This story is wild. Last Friday, Wikipedia was holding a conference in New York and, in the midst of a panel, a 27-year-old man wearing in a pride flag with some words on it walked on stage with a gun. Understandably, this created a panic.
The man, draped in a multicolored flag, walked onto the stage and stood next to Maryana Iskander, the chief of the nonprofit group that runs Wikipedia, interrupting her speech. He announced that he was going to kill himself. He held a gun near his head and pointed it toward the ceiling.
The audience of well over a hundred people panicked.
“People started yelling, ‘Get down, get down!’ and people started ducking behind their chairs,” said Bill Adair, a journalism professor who was there and is writing a book on Wikipedia.
A man in an orange sweatshirt rushed the stage. He was not in law enforcement, but a Wikipedia contributor on the conference’s “trust and safety team”: Richard Knipel, the City University of New York’s “Wikimedian-in-residence.” He grabbed the gunman from behind.
Knipel and another guy wrestled the guy to the ground and not shots were fired. However, police confirmed the gun was loaded.
“Wikipedia’s Volunteers Avert Tragedy by Taking Down Gunman at Conference”
At Civic Hall in New York’s Union Square, a man with a gun walked onto the stage at a Wikipedia gathering.
Volunteer Wikipedia editors and event organizers jumped the gunman and saved the day.
Heroes. pic.twitter.com/Ay62K1iVPD
— Stephen Harrison (@harrisonstephen) October 18, 2025
So what prompted this? Well, the person with the gun, who has since been identified as Connor Weston, had the explanation draped around his neck as he walked on stage. Yet somehow the NY Times describes his motivation as “murky.”
The armed man’s motivations were murky. But he was wearing a sign around his neck that said “anti-contact non-offending pedophile” and he told the audience he was going to die by suicide to protest what he called Wikipedia’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on pedophiles.
The site has a rule that editors “who identify themselves as pedophiles will be blocked and banned indefinitely.”
In case the Times still doesn’t get it, here’s Weston with his sign and a matching pride flag.
A pedophile activist has been arrested after storming a Wikipedia conference and threatening to commit suicide on stage.
Connor Gardner Weston is a member of a prominent pro-pedophile group that has been promoted by academics and the media.
READ: https://t.co/X5ShJKaSFf pic.twitter.com/PGk8zqB5yF
— REDUXX (@ReduxxMag) October 19, 2025
Reduxx reports Weston joined an online group called VirPed last year. VirPed stands for virtuous pedophile and the idea is that these are people who admit to being attracted to children sexually but who promise never to have contact with a child.
While at the event Weston wore a flag designed by members of the online “minor-attracted persons,” or MAP, community. The blue, yellow, and pink flag was draped over his shoulders while a sign around his neck read, “ANTI-CONTACT NON-OFFENDING PEDOPHILE.”
Reduxx has learned that Weston had been active in an online forum dedicated to promoting the concept of a “non-offending pedophile.” In September 2024, Weston became a member of the Virtuous Pedophiles (VirPed) community, where he remained mostly quiet, until a few months ago.
As I was reading this at Reduxx I started feeling a bit a deja vu. I’ve written about this group before. Just as I was starting to remember the details about when and why, I realized I have an unexpected connection to this story by way of my job.
In July, Weston began to ask questions to the community related to safety concerns, and started a discussion thread titled “What happened to Todd Nickerson that I should be afraid of?”
Nickerson had already been a pro-pedophilia advocate for over a decade when he joined VirPed in 2014 and became a prominent spokesperson. In 2015, Salon published an opinion piece by Nickerson titled, “I’m a Pedophile, But Not A Monster.” The publication appears to have deleted the article after facing backlash.
The article told the story of how Nickerson had spent years (at least 7) participating in a pro-contact (pro-child molestation) pedophile group online and then just a year before writing the ‘I’m not a monster’ article he switched sides and joined VirPed. The tweet promoting the article still exists but the article itself is long gone.
I’m a pedophile, but not a monster http://t.co/JibwUL8Idq pic.twitter.com/yLKDa6IpBo
— Salon (@Salon) September 21, 2015
As for the backlash, that was coming from me. When the article was published I was working at Breitbart News and wrote a response saying that I wasn’t convinced Todd Nickerson was so virtuous based on what he’d written. Here’s a bit of what I said at the time.
