[cw: sexual abuse] Max Boord

[J.S]

I apologize for keeping my identity private. I know it is against the forum rules, but I have had enough dealings regarding this person, that I really don’t want to rehash it with new people. However I feel that I have to bring this topic up, because it has come to my attention that he is still to this day involved in FIRST and interacting with students, and thank you to met for showing me that this can be done.

Max Boord is a child predator. He has on numerous times attempted to coerce students from various teams into forming close relationships with him and more.

This took place when I was 14-15 and Max was somewhere between 22-25, I do not know exactly how old he is now. I was the lead (and frankly only) design student on my FRC team. Max approached me online offering to help design robot parts for me. He promised that he could help my team win a blue banner, a team that had never won anything until then. I was instantly excited. This was Max Boord, a member of the community who was active on Chief Delphi, various slack groups, and discord groups. He was known for being an expert cader and a part of multiple teams.

I openly invited him to our team in hopes that it would help us win. He started giving us design tips, helping direct how things should be done, and even cading entire parts of the robot and telling us to just build it and we will win in the upcoming season. This went on for a few months, and eventually he started even telling me that he would fly out to where we were (since he was not local) to attend our competitions in person and help us out. I was excited to have an experienced mentor with us.

It was about then that he started being overly inappropriate. Looking back on it as an adult, there were signs way earlier that I should have caught on to and alerted someone. But I failed to do so and fell into his trap. He asked for my snapchat and started sending me snapchats daily, to which I would respond because I thought he was just being friendly. But he started commenting on my looks and my body. It initially started out with simple compliments like complementing what makeup I was wearing, but eventually he grew bold enough to directly call my breasts and behind as attractive.

The final straw before I finally realized I needed to get help was when he asked me to send him a picture of myself naked. When I initially refused and laughed it off, he pressed harder and even implied that if I did not do it, he would stop helping my team and would not help my team win a banner.

I have reported this to many people back in the day, including FIRST itself, but it never went anywhere significant. I know he was officially banned from FIRST, but clearly that didn’t affect him at all and he just went to yet another team.

These are all second hand stories so take them as you will:
I have been told/he has claimed he has been a part of several teams over the years, including 233, 1477, 1902, 1369, and others. He has been kicked off several of those teams due to further inappropriate behavior including behaving inappropriately with students both online and physically in person (which thankfully I never had to experience), and including one team for abusing drugs with or around students.

Today I found out via a couple of people on the Major FRC Discord, that Max Boord is with yet another team. I have included the screenshots I was sent below regarding the team he is currently helping.

I really hope this post does not get taken down. I and several others have already tried to handle this privately, but clearly it does not do anything since he is continuing to be a part of FRC. His story is known amongst the active online community, but not amongst outsiders, and that is how he continues to be a part of more and more teams. If this gets taken down, it is only ensuring that he continues his behavior.

[Libby_K]

I am replying to this with another post that came out of the FRC Discord for clarity to the readers here, and hereby step out of moderation discussion on what we do with this thread - but for the time that it stays up, I want to make sure this is transparent.

Several folks on FRC Discord were concerned and didn’t know where to go. Knowing where this individual is from I called the RD, Wendy (who I’ve known since I was in 9th grade) and she already knew who I was talking about. She asked me to post this back to that Discord, since she doesn’t use the platform. I don’t know how active she is on CD anymore…

I wanted to make clear to the thread (for as long as it’s up) that THIS was the response from the person in charge of that FIRST region…

[Nick.kremer]

First of all, thank you J.S. for sharing your story.

Being a regular on the FRC Discord, I feel as of I have seen so many different mentions of Max Boord helping numerous FRC teams despite apparently being banned from the program.

My question is this:

What can and should FIRST HQ be doing to ensure our program remains a safe space for children? How can we prevent serial predators like Max Boord from jumping from team to team with impunity when remote mentoring is easier than ever?

[met]

J.S.
i’m so proud of you for coming forward. i really know how hard it can be, but i promise, what you did was the right thing. this is only the beginning, and these people are going to get what’s coming to them and will never, ever be allowed near children again. if you need anything at all, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. hang in there.

[CalkinsGarrett]

Max has also been involved, and has attempted to be involved, with multiple teams for CADathons. In at least one season it was discovered that he directly contributed to a team, including private conversation with students who were designing the robot. He is not just trying to get involved in FRC teams, but the FRC community as a whole. The things he has done and continue to do are disgusting and HQ needs to do more to ensure that max and people like him cannot be allowed to continue doing things that are putting our kids in active danger from predators. I cannot involve myself with an organization that turns a blind eye to well documented and frequent abuse and only puts up a cardboard facade of safety.

[Brian_Maher]

Thank you, J.S., for coming forward, and I am so sorry you experienced what you did.

@Libby_K

However… what happens when they try to join a team who doesn’t effectively use the FIRST site, and doesn’t actually sign up as a mentor on the dashboard? How will FIRST know about this?

Moreover, how will the teams know who is banned from the organization if they choose not to use the dashboard?

This isn’t just a problem for teams. The online FRC community is decentralized, scattered across countless Discord servers, group chats, etc. Max Boord was in the Fantasy FIRST Discord server for a while before we were informed about his misconduct and removed him. Relying on word of mouth is not sufficient, FIRST needs to provide a more robust solution for protecting students in both their team environments as well as the broader FRC community.

