An Old Stalking Law Reaches AI Images of Township Officials

A Lafayette Hill man faces two federal cyberstalking counts for posting AI images of a police officer and a township official in Ku Klux Klan robes, an indictment says. Scott Testa, 60, was arrested September 8, 2026, and a U.S. magistrate ordered him held pending trial.

United States Attorney David Metcalf’s office did not charge a new deepfake crime. It used the federal stalking statute that has covered online campaigns since 2006, treating the generated pictures as part of a longer course of emails, false claims, and threats.

Two Counts Carry a 10-Year Maximum

Metcalf announced the indictment on September 8. The grand jury charged Testa with two counts of cyberstalking over alleged online conduct aimed at a local government official, a police officer, and their families, all tied to Whitpain Township in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania.

He appeared that day before U.S. Magistrate Judge Scott W. Reid. Reid ordered him detained in federal custody pending trial. Assistant United States Attorney J. Jeanette Kang is prosecuting. FBI Philadelphia’s Fort Washington Resident Agency ran the investigation.

THE CHARGING SHEET

• The charges: Two counts of cyberstalking.
• The maximum: The U.S. attorney’s office put the ceiling at 10 years in prison, three years of supervised release, a $500,000 fine, and a $200 special assessment.
• The penalty statute: For stalking that does not cause death or serious bodily injury, federal law sets not more than five years per count.
• The status: Testa is detained. The indictment is an accusation, and he is presumed innocent unless a court finds otherwise.

Those figures line up if the two counts were stacked. Kang’s office did not spell out concurrent versus consecutive time, and a judge would set any sentence after a conviction.

The Stalking Law Never Mentions Artificial Intelligence

The charging language tracks 18 U.S.C. § 2261A, the federal stalking statute. Congress added it in 1996. A 2006 amendment brought online campaigns inside the same frame, and a 2013 rewrite broadened who can be charged even when stalker and target live in the same state.

The cyberstalking clause makes it a crime, with intent to harass or intimidate, to use the internet or email for a course of conduct that causes substantial emotional distress, or that would reasonably be expected to cause it. The statute also covers conduct that puts someone in reasonable fear of death or serious injury. It does not name image generators, deepfakes, or Klan robes.

Metcalf’s announcement says that on multiple dates in April 2026, Testa, with intent to harass and intimidate two people affiliated with Whitpain Township, used the internet or email in a course of conduct that caused, tried to cause, and would reasonably be expected to cause substantial emotional distress. That is the statutory test copied into the case, not a new AI offense.

Generating a cruel picture, standing alone, is not what the count describes. The count describes a pattern: posts, messages, and mail that prosecutors say were meant to scare two households and wreck reputations at work.

How a Blue Bell Rental Dispute Spread Online

The federal case did not start with a prompt. It started with rental property in Whitpain Township and a fight that moved from code notices to county court to a website.

Testa’s own civil filing lists two houses, 951 Netherwood Drive and 634 School Road in Blue Bell, that he owned with Sharon Testa. She died in 2013. He later described a personal relationship with a Black woman and told the county court the township went after him because he was “in an interracial relationship,” language the federal indictment also recites.

THE BLUE BELL TIMELINE

1. 2018: Police begin answering calls about rental disputes at the two Whitpain properties, the indictment says.
2. 2019: Testa starts receiving township code notices, including claims the houses were illegally converted into multi-family dwellings.
3. September 19, 2024: He reports a daytime break-in at 951 Netherwood Drive. His joinder complaint against the police chief and Detective Sergeant Thomas Wittig, filed in Montgomery County as No. 2024-27992-0, puts the loss at about $30,000 in stolen or damaged property, including jewelry that had belonged to his late wife. Whitpain police later called the jewelry theft unfounded. Two people were still charged with harassment and disorderly conduct tied to the incident. The complaint names Police Chief Kenneth Lawson as a defendant and says attorney Stephen T. O’Hanlon filed the papers.
4. December 2024: The township seeks a preliminary injunction in the Court of Common Pleas to force Testa to fix the code problems.
5. January 2025: A judge grants that petition. Testa launches a website attacking township police and officials, the indictment says, and files a counterclaim repeating the interracial-relationship claim.
6. February 20, 2025: A U.S. District Court judge sends the dispute back to county court. Officials said Testa never filed an amended complaint.
7. 2025 into 2026: Through emails, websites, and podcasts, he keeps saying a federal civil rights suit against the township is pending, the indictment says, which prosecutors call false. He also keeps saying the town is run by racists.

Through 2025 he also put that argument on a public site and a podcast series that framed Whitpain as corrupt and hostile to Black residents, including a 2022 death he treated as unfinished business. That campaign is not the federal charge. It is the years of public accusation that the April 2026 posts then attached to two named households.

