In the naturist community, no one should ever doubt how protective we are of our own children. In our search for a nudist vacation, whether it be a nudist park or resort or a non-landed club, we want to be sure it’s a safe space for our children to play without being bothered by strangers with ill intent.
Unfortunately, in their effort to safeguard their child’s safety, a first timer nudist family may attempt to research naturism online and come upon the name of Nikki Craft’s website. Ms. Craft is a radical feminist and a long-time victim of patriarchal persecution turned activist. She claims to be a former nudist, but has been away from this community since the mid-1980s. Still her website can still be found online. I will not name here as I have no intention of drawing anyone to it. Many in the nudist community already know of it, and I leave it up to this community to forewarn future generations of the harm it promotes.
Thankfully, there is a Facebook page using the same name, which actually provides a helpful discussion thread to expose toxic and illegal behavior of the same type of people, and I do hope this page overtakes Craft’s old and obsolete version.
Basically, Nikki Craft’s website is a list of links to old articles and testimonies from the 1970s to the early 2000s, calling out pedophiles, some of whom are long deceased, of sex offenders who have held positions of power in nudist resorts, some of which are now closed. At the top of the page, she claims, “it became apparent I was running into a large number of pedophiles, child molesters, child pornographers and their apologists; disturbingly disproportionate for such a small, fringe group. I had never run into such a consortium of men, in various ways, abusing children; and never have since, either.”
This type of language is incendiary and sensationalistic; and it’s obvious she’s been on the hunt for potential sex offenders. Basing her viewpoint on her own prior trauma with abusive men, it’s obvious that this abuse has skewed her perspective. She would have every naturist believe that the nudist community is crawling with pedophiles and the same problem exists in the same form to this day.
The reality is far removed from the bleak picture she paints and any careful examination of her posted articles would make her argument glaringly flawed. I have faith that most intelligent naturist parents will see through her fearmongering, but in case they don’t, I will make an effort to clarify how wrong she is by examining some of her posted articles.
But first, ask yourself this question: how are articles published from the 1970s to 2005 relevant to anyone? If the criminal isn’t already dead or in prison, then they are likely too old to be a danger to anyone at this point. And they are unlikely to be “moving about freely” as she claims—we are not talking about billionnaire sex offenders here—they do not patronize these resorts. She is not calling out Jeffrey Esptein, only the middle to lower class criminal types here.
Another question, what about the victims who gave their “testimony” that they had been abused at these camps? While it’s important to pay attention to a victim’s story, if these grown up “nudists” felt that future generations of nudist children were in any danger, where are their individual efforts to either shut down nudist clubs or effect changes in naturist club policies?
In reality, there are outsiders who publicly denounce nudist clubs every ten years or so: people like Congressman Mark Foley whom she has the gall to quote on her page. But curiously, these propagandists, including Foley, are not actual nudists. They do not care to look at nudist history, and are oblivious to the fact that another such outsider made the same argument ten years ago and failed. Foley conflated his own abusive past going skinnydipping with a child abuser with a nudist youth camp, the latter which is regulated and supported by a national organization.
Every anti-nudist protest have come from outside the community. Does this imply that all nudist children are happy to be raised nudist? From my experience, I would think so, but I will address that issue later.
When it comes to concerted efforts to revise policy to protect children, I can’t find any such efforts. Perhaps it’s because those policies are already in place and working? No one who actually grew up as a nudist has ever mentioned that they felt the need to change the rules to ensure their safety. Funny that.
When I sat down to write this article, I’d intended to nitpick each article, one at a time, and contradict her point by point, but I realized it would be pointless. Many of her points are repetitive, and she often puts the blame on the wrong person. Nikki Craft claims that there have been conspiracies to cover up the crimes of pedophiles but makes no effort to understand why the club owners behaved the way they did. She also implies that these clubs are a haven for pedophile rings, which is an extreme exaggeration. One or two criminals meeting in a remote campsite is hardly a “ring,” and it’s hardly a place where a criminal network can thrive. The naturist community can barely get a national movement together; do you think a bunch of nudist sex offenders can get that organized?