[Nate_Laverdure]

@EricH

Worthy of a separate thread

IMO doing the discussion in this thread helps protect it from deletion.

[EricH]

Given the mods already being aware, I don’t think this thread is a deletion target, at all.

For visibility/clarity, I’d prefer a secondary thread–that way that important dialogue doesn’t get lost even if this one does get shut down.

[J.S]

Oh no.

I just received this DM from a student.

He is still clearly working with multiple teams and using fake accounts on this very forum to reach out to unsuspecting students. Nothing that FIRST or the community has done so far has apparently stopped this. If anyone else has been approached by Max Boord or is currently working with him, please stop immediately and report it to someone.

I am posting this here to show that he is still continuing this exact behavior, and hoping one of the more involved adults, @Libby_K potentially?, in the community can contact this team and warn them.

Mod edit: There is another individual mentioned in the PM screen shot that otherwise is not mentioned or accused of anything on here and that name has been redacted in the edit.

[Connor_McBride]

This hurts. Even though I’ve been in the program for over a decade, I have no idea he was like this. Max helped me out with my college capstone project by printing parts for me on a markforged. He had also gave inspiration to 166s 2021 off season robot “Off-Axis”. Definitely cutting ties with him. I feel disgusting knowing that I worked with him.

[Libby_K]

@J.S

I am posting this here to show that he is still continuing this exact behavior, and hoping one of the more involved adults, @Libby_K potentially?, in the community can contact this team and warn them.

I’ve reached out to Wendy and she will be passing this on to the appropriate folks for the teams in question.

[guineawheek]

Stepping in for hopefully one of the last times.

We’ve known about Max Boord for years. He’s been banned from online FIRST communities since at least 2020. Part of why he’s still able to work with teams today was that instead of addressing the problem, we, the FRC community, both the FRC Discord and ChiefDelphi, chose to delete all conversations of Max Boord rather than warn teams about working with him. And what happened? We let him get away with it for two years after he was supposed to be gone.

We all hold some responsibility here. ChiefDelphi and the FRC Discord both owe an apology to J.S. and all the other teams that Boord has interacted with since 2020.

Friends mentioned how disturbing it was to see so many members of the community not know who Boord was when this thread was made. Turns out, hush-hush word of mouth did not work as well as perhaps we thought it would.

I’m very glad that this is the first thread on him that’s been able to stay online.

[Ekcrbe]

Given that this thread is collecting posts/messages from multiple places, and that another similar thread was also started today, I wonder whether it makes the most sense to systematize the organization of them somehow, perhaps in a single (pinned) wiki or a within specific sub-forum/tag that they can be moved into. Maximizing the visibility of these threads and the others that are, unfortunately, likely to be started soon would be beneficial, both in spreading the word about particular perpetrators and in normalizing and encouraging other victims to speak up if they feel able.

[CIM]

I do agree that there should be a more accessible list of folks banned from FIRST. How CD handles these kinds of allegations and posts is a challenging discussion that we as a community should work through.

That said - to be clear here - to the best of my knowledge, any moderation discussion I can find on CD about Max Boord is along the lines of “this user was banned by FIRST, let’s ban this account”. There is no secret CD moderator thread (that I know of) where we had a collection of abuse allegations detailed against Max Boord that we chose not to share. This is just based on my memory + a quick search I did to make sure I didn’t forget anything huge, though.

Personally, I didn’t know why he was banned from the program until this thread emerged. I can’t speak for any other moderators on this.

[BrianAtlanta]

It’s great that the CD community wants to help by keeping this type of information more readily accessible. @Libby_K posted that a person from that region is aware and addressing it locally/regionally.

This terrible behavior has been seen in other organizations, the FIRST YPP policy and processes needs to evolve so they can better handle this.

[Nick.kremer]

@CIM

There is no secret CD moderator thread (that I know of) where we had a collection of abuse allegations detailed against Max Boord that we chose not to share.

This comment, from almost 2 years ago was about Max Boord. To the best of my knowledge, that thread was scrubbed of direct accusations, hence why the linked post was written to be vague.

This policy of preventing “harmful doxxing” in all circumstances coincidentally caused precisely the following:

@CIM

Personally, I didn’t know why he was banned from the program until this thread emerged. I can’t speak for any other moderators on this.

[Andrew_Schreiber]

@Nick.kremer

This policy of preventing “harmful doxxing” in all circumstances coincidentally caused precisely the following:

While I agree with you that policy absolutely caused that reaction (I was in the same boat as Chris) there are real difficulties here. To quote myself from that thread…

Cool guinea pig facts would be good ways we help build programs that don’t place burdens on victims. Mfd facts would be good ways we can align believing accusers with the concept of innocent until proven guilty in a way that doesn’t start with the victim is lying as the base assumption. But these are hard problems and idk that we have a solution.

I actually had a conversation with one of the CD mods when this thread popped up about how something felt not great about posts like this about a non public individual (CEO/Owner of companies? They are public people, random mentor less so) and we couldn’t come up with a good answer on how to say “bad behavior should be called out and it shouldn’t be isolated to pockets” and also “but we want to make sure that it isn’t weaponized”

It’s hard and there isn’t a great answer.

[Nick.kremer]

It’s a bit easier when person in question is banned from FIRST.

[agraduatedalumni]

Thanks for coming forward and being so brave J.S. You are not alone and he has done the same exact thing to me 7 years ago when I was 15. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t even know who to report to. This is a repeated behavior.