A 27-year-old man who allegedly obtained and shared thousands of horrific photos and videos of child and animal abuse material has been arrested just days after he was granted bail.
Landon Germanotta-Mills was initially arrested at a Waterloo address in Sydney on November 25 last year after police allegedly uncovered a web of child abuse material being shared between dozens of individuals online.
The accused is facing 14 charges related to the access, possession and dissemination of child abuse and bestiality material, and he will now face an additional charge of breaching his bail conditions following his latest arrest, which was filmed by a woman on Thursday afternoon.
Police said he was arrested about 4.30pm on Thursday from the address he was bailed to, which cannot be named for legal reasons, and he would appear before Bail Division Court on Friday.
Footage of the incident published on social media shows two officers loading Mr Germanotta-Mills into a police car as a tense verbal exchange takes place between the woman filming and a relative of the accused standing off camera.
The footage cannot be published in its entirety for legal reasons.
Crown prosecutors allege Mr Germanotta-Mills operated five different accounts on a cloud-based storage platform between October 2023 and November 2025 with the purpose of storing and sharing more than 6800 files containing child and animal abuse material.
They also say he used one of those accounts to join a chat called “boys mega link exchange” that had 97 other participants and was used to “receive child abuse material transmitted by others”.
Court documents revealed Mr Germanotta-Mills allegedly told officers during the initial arrest in November that he was a journalist who wrote “investigative articles”, and the material that police said they found on his phone was only “on (his) devices to build a bigger case up”.
Shortly after the arrest, sex crimes squad commander Jayne Doherty said police would allege Mr Germanotta-Mills and others were “engaging in conversations and the sharing of material which depicted child abuse and the torture of children, involving symbols and rituals linked to Satanism and the occult”.
During his initial bail hearing on April 28, prosecutors raised concerns over the potential for Mr Germanotta-Mills to access the material being used as evidence against him because it was “still live”.
At the time, a Crown prosecutor said Mr Germanotta-Mills may theoretically be able to gain access to evidence remotely by applying to recover an account containing the abuse material.
The prosecutor also expressed concern over whether the strict bail conditions, which included a near-total digital technology blackout for the accused, could be adequately enforced.
According to his LinkedIn profile, the defendant did work as an independent journalist for an organisation called the Underground Media Network up until the time of his arrest and even spent time as a production assistant at Network 10 between 2015 and 2017.
