Former Green Party Candidate, Suspended for Appointing Paedophile Father as Election Agent, Hired by Reddit

A former UK Green Party candidate and Liberal Democrat Diversity Officer who was suspended from both parties after being implicated with individuals involved in paedophilic activities has been hired by Reddit as an administrator. 

Aimee Challenor/Knight of Coventry, England, announced on Friday, 18th December, that she had been hired by Reddit as an admin, going under the moniker of u/IsNotTheImposter. 

Challenor/Knight, a trans woman, was previously head moderator of the Reddit Public Access Network (RPAN). She wrote an open letter to Reddit in April of last year, criticising the site for not taking action against anti-LGBT sentiment in subreddits and condemning “multiple attacks” against Reddit’s LGBTQ+ community. The letter ultimately led to the removal of many gender-critical users and subreddits from the site. Subsequently, when Challenor/Knight was made a Reddit admin, she stated that she would work hard to make subreddits “great communities.” 

A Reddit post made on March 22nd by the moderators of the r/ukpolitics subreddit explained a long-standing moderator’s permanent suspension from the platform. According to the post, the moderator had been suspended by Reddit’s admins for posting an article published by The Spectator on the 8th of March which briefly mentioned Challenor/Knight’s suspension from the Green Party in 2018. The r/ukpolitics mods then asked their community to refrain from naming Challenor/Knight, warning that doing so “may result in your account being banned by the admins.” They also warned users against asking further questions, advising against discussing the incident on the site publicly or in a private message, as any mention could result in a ban.

Aimee Challenor/Knight had joined the Green Party in 2014, having acted as an equality spokesperson and chair for the LGBTIQA+ wing of the party between 2015 and 2017. In 2017, she stood for election as the Green party candidate in Coventry South, receiving 1.3% of the vote. Her father, David Challenor, acted as her Election Agent during the 2017 general election and 2018 council elections, going by the name of ‘Baloo’ Challenor in campaign materials.  

In August 2018, David ‘Baloo’ Challenor was sentenced to 22 years in prison for the rape and torture of a ten-year-old girl in the attic of the home he shared with Aimee. He had been originally charged in 2016, with his daughter appointing him as her Election Agent in the period between his charge and conviction. Aimee Challenor/Knight was suspended by the Green party on a no-fault basis in the wake of her father’s sentence, with the party launching an inquest into safeguarding failures. Aimee Challenor later resigned from the party, citing transphobia, joining the Liberal Democrats as a Diversity Officer. 

In 2019, Aimee Challenor’s partner and husband-to-be Nathaniel Dean Knight of Michigan, USA, was outed by Mumsnet for writing sex stories that involved young children. In an attempt to defend himself, Nathaniel Knight wrote a series of tweets, stating: 

“I fantasize about things I don't want to do in real life. I fantasize about things that are some combination of impossible, unethical, or otherwise outside of my personal capacity to act upon outside of fantasy. I fantasize about jumping 20 feet high. I don't think that means I can or that it would be safe to do so. I fantasize about children having sex, sometimes with adults, sometimes with other children, sometimes kidnapped and forced into bad situations, sometimes coerced through fantasy mind control.

Nathaniel then named Aimee Challenor directly, referring to her work with children, stating: 

“How can @AimeeChallenor work with vulnerable teenagers when she's in a relationship with me? I don't have a violent bone in my body, and I have no interest in real children. In more than half of my lifetime, I have not "graduated" from a fetish for fantasy children to a fetish for real, living, breathing children, and I have never committed a single act of offence towards a real child. I don't even fantasize about real children.”

As a result of his tweets, Nathaniel Knight was banned from Twitter. Aimee Challenor went on record to deny that Nathaniel had written those tweets, stating that his account had been hacked. Consequently, Challenor was investigated by the Liberal Democrats and subsequently removed from the party. She then resigned from her position at LGBT charity Stonewall where she had sat on the trans advisory board for several years, citing a “hostile environment towards trans people.” Challenor then left the UK for the US, marrying Knight. 

Nathaniel Knight, as reported by Graham Linehan, admitted to his paedophilia in 2004 on the website DigiArtistsDomain. Nathaniel Knight, going by the name ‘Nate Hunter’, replied to a forum topic asking “what causes us to have certain fetishes?”:

“I can probably trace almost all of my fetishes back to my own childhood. Let's see, early exposure to sexual situations led to an interest in the immature female body, which led to my paedophilia. Early exposure to hypnosis/mind control in sexual situations led to an interest in domination and thus to my hypnofetish while also contributing to my paedophilia.”

Nate Hunter’s DigiArtistsDomain profile listed Nathaniel Knight’s alias, ‘KharonAlpua’, as its screen-name, which is linked in Nathaniel Knight’s Keybase account. Both Knight and Challenor regularly interacted on the art site Furaffinity in 2015 where Nathaniel posted a variety of his pre-teen child sex stories. 

After the suspension of the r/UKPolitics moderator and subsequent removal of many users and posts relating to Challenor/Knight’s history, it was reported that Reddit was actively “banning people” from discussing Challenor/Knight’s past to “protect their employee from harassment.” Another subreddit, r/Europe, stated that “this is a rather sensitive situation,” warning that posting and responding to related threads presented a “real chance” of “account suspension.” Hinting at censorship, author Jesse Singal stated on Twitter: “unless Reddit can explain, it certainly appears to be nuking negative mentions of [Challenor/Knight].”

Graham Linehan challenged Aimee Knight, and Reddit’s decision to employ her, asking “did Aimee Knight get the job at Reddit by keeping quiet about the real reasons for their removal from the Green Party, Liberal Democrats and Stonewall?” and “does Reddit stand by its decision to remove feminist and lesbian subreddits like r/GenderCritical, which contained some 65,000 members, at the request of someone who, at the very least, has covered up for a paedophile?”. Linehan concluded by stating that scandals involving Aimee Knight will “continue to pile up.”