those of you who do not know Brandon and I, we have three adopted furbabies (one dog and two cats) and are excited for them to have a new sibling! We live in Seven Valleys, PA, just south of York, PA and north of the MD state line. We were intended to be married in May of 2020, but our wedding was postponed twice due to Covid-19 and is now scheduled for May 2021.
The fundraiser ran for years and was still being promoted as recently as 2023. In one of the final fundraiser updates, the couple wrote that they had created four embryos and that a woman named Shayna Martinovich would be the surrogate mother.
It’s unknown how much money was ultimately raised.
“Our surrogate went through extensive medical and social worker evaluations in order to be approved for surrogacy,” the couple’s GoFundMe read, leaving the public to wonder why the men raising the child were not evaluated or scrutinized in the same way.
Critics of the influencer pair have been dismissed as homophobic and bigoted.
Anna Slatz, who broke the scoop on the Reduxx feminist news site, said the Pennsylvania State Police suggested to her that Mitchell-Riley was not in breach of any conditions banning him from being around children because being a sex offender in the state does not prohibit one from exercising parental rights.
The case is now prompting renewed scrutiny over the lack of safeguarding and background checks in American surrogacy arrangements, as well as laws failing to protect babies given to people with sex-crime histories.
My former colleague Mia Cathell, now at Townhall, has spent years reporting on William Zulock and Zachary Zulock, a “picture-perfect” LGBTQ activist gay couple in Georgia state who were convicted of pimping out their adopted young boys to other men, and filming the abuse.
These stories make me want to cry. There is so much perversion being hidden and/or promoted and it is sickening. While suicidal empathy may not exactly apply here, the premises and motivations of the perpetrators, victims and enablers are exactly the same.
Pity the children.
😳