Jon Uhler Stealth Edits A Video To Hide False Professional Membership Claims
Jon Uhler Stealth Edits A Video To Hide False Professional Membership Claims
Because our reporting has been solid
Jon Uhler, self-styled “safeguarding expert” and subject of our reporting at The Distance, appears to have edited a video on his YouTube channel to remove false claims about his membership in a professional organization. Uhler took this action the day after a researcher working with The Distance contacted that organization about the claims made in the video.
We assess that this is evidence of consciousness of guilt on the part of Jon Uhler. He knew the claim was false when he made it and simply never expected to be held accountable. Contrary to his claims, Uhler is not a current member of ATSA, the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers. He did not receive special recognition for his expertise from that organization. Jon Uhler is simply lying.
At the 7:25 mark in a stream dated 12 September 2022, Uhler said that he “was granted, a number of years ago, the rare certification by ATSA of a dual research and clinical membership, and that was due to my clinical hours of experience, they required approximately 3,000 hours; by that time, I had over 11,000 clinical contact hours with sex offenders. And they also based that on my unique qualitative work that I produced during my time working with incarcerated sex offenders.”
Here is a clip of that section of the video. It has disappeared from the version at YouTube. Uhler removed it less than 48 hours after we contacted ATSA to point out that he was making this claim.
In a communication dated 3 June, we notified ATSA about Uhler’s claims, pointing out discrepancies that we could already discern. Jon Uhler is not a current member of the ATSA and the organization does not “certify” members. They did not review his work. Uhler simply purchased a “Research and Clinical Membership” from the organization for $200 in 2020, which he then either allowed to lapse or which was revoked.
Uhler did not have 11,000 clinical hours of counseling sex offenders when he joined ATSA. His research has never been peer-reviewed or published and ATSA does not review the research of members. We covered all of this in depth in our first report on Uhler, who is quite simply lying through his teeth about everything, here.
At the time Uhler was a member of ATSA, the requirements for a research and clinical member were “a master’s degree or above in the behavioral or social sciences and has completed a minimum of 2,000 hours of investigative research related to sexual offending behavior and 2,000 hours providing direct clinical services to individuals who have engaged in sexual offending behavior.” Uhler lies about ATSA’s membership requirements in order to puff up his own image.
While ATSA did not respond to our inquiry, it seems they did take action. According to YouTube, Uhler spent a little over ten minutes editing the video less than 36 hours after our contact with the organization, a day and a half. When we checked the video last week, he had removed exactly the bit we mentioned to ATSA in our email. He did not remove any other part of the stream.
Here is a clip from the video that is still online. The edit to remove the false claims about his ATSA membership is painfully obvious. Jon Uhler is free to lie about himself, but he is not free to lie about ATSA. Mischaracterizing them and their membership requirements is hardly a professional move, either. We submit that Jon Uhler is not a real professional sex offender researcher, he just plays one on YouTube.
Of course, Jon Uhler is also a Twitter/X app user. He has made similar false claims many times there. He is not even consistent in his lies. As we noted in our first story about Jon, he first claimed to have treated “approx 4000 incarcerated sex offenders” in 2018, one year after publicly claiming to have treated 3,000 inmates. Yet Jon did not work in a prison during that year, or see any sex offenders in private counseling, as far as we can ascertain.
Consider the following two tweets from Jon. Posted just one year apart, they seem to claim that he had accrued another 1,000 hours of sex offender treatment in just that time. As we exhaustively documented in June, these claims are baseless and false. According to his South Carolina application to be a licensed professional counselor (LPC), Jon had only accumulated 10,625 clinical hours with all types of client, including family and marital counseling clients, by 2022. Then, in the space of just two years, he claimed to have added another 2,000 clinical hours, and that all of his clinical hours ever earned had supposedly been with sex offenders.
We anticipate one more written chapter in our investigation of Jon Uhler, one more podcast, and a video project. We expect to report the results of the review of Uhler’s license by the Office of Investigative Enforcement in the South Carolina Department of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation. We have told the story of Jon abusing and dividing his family, but we have yet to tell the full story of how he has abused and destroyed families that were not his own.
Our subject presents himself to the public as an expert on safeguarding women and children from predators. We submit he is neither safe for women and children nor an expert on sex offenders, that his credentials are not credible. Now that he has been forced to delete just one of his many lies from YouTube, we stand by our reporting with firmer conviction than ever.
