On a school night in early December, a freshman at Radnor High School in Pennsylvania wrote in Snapchat messages to his friends that his parents took his phone away.

“why,” one replied.

“the app,” he answered. “o shi. did you admit to what it was or just the money,” another asked. Just the money, the first boy replied.

“Bro u would literally be dead rn if ur parents found out what u were doing in ts” 

He was sending these messages from a school-issued device, he said. “I dropped 250 on that hoe,” he replied. “Worth every penny.” 

He spent that money on a subscription to an app from Apple’s App Store, called Movely, and allegedly used it to put five of his female classmates’ faces onto nude bodies and make sexual images of them. The boy who used the app and made the videos didn’t show up to school the next morning. But the girls did. And so did his friends. 

“The boys are defending him, and they're now saying that they didn't see anything, but they did,” one of the girls texted her mom. “It's not okay.” 

Radnor is ranked one of the top high schools in the state. It has a little more than 1,000 kids enrolled in the 2026 school year. The school district has had policies in place concerning bullying, harassment, and sexual violence for years, and Pennsylvania law criminalized malicious deepfakes in 2024. In 2025, a man was charged on over 30 felony counts of possession of child sexual abuse material after investigators found more than two dozen files of AI-generated content depicting minors on his phone. 

Despite all this, Radnor’s administration failed students in the days and weeks after it learned about the abuse, according to parents who spoke to 404 Media, email exchanges between parents and mandated reporters in the aftermath, conflicting narratives between the administration and the police department, and spotlight on the school from governor Josh Shapiro.

Already have an account? Sign in