Another one of her many repeated accusations were, “The police were not called.” In the 1970s, nudist camps were seen as “cultish” and not well respected by the local community. Many were underground and advertised only in magazines sold to members of a national organization such as the “American Sunbathing Association” and later, “The Naturist Society.”
It does not surprise me in the least that the police weren’t called because that could lead the authorities to shut down the camp, or in one instance at Elysium, officers entered the campground without a warrant and took away a child at gunpoint. How did any nudist back then prosecute their criminal element if the police treated them all as criminals.
While this is not an excuse, I have noticed from my own personal experience, the naturist community had always been an old boys’ network. They take care of their own. And while this is mere speculation, I have also noticed that naturist journalists, like myself, weren’t necessarily members of any club, but leaders such as Lee Baxandall appreciated us for the positive news we were spreading. For our activism.
I postulate this could have been the case for the apologists of abusive behavior in these old boys’ networks. This could lead to female members being ignored when they try to report abusive behavior, and they would simply leave. But eventually, the criminals did get caught though Ms. Craft did little to spearhead the effort. They simply got caught on their own.
Ms. Craft acknowledges that most sex offenders are men, without acknowledging that female offenders are often underreported. While it’s true that there has always been an abundance of single men active in the nudist community, I postulate that nudist leaders, such as Baxandall, may have depended on these men because they were very outspoken and contributed a lot to the activities of the nudist club or park. If some of them had been sex offenders, perhaps some nudist leaders looked the other way as long as there was no hard evidence that any abuse had occurred.
Is this excusable? No.
But would this occur today? It hasn’t, and I don’t think it will continue. With the advent of social media, nudism has become a lot more normalized in today’s society. Many more women have risen to take leadership positions at nudist parks and clubs. There is no doubt that police will be called if there was any suspected abuse. Take the 2013 incident at Sunsport Gardens in Florida. Police were indeed called, and the club owners cooperated fully.
And even without police involvement, there is no doubt that a modern nudist resort will take steps to remove the sex offender and protect the children. In addition, children are better educated about stranger danger. No stranger can simply approach and befriend a child at a nudist resort. And anyone who tries is always forewarned, sometimes even ousted, just because the “offender” shows signs. And from my own experience, single men of color were more likely to be forewarned than single white men. It’s not a solution, and often incriminates innocent men, but such is our world.
But let’s get back to the actual child abuse victims whose testimonials are posted on Ms. Craft’s website. Many were children who claimed to be “unwilling participants,” dragged along by their nudist parents. While there are still nudist children to this day who are indeed “dragged along for the ride,” I have personally never met any who resent their parents for teaching them a different philosophy. Yes, children do drop out, but the shame of being a nudist isn’t prevalent, and I doubt it ever was.
So let’s examine their testimonials a little closer: a common theme of their testimonials is the phrase, “My parents forced to go with them to this nudist resort.” They were then secreted away, kept away from other children where they were abused by a parent or relative or an unrelated male.
According to their own admission, these children can’t be considered “nudist children.” They were never educated about nudist history or nudist behavior etiquette. They were never given a chance to socialize and form bonds with other nudists their age, form friendships with older “brothers/sister” who would look out for them. They were essentially kept in the dark to be abused by family members, which is more common than stranger abuse. Had they been exposed to a little education, they would know of the nudist commitment to NON-SEXUAL nudity, and realize what they’re abusers were doing was against the nudist code of ethics. They are no different than a textile child abuse victim who grew up next door to a nudist park.
And if the abuse was the result of stranger danger, a modern nudist child would have been taught to report such behavior. They could even rally the entire community against their abuser. Since these these testimonials are decades old, and there are more resources available to abuse victims now.
But the worst thing that Nikki does on her website is conflate the actions of nudist leaders with sex offenders who took advantage of the situation. In the case of Leif Heilberg, one of the most prolific nudist photographers, he personally told me that his photos had been reprinted without his permission and juxtaposed into pornographic magazines. Nikki Craft doesn’t let up on her accusations even though she had printed Heilberg’s defense.
Heilberg’s photographs of children cannot be uploaded online, and are not easily available, so any danger that his old materials could get stolen, resold and recirculated is rare. At the end of the day, this is old news and a vilification of one of the most prominent nudist photographers.
