A Case Study in Child Modeling: How Legal Photography Becomes Predator Currency

While researching clearnet pedophile advocacy sites, I kept running into a recurring argument: "Why should photos of children be illegal if no abuse is occurring?"

The community's answer to that question is best illustrated by Brian Ribbon, a prominent pedophile advocate, who wrote:

"What are [pedophiles] actually expected to look at? Demanding that a grown adult jack off to the Disney Channel or a holiday brochure is kind of ridiculous." — Brian Ribbon

That quote isn't specifically about non-sexual photography, but the implication is clear: the content doesn't need to be explicitly sexual to serve a sexual purpose. So are these people trolling the dark web for material? Some are. But most don't need to, they're on your Facebook, or watching home videos posted to YouTube meant to be shared with friends and family.

Today's piece is about the category of content I see shared most on these sites: child modeling.

Starting in 2001, BeautifulYouth describes itself as:

"An ongoing artistic 'photo-mentary' focused on recording and displaying the beauty of youth, launched in 2001 with six models and grown to include over 30 different young models." — Aquaria

BeautifulYouth.com or The Beautiful Youth Project, are a collection of images by an amateur photographer who goes by the name aquaria. Aquaria also has a DeviantArt account where they post mostly portraits of children. Low-cut necklines, unbuttoned shirts, and costumes can create a particular tone for a photo, but they can also attract sexualized attention from predator communities. Here's a few examples from aquaria's DeviantArt account.

All the the models being referred to in these comments are children.  The WordPress blog has run continuously since at least December 2005, cataloguing named child subjects through numbered milestone shoots — 250, 500, 750, 1,500, 2,500 photographs of individual children, tracked by name across years of sessions. After a quick crawl using a tool called Katana, I found the legacy "links" page and it showed 2 links:

Derek's universe was a place for "young Derek", one of the child models, to edit photo's of aquaria's other child models. It was hosted at derek.beautifulyouth.com

According to the Wayback machine, "GoingFoto.com provides photographic essays of young male models". That mixed with the completely scrubbed "roadrunner3dx.com" and the tag line "original pictures of boys age 8-13" is self explanatory. Made to model is also a child modeling site, creating an accidental hub for possible predators.

How'd I find this site?

I have been doing a lot of research on the clearnet pedophile ecosystem, and BeautifulYouth has dedicated static links on

Boylinks - The longest running and largest pedophile link repository for those attracted to boys

Annabelleigh - One of the largest and longest running pedophile link repositories for those attracted to girls.

Now, aquaria probably has no idea their website is being linked by two of the largest pedophile link repositories on the internet, but it makes a point that even something that can be considered harmless or done without malice can be used as "material" for pedophiles all over the world. Using something called a backlink checker, which is a method of seeing what website is linking to another, we can see a pattern of predators linking to the site

But who is aquaria and how have they been able to run this project for 25 years?

One of the first things I do when I'm researching a website is a quick subdomain enumeration, it can give you a lot of information of what's being run on a network. When I did that I got a surprise, Over 75 subdomains. Outside the normal web server subdomains the most interesting ones I saw were:

rickrood.beautifulyouth.com
aprilrood.beautifulyouth.com
chooselovecoaching.beautifulyouth.com
jrleader.beautifulyouth.com
aquaria.beautifulyouth.com
hopechildrenhome.com.beautifulyouth.com

rickrood.beautifulyouth.com

• What it is: Personal subdomain registered under the beautifulyouth.com hosting account
• Confirmed via: Certificate transparency logs (crt.sh)
• Content: Not independently verified beyond DNS/cert presence
• Significance: Full legal name of Rick Rood used as a subdomain on beautifulyouth.com

aprilrood.beautifulyouth.com

• What it is: Personal subdomain for April Rood (Rick Rood's wife)
• Confirmed via: Certificate transparency logs; active HTTP enumeration confirmed subdomain is live and configured as a personal directory-style page
• Content: Personal page; April Rood is also documented as a contributing author on beautifulyouth.com

chooselovecoaching.beautifulyouth.com

• What it is: Subdomain corresponding to chooselovecoaching.org — a 12-week coaching platform built and hosted by Rick Rood
• Confirmed via: Certificate transparency logs; DNS enumeration; active DNS resolution of chooselovecoaching.org to 144.208.71.129
• Content: chooselovecoaching.org hosts a $297 "Choice Moment Coaching" program combining Choose Love curriculum with High Performance coaching, delivered via weekly Zoom sessions. The Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement's own website (chooselovemovement.org/choice-moment-coaching/) links to chooselovecoaching.org under "Get Coaching" and references Rick Rood by name, presenting it as an official program offering.

