In a statement on Facebook and Instagram, Chris Bendann proclaimed that he was “wrongly accused of awful crimes.”
He was facing allegations that he had sexually abused one of his students at the Gilman School, a private, independent all-boys school in Roland Park, where he worked from 2007 to 2023.
“Unfortunately, I am now one of the 3,337 people who have been wrongly accused in this great country since 1989,” Bendann wrote on June 27, 2023. “Like those people, I expect that, in the end, the truth will show that I am innocent.”
Bendann, 40, of Baltimore, later held a news conference on the steps of the Baltimore County Courts Building to again profess his innocence.
But after less than an hour of deliberations, a jury in U.S. District Court in Baltimore on Wednesday found Bendann guilty on all counts of sexual exploitation of a child, possession of child pornography and cyberstalking. The judge took longer to read the instructions.
“It was copious amounts of evidence,” said one of the jurors, Cecily Floyd, 40, a clinical social worker who lives in Southwest Baltimore, “and facts that you could not ignore.”
The student, who is now 23, testified that Bendann drove him and his friends to Meadowood Regional Park or nearby to a hill at the St. Paul’s Schools to run laps naked as repayment for rides home or trips to McDonald’s. Bendann was his eighth-grade teacher, adviser and coach.
The behavior, he said, “just kept getting worse and worse.”
Later, the man testified, he would touch himself while his teacher watched. Bendann would eventually sexually abuse him in parking lots or at homes where he was housesitting.
When the man went away to college, Bendann would constantly text him and threaten to expose nude images if he did not comply with demands.
Bendann, he testified, had several nicknames for him. Among them was “Puppy.”
The Baltimore Banner does not identify people, without their permission, who are survivors of sexual abuse.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Colleen McGuinn and Kim Hagan played eight videos to the jury that they argued depicted child sexual abuse material.
Bendann had deleted the videos off his iPhone. But investigators found them in his iCloud account as well as on two laptops.
The metadata showed that in the videos the man was 16 or 17, FBI Special Agent Calista Walker testified. Bendann can be heard — and even seen — in some of the clips.
Several of the files contained GPS coordinates that matched up with where Bendann was housesitting at the time.
Federal prosecutors put on witnesses, presented financial records, and displayed still images from the videos side-by-side with photos the FBI took as part of the investigation inside those homes to corroborate the metadata. That’s along with showing jurors notes in day planners that law enforcement seized from Bendann’s house.
They also called several classmates at the Gilman School who testified that Bendann would text students, add them on Instagram and Snapchat, and take them to dinner and the movies. He drove them to participate in naked runs and hung out while they partied.
“He latched onto that kid. And he never let go,” McGuinn said in her closing argument. “The time has come. Make him let go. And find him guilty.”
Bendann’s attorneys, Christopher Nieto and Gary Proctor, contended that their client was in a consensual relationship with the man after he turned 18 and disputed that the videos were child sexual abuse material.
“Somebody would’ve known,” Nieto said in his closing argument. “He would’ve reported the abuse.”
Nieto described the metadata as “flawed” and “fallible.”
But Nieto conceded that Bendann committed the crime of cyberstalking. Prosecutors handed out binders to the jury that contained more than 350 pages of text messages between the man and his former teacher from an eight-month period in 2022 — and that was a slimmed-down version.
The foreperson of the jury made eye contact with the man’s parents as the judge read the verdict. Sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 21, 2025.
Sexual exploitation of a child carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years in prison.
Before jury selection was set to begin, Bendann refused to leave his cell at the Chesapeake Detention Facility. U.S. Senior District Judge James K. Bredar then directed the U.S. Marshals Service to deliver instructions to him that he had to come to court.
Bendann later appeared and vowed to skip parts of his trial. But he showed up every day.
And though he also declared that he would testify, Bendann chose to remain silent.
It was yet another promise that he failed to keep.
