Bangladeshi social media has been passing around a story about a professor in Florida and a goat for a week. Half of it is wrong, and the half that is right is worse than the headlines.
I have obtained the three documents to stitch a broader picture of the whole story behind the fiasco. They are the sworn Criminal Report Affidavit filed by Tampa Police on October 29, the 22-page search warrant and supporting affidavit signed by a circuit judge on October 28, and the notice of appearance and not-guilty plea his lawyer filed on November 1.
Read alongside the Hillsborough County Sheriff's booking record, they tell a story that began not with an animal but with a Dropbox account and an automated report of child sexual abuse material.
Here is what happened, in order.
Raiyan Abdul Baten, 33, was born in Bangladesh on November 1, 1993. He graduated from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), then went to the University of Rochester in New York for a master's and PhD in electrical and computer engineering, finishing in 2022.
The university publicised his doctoral work on social networks and creativity, and he won a dissertation award. He joined the University of South Florida in Tampa as an assistant professor in what is now the Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing, where he ran a small computational social science lab.
By the record, he lived alone in a rented flat at the Cortland Lakecrest complex on North McKinley Drive and drove a 2011 Toyota Corolla.
His USF faculty page, live a week ago, now redirects to the college's home page. The university has not answered media enquiries and has made no public statement.
Several Bangladeshi outlets have reported, citing unnamed former classmates, that he was involved with Islami Chhatra Shibir during his student years at BUET. Waadaa couldn’t independently verify it.
On August 20, 2026, a video file was uploaded to a Dropbox account registered in 2013 to raiyanabdulbaten@gmail.com. Dropbox, like every major American cloud and social media company, runs automated scans that compare uploaded files against a database of known child sexual abuse material.
The file matched. Under US federal law, the company had no choice: within 24 hours it filed a "cyber tip" with the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, NCMEC, a Congress-funded clearinghouse that routes such reports to police.
Bangladeshi readers may know NCMEC already. Its tips led Rajshahi police in 2024 to a school teacher accused of abusing thirty children, and its 2019 data ranked Bangladesh fifth in the world for IP addresses used to share child abuse material.
In America, a cyber tip is the starting gun for an investigation, and it almost always ends at someone's front door.
The tip listed the IP addresses used to access the account. One belonged to Frontier Communications, an internet provider. Hillsborough County Sheriff's deputies obtained the subscriber record: 10420 McKinley Drive, Apartment 7301, account holder Raiyan Abdul Baten.
The address falls inside Tampa city limits, so the case went to Tampa Police.
On October 1, the file landed with Detective Julio Tagliani of Tampa Police's Internet Crimes Against Children squad, who also sits on an FBI task force for violent crimes against children. He has written more than a hundred search warrants. Within four days he had one for the Dropbox account, signed by Judge Leslie Schultz-Kin on October 5.
Dropbox answered on October 15 with six zipped folders totalling 384 gigabytes. On October 22, after sitting outside the apartment complex at five in the morning to confirm the Corolla was there, Tagliani went through the contents with forensic software.
He found, in his words, "thousands of files of adult pornography," selfies of Baten, his USF work documents, and, in a folder labelled "Screenshots \ New folder (2)," thirteen video files depicting women engaged in sexual acts with dogs.
One, running 28 minutes, is described as a compilation.
Not a goat. Dogs. The goat appears nowhere in any document.
On 26 October Judge Frances Perrone signed a warrant for the flat. Then a complication: Baten had moved. Tampa Electric confirmed his account had switched from apartment 7301 to 7201 in the same building on October 9.
A fresh warrant was signed by Judge Michael Bagge-Hernandez at 8:45 on the morning of Wednesday October 28.
It authorised officers to seize every computer, phone and storage device, to compel anyone present to unlock devices with fingerprints or passwords, and, tellingly, to look for children's clothing or dolls "designed or modified to resemble a minor."
