Ashton Challenor, the boy who disappeared
Ashton Challenor, the boy who disappeared
By JL
Aimee (nee Ashton) Challenor is a 23-year-old trans-identified male who, until recently, had a prominent role in UK politics and within Stonewall, a major LGBT lobbying group.
His political career has been covered elsewhere, but we feel it’s time to shine a light on some of the murkier aspects of this story. There is a certain urgency now that he and his associates are moderators of dozens of groups on Reddit, including some intended for young people.
BACKGROUND
In August 2018 Aimee's father, David Challenor, was found guilty of torturing and raping a 10-year-old girl in the attic of the family's Coventry home. Images of child abuse, including photographs of Challenor and his victim, were found in the house and on Challenor’s computer and camera.
It emerged that Challenor senior committed his crimes while dressed as a little girl, wearing baby-doll dresses and nappies.
David Challenor was Aimee's election agent when Aimee stood as a Green Party candidate for Coventry South in 2017 and during the 2018 local elections. Aimee appointed him after his arrest for the crimes which now see him serving a 22-year prison sentence.
It’s well known that David Challenor used the alias Baloo (ie the name of the bear in The Jungle Book) and was heavily involved in the Green Party through Aimee.
A subsequent investigation found that David Challenor had posed a "major safeguarding risk" when working within the Green Party and that Aimee had committed a “serious error of judgement" in working with him after becoming aware of the charges.
After leaving the Green Party—accusing them of ‘transphobia’ on the way out of the door— Aimee joined the Liberal Democrats where history quickly repeated itself. The Lib-Dems launched an investigation into a whole new safeguarding concern.
This time, the alarm was sounded over Aimee's American fiancé (now husband), Nathaniel Knight, and his sexual fantasies involving children.
Although his Twitter account is no longer available for public view, the screengrabs remain and the thread has been archived.
But Aimee’s troubling associations don’t end there.
Meet Peter “Katrina” Swales, a trans-identified male, freelance programmer and very close friend of the Knight-Challenors.
On social media Swales’s aliases include @nekosuneAD and @nekosune. It’s the name of his own personal website and the handle he uses on Keybase.io and GlobalGameJam.com. (You will notice that Swales sometimes uses the surname Knight - more on that later.)
Swales is involved in various sexual fetish communities. He’s an “adult baby diaper lover” (which speaks for itself), a “furry” (someone who is a sexually aroused by role playing anthropomorphic / cartoon animal characters) and a “babyfur” (a branch of furrydom in which participants role-play as infantilised characters.)
The image above is called “Sissy Kitten”. It is one of the pictures posted to a profile with the username “Nekosune”, undoubtedly Swales, on a furry fetish website. It is one of several ‘sissy porn’ animal images on that profile. This is significant as ‘sissy porn’ is a particular grubby crevasse of porn culture in which males find sexual gratification by being humiliated and degraded in a submissive female persona, very often role-playing as little girls or young teens.
Swales is the moderator of over 80 Reddit communities. Most of them are LGBT sites and many (eg r/lgbt_KidsZone and r/transgenderteens) are aimed at children and/or young teenagers.
Some of the sites moderated by Swales (eg r/hypnocaptions and r/TransBodies) involve nudity and sexually explicit content and several (eg r/pokegirls/) contain paedophilic images.
Evidence suggests that Swales was (and probably still is) in an intimate relationship with Aimee Challenor and Nathaniel Knight. Swales often calls himself Knight online. Here is his LinkedIn profile, for example.
Knight is now Aimee Challenor’s married name. In 2017 Aimee Challenor talked on social media about travelling to Aberdeen to ‘visit family’. Based on his response to this comment, the ‘family’ in question obviously included Swales.
The other person mentioned in Swales’ reply is @feefers, aka “Fiona” Brown, another trans-identified male with a furry / babyfur/adult baby nappy fetish who, like Swales, lives in Aberdeen. (Brown also goes by the handles Fionacat and Fiona Lovecraft.)
There seems little doubt that Ashton / Aimee Challenor has been active on sexual fetishist forums since his very early teens.
Challenor was almost certainly the Fur Affinity user, @MuckyMeerkat, and operated the now-dormant corresponding Twitter account.
The account contains references to Coventry, Challenor’s home town, and to a very obvious alias, Challenora.
However, not all of the content is Laserquest and roadworks.
Notice the dates on the tweets; Ashton / Aimee Challenor was only 14-years-old when he posted these tweets.
In 2014 it looks like Aimee changed from Mucky Meerkat and became Troublepup Lovecraft, now demanding she / her pronouns. (Lovecraft after one of Fiona “Feefer” Brown’s personae, perhaps?)
And here is “Fiona” Brown (aka Feefers), describing Challenor as the “naughtiest cub” he ever met. This was in May 2015 when Aimee “Troublepup” was only sixteen. So how long was this relationship going on?
