I was in my late twenties when I got my first tattoo, small enough to tuck under my watch band. It was a choice I carefully made, one that organically led to other more visible pieces. There’s something touching about tattooing, for many of us – when done right, it’s the ultimate exercise in trust and consent, a visceral exercise of body autonomy.
But the tattoo world had a dark side. In 2019, I saw allegations of abuse and predatory behavior within the industry reverberate on social media, and I stumbled down a rabbit hole. As someone who is tattooed, I was interested; as a reporter I was addicted. One character in particular stood out: an itinerant artist named Isaiah Camacho, nicknamed “Toothtaker,” who was the subject of several accusations from women who said they were tattooed by him.
I work at the Metro desk for The Times, reporting crime in New York City. There’s a cadence to that kind of rhythm; we keep track of the daily happenings to inform our readers about what is going on. But the stories I like to tell are deeper yarns that come out of the margins. I love to dig into strange corners that our audience may not be familiar with and introduce them to those spaces through high stakes people and storylines.
The story of mr. Camacho had immediate potential. It seemed to illustrate themes of the #MeToo movement: the lack of justice, barriers to prosecution and the struggle for responsibility in subcultures. I watched as the charges were made against Mr. Camacho: sexual assault, violent assaults, intimidation. He mocked accusers from his own Instagram page.
The narrative potential was clear, but the reporting path was trickier. The #MeToo moment of tattooing had been largely ignored by the mainstream press — at least in part, I was sure, because of the insularity of the industry and the widespread stereotypes about tattoos and people who have them. Nearly all of Mr. Camacho were nameless and fiercely protective of each other. In fact, they seemed inherently skeptical of institutions like The Times.
So for two years I watched the story from a distance. I had found no advantage in the coverage—until last summer, when Mr. Camacho arrived in Brooklyn. He evaded a fugitive warrant in Arizona, where he was charged with 14 violent crimes, including sexual assault.
I began reaching out to anonymous Instagram accounts that detailed the allegations against Mr. Camacho, asking to be put in touch with prosecutors, or asking popular accounts in the tattoo industry to provide my number. There was a brief wave of responses – wary, anonymous messages and a deluge of phone calls, sifting through my reporting data.
Days later, the trail became insanely quiet.
Faced with so little to work with, I withdrew. I regularly updated my editor, but we had resigned ourselves to the hard fact that the story would be impossible to tell if none of Mr. Camacho’s accusers were willing to talk.
Then, in February, I got a message from someone connected to one of the anonymous Instagram accounts: the case against Mr. Camacho had fallen apart. Was I still interested in talking to people?
I dropped everything.
Reporters have a duty – especially to individuals, especially if they claim that a crime has taken place – to explain clearly what it means to talk to us. When the first of Mr. Camacho’s accusers contacted me, I carefully prepared a paragraph explaining how I first found the story, what “off the record” meant and what a reporting process was like. The community around this story was close, and I knew that if I could get one person to talk to me, the news would spread.
Within 24 hours my inbox exploded.
In all, I spoke to more than two dozen people who are familiar with Mr Camacho’s case. Reporting prosecutors’ stories, I combed through hundreds of pages of documents, internal police reports, court records, and prosecutors’ emails obtained through the Arizona Freedom of Information laws. We matched details from interviews with public documents and identified traces of supporting paperwork. I interviewed the Arizona district attorney who dropped the charges due to a lack of physical evidence and the time that had passed, and the prosecutors in a neighboring jurisdiction who are considering reopening the case. In the end, some of the women we spoke to even agreed to use their names and be photographed. (Mr. Camacho did not respond to multiple attempts to reach him.)
I believe a critical element of confidence building was the fact that I’m also visibly tattooed, something I’ve shared in almost all of our interviews. The photographer for the article, Christopher Lee, is also tattooed and fluent in the language of the subculture. To properly articulate this story, we needed sources who could trust us to understand their space and get to it without the kind of judgment that has historically been followed by people, especially women, who are tattooed.
Where Mr Camacho’s case goes from here – if it is anywhere – remains to be seen. But what was important about this article is that it gave space to a community that is not regularly heard by a mainstream audience. Hopefully our readers were introduced to a world they might not otherwise be familiar with.