jrleader.beautifulyouth.com

• What it is: Active WordPress blog titled "JR Leader — Leadership Blog"
• Confirmed via: Active HTTP inspection (May 2026); DNS resolution to 144.208.71.129
• Content: Site describes itself as: "A group of 4th and 5th graders in California have committed to learning principles of leadership." Contains posts written by elementary school students on leadership topics.

aquaria.beautifulyouth.com

• What it is: Subdomain hosting "AfterSchool Answers" under the "Aquaria" alias
• Confirmed via: Active HTTP inspection; SSL certificate Subject Alternative Names list (included alongside beautifulyouth.com in the same Let's Encrypt certificate, valid through June 9, 2026)
• Content: AfterSchool Answers professional organization page. Contact email: [email protected]. Training page links to Rick Rood's workshop schedule.

hopechildrenhome.com.beautifulyouth.com

• What it is: Subdomain referencing hopechildrenhome.com, a website presenting as a Kenyan children's charity ("Hope Children's Home")
• Confirmed via: Certificate transparency logs; active DNS resolution (144.208.71.129)
• Content confirmed on hopechildrenhome.com:
  • Built in approximately 24 hours (all pages created August 19–20, 2023 per WordPress REST API timestamps)
  • Contains unmodified template placeholder text including "Hunger In San Francisco" heading and Lorem ipsum body copy
  • Donate page lists fictional addresses: "2134 Divi St. #1000, San Francisco, CA 93151" and "57945 Extra Rd. #200, New York, NY 53235"
  • Default WordPress "Hello world!" post and sample page remain published
  • Images are stock photos from Pexels, Unsplash, and Pixabay — not photographs of the named charity's children or facilities
  • No payment processor configured; sole donation method listed is MoneyGram and Western Union to [email protected] and +254 713 169 694 (Kenyan mobile)
  • WordPress sole registered author username: "april" (URL: hopechildrenhome.com/author/april/)
  • The legitimate organization whose name this imitates — Hope Children's Home (hopechildrenshome.org, founded 1969, Florida) — operates on a separate server (209.17.116.163) and has no connection to this domain

The names, aprilrood and rickrood were obvious red flags as full names, but I started with the aquaria subdomain. It's actually a webpage for "After School Answers"

It describes itself as

A fertile ground for Atfer-School and Out-of-School-Time (OST) professionals to gather, share ideas, and discuss the ongoing professionalization of the OST field. 

When I checked the training page I saw a familiar name "http://www.[nolinks].com/schedule/RickRood/Workshops"

Moving further, I found an email on the BeautifulYouth websites contact page [email protected]. In OSINT, it's common place to check data breach checkers for any possible data it leaks. I personally enjoy using Pentester which is a free data breach checker, which confirmed in a breach of evite.com the email [email protected] used the name Rick Rood.

The Myspace account aquaria13, which was also publicly available from pentester, also had the name Rick Rood

Last but not least

A 2017 archive of a professional modeling portfolio on ModelMayhem.com lists "Beautiful Youth Project Lifestyle Rick Rood" as a credited shoot, further confirming the identity.

So who is Rick Rood?

According to RickRood.com:

Rick Rood has been on the front lines of Out-of-School-Time and elementary education for over 30 years, working directly with children and front-line staff. With degrees in Education, Afterschool Care, and Applied Mathematics, Rick is a practitioner in the thought leader movement, distilling lessons from master teachers like Jack Canfield, Tony Robbins, and Brendon Burchard – giving them practical application to education professionals.  

Rick is a well established and well respected teacher and has been for over 30 years. Currently he's the Outreach & PD Coordinator at the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement.

The biggest problem with the whole thing?

The Patrons section

The site hosts a patrons page offering paid access to additional photographs of child models. 100 "full resolution" images a month. On the legacy patrons page they advertise "200 new photo artworks each month" along with a "classics gallery". Whether the operator is aware of this association or not, the reality is that known pedophile websites are linking to a child modeling site that states:

The BeautifulYouth Project is supported by a small, yet committed group of Patrons who share our admiration for the beauty of youth

Regardless of intent, the pattern raises a legitimate public interest question: when legal photography of children is monetized and simultaneously unknowingly catalogued on predator platforms, who bears responsibility for that overlap, and what obligation exists to address it?

Ultimately that's not up to me to decide. In my opinion, the best option for safety here is abstinence. Keep your kids faces off the internet until they understand proper privacy protection. All accounts need to be private, Identifying information like jobs/schools need to be stripped from social media. Keeping children safe is everyone's responsibility.

If you have information relevant to this investigation, contact [email protected]. To report concerns about child exploitation, visit the NCMEC CyberTipline.

Instagram - @gpatricksec