The April Posts Named Children and a Workplace

The indictment locates the charged conduct in April 2026, with one Reddit post dated April 28, 2026. Prosecutors say Testa knew the factual claims in that post were false when he published them.

WHAT THE INDICTMENT SAYS HE DID IN APRIL

• The officer image: He posted on Reddit an AI-altered picture of the Whitpain officer he had criticized, wearing a white Klan robe, with the name of the officer’s current employer in the background.
• The false bio: The same post said the officer had been fired, faced many allegations involving minorities and disabled people, and was a defendant in a federal civil rights suit.
• The workplace mail: He emailed more than 50 staff members at that new job, repeating the false claim that the officer was a defendant in a pending civil rights case.
• The coworkers: He posted pictures of the officer’s coworkers with their contact information and invented quotes from people at the job, including lines about “handicapped people,” “the blacks,” “our white kids,” and a signed copy of Mein Kampf.
• The family data: He named the officer’s children, posted an address he believed was the officer’s home, and accused the officer, in more than one Reddit post, of beating a handicapped child.
• The official’s family: He posted an AI-altered image of a Whitpain official and that official’s family, including minor children, faces visible, all in white Klan robes, and identified them in the post.
• The messages: Posts aimed at the official included “We are watching you,” “We are coming,” and “This does not get erased; it’s forever. Your career and your family’s future is going to be pockmarked with you cowards…we are going to run you out of town.”

That mix is what turns a grotesque picture into the kind of pattern 2261A was written to reach. A generated robe on a public official is ugly. Naming children, publishing a home address, mailing a workplace, and writing “we are coming” is the conduct prosecutors say was meant to intimidate.

The officer had already left the township for another job. Putting the new employer’s name in the fake image, then mailing the staff, aimed the campaign at the place that paid him. The official’s children, the indictment says, were shown with their faces exposed, so they could be identified.

A 2025 Deepfake Statute Does Not Reach These Images

Congress did pass a federal AI-image crime last year. It does not fit this file.

President Donald Trump signed the TAKE IT DOWN Act on intimate deepfakes on May 19, 2025, as Public Law 119-12. Sen. Ted Cruz introduced the bill. The Senate passed it by unanimous consent. The House passed it 409 to 2. The law makes it a federal crime to publish, or threaten to publish, nonconsensual intimate pictures, authentic or AI-made, and it orders covered platforms to take reported intimate images down within 48 hours.

Klan robes are not intimate visual depictions. Digital forgeries under that statute are fake sex pictures, not fake political costumes. Testa’s Reddit posts came on April 28, 2026, months after the criminal ban took effect, and prosecutors still did not use it. They used stalking.

TWO FEDERAL LAWS, TWO KINDS OF FAKES

Other offices have made the same choice when the pictures were sexual. In June 2026, a grand jury in the Northern District of Georgia indicted Anthony Belford, 21, of New York, on one cyberstalking count after a January through March 2025 campaign that U.S. Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg said used AI-generated nude images and racist messages from fake accounts against a Georgia college student. Belford was arraigned June 10, 2026. That file also sat on 2261A, not on a custom AI count, even though the pictures there actually were the kind TAKE IT DOWN describes.

Dennis McAndrews, a former federal prosecutor who is not on Testa’s case, drew the line in plain terms after the indictment became public. Mocking someone with AI, he said, is not a crime. Using the pictures to intimidate someone can be.

When it becomes so intrusive and so intimidating, harmful, and places someone in fear for either their lives, their property, their reputation, then it becomes criminal.

Dennis McAndrews, former federal prosecutor

He added that false, harmful AI images can support a civil case, and that when they put people in fear for their safety or their families’ safety, the conduct is likely criminal under state and federal law. That is the second-order point inside this indictment. The generator is not the offense. The campaign is.

Magistrate Reid Ordered Him Held

Testa remains in federal custody after the September 8 hearing. Kang’s office closed its announcement with the standard warning that an indictment only accuses, and that every defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty in court.

The civil fight over the Blue Bell rentals is still a county matter. The federal file is narrower: two stalking counts built on April 2026 posts, workplace mail, named children, and AI pictures that a 2006 statute never had to mention by name.

Reid’s detention order is not a verdict. If the case is tried, a jury will have to decide whether those posts were a course of conduct meant to harass and intimidate, and whether a reasonable person in the victims’ place would have felt the distress the statute describes.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of a pending federal criminal case, and it is for information only. It is not legal advice, a prediction of how a court will rule, or a finding that Scott Testa committed any crime. Anyone who is a party to a related dispute, or who is deciding how to respond to similar online conduct, should consult a licensed criminal defense or civil attorney in the relevant jurisdiction before acting. The charges, detention status, and figures here reflect the indictment and public statements as published on September 8 and 9, 2026, and those facts can change as the case moves.