RJ May attacks search warrant, law officer in bid to suppress child sex evidence
Accused child porn distributor former state Rep. RJ May has sharply criticized a federal law enforcement officer and described as fatally deficient a search warrant that led to the seizure of digital devices at his house last year.
May wrote in his court filing that Homeland Security Investigations agent Britton Lorenzen had a “reckless disregard for the truth” and misled a federal magistrate judge when she got a search warrant approved last summer to search his cell phones, laptops and other digital devices at his house in West Columbia.
May’s allegations were made Wednesday in a 32-page handwritten motion to suppress government evidence against him in his upcoming federal trial on 10 counts of distributing child sexual abuse material on the internet under the pseudonym of “joebidennnn69.” He could be sentenced to 20 years in prison on each count.
May’s trial is set to begin Oct. 9 at the Columbia federal courthouse.
May, 38, a once-outspoken Republican hard-line conservative state lawmaker, has been held without bond at Edgefield County Detention Center since his arrest in early June. Although he is not a lawyer, May is representing himself in the case.
Federal prosecutors have until Sept. 22 to reply to May’s motion. Two days later, Sept. 24, U.S. Judge Cameron McGowan Currie will hold a hearing where she will hear arguments on the opposing motions.
A key point in May’s motion is that on Aug. 1, 2024, when Lorenzen persuaded a federal magistrate judge there was probable cause to get a search warrant for May’s house, Lorenzen told the judge that agents would very likely find child sex abuse material on one or more of May’s digital devices.
“Agent Lorenzen misled the issuing magistrate into believing there was probable cause the target individual was a collector of CSAM and ... child pornographers rarely if ever dispose of their sexually illicit materials,” May wrote.
But in fact, Homeland Security Investigations agents found no traces of child sex abuse materials on any of the devices they seized at May’s house in West Columbia, May wrote.
In his motion, May also called attention to apparently conflicting statements made by Lorenzen in a corrected search warrant affidavit and also when she testified at a June hearing before a magistrate judge that child sex predators do not commonly keep images of their victims on digital devices.
“Individuals who collect child pornography rarely if ever dispose of their sexually explicit material and may go to great lengths to conceal and protect (it) from discovery, theft and damage their collections of illicit materials,” wrote May, quoting Lorenzen’s first search warrant affidavit.
In an updated affidavit, May quoted a a paragraph that says “it is very common to execute a search warrant and discover no CSAM or CSAM artifacts in the suspect’s home or his electronics or his cloud storage accounts.”
Such sharply conflicting statements by a key law enforcement show there was no probable cause for the search, May writes.
However, May’s contention that the search warrant was invalid and the agent was untruthful may not be relevant to the prosecution’s case, which does not depend on any illicit photos or videos on any of May’s digital devices.
Instead, the prosecution’s case rests on sophisticated tracking of graphic child sex abuse videos shared on the internet. Prosecutors allege that postings on the internet social media site Kik, even though anonymous, lead directly back to the IP addresses of one of May’s cell phones and one of his laptops. IP addresses, which can be a combination of letters and numbers, represent a specific location.
In May’s upcoming trial, prosecutors are expected to present witness who describe the illicit postings on Kik, how they were shared with numerous other users, and how those postings left digital footprints that led directly back to May.
Moreover, prosecutors contend that deleted materials on May’s cellphone match up with the illicit posts of child sex abuse material on the Kik internet site.
Evidence against May includes search warrants to his internet and cell phone providers that led investigators to his house, prosecutors have written.
Even if May fails in his bid to throw out the search warrant, he still might be able to call law enforcement to the witness stand during his trial and question them on the conflicting statements they made to a magistrate judge to get a search warrant.
This story was originally published September 11, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