That language gives an idea what the detective was really looking for.
Officers were at the door within the hour. Baten was arrested at 9:34 and booked into Falkenburg Road Jail at 11:06.
In America, police must warn an arrested person of the right to remain silent and the right to a lawyer before questioning him. Baten was given that warning and chose to talk.
According to the sworn affidavit, he admitted the Dropbox account was his. He said he had downloaded the child abuse video "accidentally." He said he had downloaded the animal videos intentionally. Shown screenshots from two of them, he identified them as his.
And he told the detective, in the words recorded in the affidavit, that he has "a bestiality kink."
That phrase needs explaining for readers outside America. "Kink" is casual English for an unusual sexual interest, the word people use about their own tastes to make them sound ordinary.
Florida law requires prosecutors to prove that possession was knowing. If upheld, Baten’s reported admission could help establish that element, though prosecutors must still prove the remaining elements of the offence.
Baten was booked on thirteen counts of filming, distributing or possessing an image or video of sexual activity with an animal, one for each file, under Section 828.126(6) of the Florida Statutes. Each is a third-degree felony carrying up to five years' imprisonment and a $5,000 fine.
Judge Martin set bail at $2,500 per count, $32,500 in all. An immigration notification hold was placed on him, standard for a foreign national, meaning federal authorities must be told before any release.
What isn't on the charge sheet is what started it all. He has not been charged under Section 827.071, possession of child sexual abuse material, an offence that in practice is prosecuted far more harshly, often federally, and carries lifetime registration as a sex offender.
Police seized his devices, and on October 28 a cloud backup provider returned a further 48 gigabytes of his data under a separate warrant. Forensic examination takes weeks. The affidavit was written on the morning of the arrest. The State Attorney decides what to charge once the analysis is done.
"Accidental download" is a defence forensic analysts are trained to test. They look at how long a file was kept, whether it was opened, whether it was moved or renamed. The file in question was uploaded to his account on 20 August with a filename dated 23 July.
On November 1, attorney J. Ruffin Hunt of Hunt Law PLLC filed a written plea of not guilty and waived formal arraignment. As of November 4, Baten remained in custody.
Florida's law on this was weak until recently. In 2022 the legislature rewrote it: direct sexual contact with an animal became a second-degree felony, and for the first time it became a crime merely to possess or share images of it.
The provision Baten is charged under is four years old. Had this happened in 2021, keeping those thirteen files would not have been a crime in Florida.
Bangladesh's law is older and, on paper, harsher. Section 377 of the Penal Code of 1860, inherited from the British, punishes "carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal" with up to life imprisonment.
Possession of such footage would fall under the Pornography Control Act 2012, which punishes keeping pornography with up to two years and distributing it with up to seven. I could not find a single reported Bangladeshi prosecution for possessing such images.
Not that the record shows. I found no previous case of a Bangladeshi national charged in the United States over animal pornography.
What I did find is a pattern of Bangladeshis caught by the same NCMEC machinery for child material: three private university students arrested in Dhaka in 2020 after a complaint from a 14-year-old in America; the Rajshahi teacher in 2024; and Zobaidul Amin, a Bangladeshi medical student extradited from Malaysia to Alaska in March this year to face federal charges of running what prosecutors call an international child exploitation enterprise with hundreds of victims. He faces twenty years to life.
These cases share the same technology. Once a file is uploaded, the company's software flags it, a report goes to NCMEC, and an IP address becomes a name and an address.
This process leaves no privacy in a cloud account. Dropbox, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Apple all do it, and they are legally required to.
The State Attorney for the 13th Circuit will decide the formal charges once the device forensics are complete. If the child abuse material count is added, this becomes a different case, likely with federal interest.
If it is not, Baten faces thirteen third-degree felonies and his own recorded admission. On any conviction, a Florida court must also bar him from owning or living with animals for at least five years, and a conviction for a foreign national is grounds for removal from the United States.
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