Nickerson was part of a community that was run by “monsters” for years. He supported it by his presence and with his voice. Now he wants to be praised for leaving? Read it again. He is literally saying that not being a child rapist deserves special commendation. This is the ultimate participation trophy; anyone who is not an immoral monster gets one.
This is like a member of the mob announcing he is leaving the family and claiming 1) he never did anything wrong and 2) he deserves commendation not criticism. I don’t think the police or the public would buy that story, nor should they. At the very least, the cops are going to want a detailed confession of what the person in question was doing during all that time. Even if the individual never committed a crime themselves, authorities would want insider testimony they could use to take down the rest of the organization. Only then does witness protection and a 2nd chance become an option.
But Nickerson doesn’t seem to grasp that virtue is more than not being a monster. Whether he personally did anything or not, Nickerson was on the wrong side of the line for years. He was part of a group with people who possibly acted on their pro-molestation beliefs. And some of them possibly mentioned it over the years.
If he really wants to be a hero, Nickerson should start by outing his former “pro-contact” friends to the police. If he wants to use his “pedo powers” for good, he should be infiltrating sites like the one he was part of using his background to prevent crimes against children which are still in the formative stages. Is it possible that someone with a pedophile’s monstrous inclinations could do more good than harm? Maybe, but based on his own self-report Todd, Nickerson isn’t nearly there yet.
I wasn’t the only person to respond to Nickerson’s post but I was pretty clearly the one that irked him the most. He wrote a follow-up for Salon in which he attacked me by name.
John Sexton’s article for Breitbart attempted to paint me as a terrible person, since the author apparently had no good arguments against my actual position and never bothered to ask me to clarify the points he was confused about. First off, Sexton attacks me for not narking out the people at the pro-contacter forum who were supposedly doing illegal things. This is purely a straw man attack, since I never observed anyone there doing anything illegal or admitting to illegal activity (which is actually forbidden by that forum’s rules)…
As I said earlier, I never witnessed any illegal goings-on at the forum, nor heard anyone confess to molesting kids or using child porn. What exactly does Sexton expect me to have done? I should point out here that politically, most of the forum’s membership, including its moderators, actually fall into Breitbart and Sexton’s camp: they’re raging anti-government libertarian / minarchist types who believe their oppression is largely down to a feminist conspiracy. If you don’t believe me, go ask them yourself. Anyone can sign up and post there.
It went on like that for several more paragraphs. He used my name five or six times and I think mentioned a couple other response to his initial article briefly. If you want you can read my whole response here. I very politely told him to F the F off.
Nickerson saying pedophiles are all in “Sexton’s camp” suggests he’s the one lashing out in anger. I have no doubt the pedophiles on this site he won’t name have a libertarian streak. How else can they argue against laws which seek to prevent sex between adults and minors or which outlaw child porn? Pro-drug legalization people have a similar libertarian streak when it comes to their favorite issue. And pro-choice supporters, most of whom are Democrats and otherwise fans of big government, rally against TRAP laws and any regulation of abortion clinics. Needless to say, these are not all the same people, and, more to the point, I am very much against all the libertarian things the pro-child molesting group supports. They are not in my camp, and I am certainly not in theirs. In fact, I’d like to see their camp burn to the ground.
Anyway, his response to me created even more backlash and not too long after that, Nickerson seemed to fade away. Salon pulled down his article having decided, I guess, that they’d made a mistake turning their brand into a platform for pedophiles.
So, getting back to the Wikipedia event, it seems the Connor Weston was upset that Nickerson had disappeared and worried that maybe he’d been killed or something.
Weston’s question initially asked other forum participants if Nickerson had been “murdered,” presumably due to his quiet exit from pro-pedophile activism. When group members inquired as to why Weston believed Nickerson had been killed, he quoted statements that had been made by a forum administrator, RaccoonDad, who identifies himself as a Lead Tech Admin & MSC Liaison.
“People have been actively attacked and killed for being non-offending pedophiles, look at Todd or anyone who’s been publicly outed,” RaccoonDad is quoted as saying in Weston’s post. “Todd was stalked and harassed…”
I have no idea what happened to Nickerson but after asking about it, Weston decided to ride through town on his bike with his pedophile flag draped around him. So he was pretty worked up about it.
Bottom line, I have no doubt any self-described pedophile is living a pretty miserable life. Fortunately, this guy didn’t hurt anyone and maybe he can get some help instead of threatening to kill himself over a Wikipedia policy.
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