Translation
A 20-year-old attacker who led a three-man assault against a gay man he met on the adult hook-up app Grindr has claimed that he did it to “teach the man a lesson” for allegedly trying to sleep with a 15-year-old boy. However, on Monday, a judge said the attacker provided no proof of his victim’s alleged pedophilic intentions — the judge sentenced the attacker and one of his accomplices to 10 months in prison.
The attacker, Blake Dean Nightingall, told the court that he created a fake Grindr profile using pictures of himself as a 15-year-old before arranging to meet his unnamed victim at Smithfield library in Queensland, Australia, on October 22. Nightingall said his victim wasn’t “fully innocent” because he allegedly sent sexually explicit photos before meeting up.
Related
Anti-LGBTQ+ education head wants Bibles in schools. His colleagues say he plays porn in his office.
Two state Board of Education members say Ryan Walters played a video with two nude women during a recent meeting.
The victim was then repeatedly punched in the face, choked from behind, thrown to the ground, and dragged before being forced to provide his bank details and phone. Nightingall claimed not to have assaulted the man but recorded part of the attack on his phone, and told the court, “He needed to learn his lesson,” the Star Observer reported.
Never Miss a Beat
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today
Defence solicitor Jacqueline O’Reilly said Nightingall had no criminal history, accepted that his behavior was unacceptable, and was “otherwise of good character from a good family.”
“The offending displays a lack of maturity and gung-ho attitude that is quite typical of young men of this age bracket – there was no thought of how the meeting would play out and the consequences of their actions to the victims or themselves,” O’Reilly told the court.
When asked why he didn’t report the man to the police about the man’s alleged pedophilia, Nightingall said, “It made more sense to get a funny story out of it.” However, Magistrate Adam Johnson didn’t buy Nightingall’s version of events.
“The circumstances were appalling, … you saw yourself with the other offenders as judge, jury, and executioner,” Johnson said.
“You’re not a sworn constable – you don’t have the power to investigate offenses – you were acting like a vigilante law enforcer,” he added, noting that Nightingall provided no evidence to prove his claims of his victim’s pedophilic intent.
Johnson sentenced Nightingall and one of his accomplices, Max Fryer, to 10 months imprisonment with immediate parole. The third alleged attacker has not yet been brought to court.
This isn’t the first time that an attacker has accused his gay victim of trying to sexually prey on children. Conservative Christians and neo-Nazis have long accused gay people of pedophilia as a pretext for violence and hostility against them.
In 2014, Maxim Sergeyevich Martsinkevich, the leader of the Russian anti-gay vigilante group “Occupy Pedophilia,” was sentenced to five years in a penal colony after repeatedly luring LGBTQ+ youth into abusive encounters through fake social media profiles. Martsinkevich claimed that his victims had all planned to meet with underage boys for sexual encounters, and he recorded videos of himself threatening queer people with physical violence, torturing, and robbing them before posting the videos to social media.
Martsinkevich appeared in many of the videos and is often seen forcibly shaving the victims’ heads in reverse mohawk hairstyles, painting rainbow flags in the shaven areas, forcing the victims to perform sex acts with objects, pouring urine on them, and forcing them to make self-denigrating statements to the camera.
Martsinkevich, a neo-Nazi married to a woman, died while in prison. Investigators claimed he died of suicide but also found signs of torture on his dead body, Russian media reported.
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.
(new Image()).src = "https://capi.connatix.com/tr/si?token=2 ... debce1fa0c"; cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "233d5589-4c80-486d-8c38-e522bcdbc118", queryJsTargeting: {"articleId": 484497, } }).render("e999bf39de8f4df2913f690e1c50b10a"); });
Source: https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/07/he- ... the-price/