In the case of “Naked City’s” Dick Drost, she rightfully calls him out for running a swinger’s truck stop disguised as a nudist park. There has never been anyone sleazier. But after meeting a young woman who grew up at Naked City, she admits that any sexual activity took place away from the presence of any minors. She recalls being taken out of school one day to be questioned by the police, but she didn’t know anything. She only recalls the trauma associated by the stigma of living in a nudist environment.
Ms. Craft also conflates Walt Zadanoff’s Nudist Family Videos with the Ponderosa Sun Club’s Nudist Pageants by putting them all on the same page without context. The two are not related at all. The Ponderosa Sun Club is not affiliated with AANR because of its adult activities. End of story.
Ms. Craft does not acknowledge that most nudists do not approve of nude pageants, but you’d never know that from her page. And to argue devil’s advocate, I personally talked to many celebrities who worked the “old school” pageants. They told me they were a lot of fun; the children would play off to the side paying no attention to the stage. Looking at old videos of these pageants, there was a sense of innocence about them. And they weren’t all about objectification, but that’s neither here nor there as they don’t exist anymore.
As for Walt Zadanoff’s nudist videos, Zadanoff was exonerated in 2003 when he was accused of producing what some could view as child pornography. I do not condone Zadanoff’s videos—they are counterproductive and extremely boring, but not obscene. Zadanoff told me that his goal was to provide content so other nudist parents can see how normal and fun family naturism can be. He naively believed or ignored the fact that his videos could be misused by sex offenders.
Zadanoff is not a filmmaker or a storyteller. A simple narrative in any of those videos, or maybe a distribution deal made to nudist filmmakers who simply want to tell a story would have made it clear that nudists will not tolerate sex offenders or exploiters. If nudist films such as “Act Naturally” or “Nudels of Nudeland” could saturate the nudist film market, then those videos would simply become obsolete, not just banned. I personally produced a scathing comedy that literally crucifies sexual predators, and hopefully there will be more legitimate films to come.
But the greatest, most criminal aspect is what’s not on her site—solutions. By painting sex offenders in broad strokes, demonizing them, portraying them as unthinking monsters, she doesn’t attack the problem of pedophilia. Instead, this mentality drives pedophiles further underground, giving them room to strategize and infiltrate further.
Pedophiles are sexually immature people who lack the cognitive or communication skills to create serious personal connections and relationships, but many of them are hyper-intelligent and abuse that intelligence leading them to believe they are somehow superior to the rest of society. I assume it’s this mentality that made them valued as nudist journalists and activists. Nowadays, we have a better understanding of their psyche. What appears to us as “preying on a child,” in reality, it’s the innocence of a child that they can only relate to. Perhaps they had been abused in their childhood, and are cursed to repeat their abusers behavior.
Are they still a danger? Yes.
Is there a cure for their condition? No, but there is therapy and there is adjustment.
What if workshops could be held to help naturists spot the signs of pedophilia early on, and send such individuals to seek professional help. What if reformed sex offenders could be consulted to oust other sex offenders? After all, these people don’t like each other, let alone themselves.
With the stigma of mental health issues is eroding, these issues need to be brought out into the open. Like cancer, with early detection, there is a better chance for rehabilitation.
As for older sex offenders to change, it’s more difficult for them to be rehabilitated, so they need to be ousted and their photos sent out to affiliated clubs and resorts, which is a practice that has been in place for decades and is easier to do now.
With the proliferation of more young adult oriented naturist clubs and female-run organizations, the “old boys’ network” is eroding. Criminals will inded be caught, but there needs to be a way to address any form of mental illness, since many adults join naturist clubs to improve their mental health in the first place.
But rather than promote a healthy alternative lifestyle that simple needs to address its safety issues, Nikki Craft’s website creates a paranoid, “guilty until proven innocent” mentality which is not needed and harmful in this day and age. She would have us believe there are sex offenders under every rock in every nudist park. Her site is the product of deranged, trauma-compromised mind who rants and raves against a world that she doesn’t see no longer exists. And it needs to be removed from history, much like Nikki Craft herself.
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