This collection of screenshots demonstrates that Aimee Challenor had a furry persona on Twitter. And that he clearly spent time with in Aberdeen with Brown and Swales, one of whom he describes as his “Mommy”, in 2016.
Another one of Fiona Brown’s online personae is ‘Runt’. This is his profile page on the fetish website, Fur Affinity. Even if his profile was only updated yesterday, the fact that he gives his age as 41 makes him at least 17 years older than Aimee Challenor.
The “Gallery” and “Favourites” sections of his profile demonstrate his particular proclivities; lots of furry/diapered/infantilised characters and images.
In this blog post from five years ago, “Runt” (ie “Fiona” Brown) describes how he and Nekosune (ie Peter “Katrina” Swales) stayed with Aimee Challenor at his flat in Coventry. There are several references to them having “Cuddles with Aimee” during their stay. At the time, Aimee Challenor was eighteen years old whereas Brown and Swales were in their 30s.
This is Aimee Challenor discussing his unique Reddit profile picture.
So it’s safe to assume that this is his Reddit alias.
And it’s equally safe to assume that this Reddit post is from him, detailing his polyamorous relationship with one partner in the USA and one in Scotland.
Challenor’s husband, Nathaniel Knight, is also involved in a variety of sexual fetish sites. Given it was his Twitter handle and his user name on Keybase.io, it seems obvious that Knight is the user Kharon Alpua on a site dedicated to “hypno porn”.
This appears to be Nathaniel Knight’s profile on yet another fetish site. He lists his ‘fave’ activities as animal anatomy, femboys, forced nudity, forced clothes-wearing, gender transformation and hypnotism/mind control, amongst others. And in his “yes” column are ‘anal training’, ‘anal virginity’, ‘animals’ and ‘babysitter’.
So, to sum up.
Ashton / Aimee Challenor grew up in a house where his father raped and tortured a 10-year-old girl whilst wearing a frilly dress and a nappy and calling himself Lucy.
From a very young age, Aimee had intimate relationships with at least three much older males, two of whom claim female identities, all of whom are part of the furry/ furbaby/adult baby/nappy-lovers fetish scenes, all of whom seem to have a deeply troubling interest in pre-pubescence and one of whom, Aimee’s husband, has openly expressed his sexual fantasies involving children.
Whilst we might recognise that Aimee Challenor is a tragic victim in this mess, we must remember the positions of power and influence he held and how quickly and easily he reached them.
He was the Green Party’s LGBTQI and Equalities officer, stood for parliament and in local elections was even in the running to be the party’s deputy leader.
He campaigned vociferously for the Green Party to adopt the policy of self-identification, crushing any dissenting voices.
In 2017 Aimee and his father took out a private court injunction against another member of the Green Party, Andy Healey, to prevent him from speaking at the Green Party conference against the policy of self-ID.
Aimee then tried to bring a criminal prosecution against Healey for 'hate speech' (mainly 'misgendering' ie correctly referring to Aimee as male) which the police eventually rejected. Aimee attacked the police and the CPS for failing to act and was even given an opportunity to complain to a parliamentary committee.
Andy Healey is still waiting for his suspension from the Greens to be lifted and has no received no apology from those who called him a bigot for raising concerns. Amelia Womack, the deputy leader, Claire Phipps and Rachel Collinson should be doing a lot of soul-searching right now.
Not only did Challenor hold tremendous sway in a major political party, he often appeared in the press and was given a regular media platform. Furthermore, even after the revelations about his father and husband-to-be, Challenor was on the Stonewall trans advisory board until as late as July 2019. He was advising the charity which provides training for schools, public bodies and innumerable businesses.
While women like Helen Watts were losing their positions for raising concerns about Stonewall’s advice, this young and deeply troubled boy, ushered into positions of power and influence with his paedophile father close at heel and his furry, diapered, much-older boyfriends lurking in the background, fought ferociously for the rights of males to identify however they want and smash basic safeguarding principles.
Did nobody ever stop to wonder why?
Jesus christ. This is the first Glinner/JL article I couldn't read to the end. It made me feel sick. I will have to read it all though when I have the stomach for it again. I am grateful for the warning. I know my 13 year old daughter visits some of those LGBT Reddit groups. It makes me white hot with rage and tears are stinging in my eyes wondering how it has got this far. Central outliers indeed. They don't even have to hide it anymore. These are the people all parents have their 'worse nightmare' moments about, except they are real and here and close to our children. I feel physically sick so can't imagine how hard it must have been for the writers and researcher to put this together and for that I thank you.
The Challenor shit show was what made me aware of TRA's, queer theory, etc... While I learned a lot of what's in the piece back then its still disgusting to see it all in one place; to see how victims become abusers
I've been concerned by the policy capture at reddit for some time, they purged the majority of gender critical subreddits some time ago, but they've also mandated external admins on what remained. Reddit is not a safe place for children, teenagers or the vulnerable.