The sexual abuse, the man testified, started when Chris Bendann would pick him up after a night of partying.

At the time, he was 15 and attended the Gilman School, a private, independent all-boys school in Roland Park in Baltimore. Bendann, he said, would give rides to him and his friends and bring them to Meadowood Regional Park or a hill at the St. Paul’s Schools to run laps naked.

Then, Bendann started to take him alone to McDonald’s, during which time he’d have to be nude. The behavior, he said, “just kept getting worse and worse.”

At first, the man testified, he would watch pornography in front of his teacher and masturbate. Eventually, Bendann would touch his genitals in a parking lot or at a home where he was housesitting.

“Did you want to do these things?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Colleen McGuinn asked.

“No,” the man replied.

“Why did you?” she questioned.

“I got threatened,” he responded.

The man, now 23, testified for more than two hours on Friday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore and recounted how the sexual abuse and extortion started, escalated and continued into his early adulthood as federal prosecutors began presenting their case. Bendann, 40, of Baltimore, is standing trial on charges of sexual exploitation of a child, possession of child pornography and cyberstalking.

The Baltimore Banner does not identify, without their permission, people who report that they’ve experienced sexual abuse.

In his opening statement, Christopher Nieto, one of Bendann’s attorneys, said his client is not guilty of sexual exploitation of a child and possession of child pornography.

None of the images that will be presented at trial, he said, were taken before the man turned 18.

But Nieto conceded that his client is guilty of cyberstalking and described the behavior as “embarrassingly regrettable.”

“Mr. Bendann did not have a lot of experiences with romantic relationships,” Nieto said. “His feelings obviously got the better of him.”

The man panicked after his girlfriend discovered his relationship with Bendann and lied about how it began, Nieto said. Members of the school community, he said, circled the wagons, ostracized his client and turned on him to protect their own.

Bendann, the man testified, was his teacher, coach and adviser in eighth grade.

He seemed like a “cool guy.” They’d text each other, go to breakfast and hang out.

His mother said it was as if Bendann was a “pied piper.” Students going into middle school, she testified, were curious to get to know him.

“I trusted him implicitly,” she said, referring to Bendann almost exclusively during her testimony as “the defendant.”

Bendann, the man said, would record him. At the time, he estimated, he was 15 or 16.

Prosecutors showed several sexually explicit images to the jury — including one in which Bendann’s face was visible.

When the man went off to college, he said, he felt forced to maintain contact with his former teacher. Bendann would continually message him if he did not respond, he testified, and threaten to expose the intimate images.

The man said he would strike what he described as deals. He testified that he would send Bendann a certain number of naked photos and videos in which he’d have to smile and appear happy.

But nothing was ever satisfactory.

“Anything the defendant wanted,” the man testified, “he said I had to do.”

Bendann, he said, created an Instagram page that contained some of those images — and threatened to make it public. At one point, he did.

The man’s girlfriend eventually stumbled upon everything.

That’s when he explained that he’d been sexually abused for five or six years and was scared, the man testified. But he lied and told her it was coming to an end.

“I thought in a way it was going to stop everything,” he testified. “It just didn’t.”

Then came Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2023.

Gilman Head of School Henry P.A. Smyth and Director of Human Resources Angela Johnson met with Bendann after the school received an allegation about children running laps naked and placed him on leave.

The school then conducted its own investigation and, four days later, fired Bendann over Zoom.

Meanwhile, the man testified, he told everything to his father. He then spoke with the FBI and the Baltimore County Police Department.

Johnson testified that Bendann denied the allegations and accused the school of persecuting him because he was Asian. He asked who made the accusations.

Bendann, she said, then appeared to cry.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kim Hagan asked Johnson why she stated that it seemed like Bendann was crying.

“Because,” she said, “no tears fell.”