The Tiberius Show enables a child predator

Executive Summary

This is about a simple failure dressed up as “content.” The producers of The Tiberius Show kept Episode 370 online across Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube after clear, publicly accessible warning signs about their guest, Daniel Rumanos (born Ronald Lee Mershon Jr.), were raised. They did not remove the episode, did not issue a meaningful correction, and appear to have managed the fallout by limiting or suppressing criticism on their own platforms, pushing the real discussion into outside watchdog spaces.

Three things matter here. First, retention was not an innocent mistake, it became a choice once concerns were made public. Second, the backlash looks “quiet” on official channels largely because the channels are controlled, moderated, and in some cases effectively sealed off. Third, Rumanos’s claimed religious identity, including Jewish heritage and ordination, reads less like a coherent background and more like an engineered persona, built to look safe, searchable, and credible to strangers.

The end result is ugly and avoidable. The show’s producers prioritized continuity, downloads, and the appearance of normal operations over the safety of a minor host and a young audience.

The Unregulated Frontier of Youth Podcasting

Youth podcasting is the wild west with better microphones. Independent shows can rack up real reach with none of the guardrails you’d expect in traditional media, especially when the on-air talent is a child. The Tiberius Show is hosted by a 14-year-old. It brands itself as wholesome and educational, a tour of careers and virtues, “Leadership, Integrity, Obedience, and Nobility,” packaged for kids and parents who want something safe in the background.

That “safe” branding is also a magnet. High trust environments are exactly where reputation laundering works best, because audiences assume somebody, somewhere, did the homework. When that homework isn’t done, the branding becomes a shield for the platform, and a welcome mat for anyone good at sounding legitimate.

How a Guest Like This Gets Booked

You don’t end up platforming someone like this by doing real vetting and getting unlucky. You end up here by not vetting at all, or by treating a guest’s self-description as verification.

Rumanos presented himself using job-title camouflage: “stage magician,” “sci-fi author,” “talent agent.” Those are shiny roles for a youth career show. They also function as social permission slips. A parent sees the labels, the kid sees the cool factor, and everyone stops asking the next question, which is the only question that matters: who is this person when you type their name into a search bar and don’t use their own links?

The “talent agent” claim is the most alarming part to accept casually. Legitimate agents are licensed and regulated in many contexts, and they do not need minor-hosted podcasts to find “new actors and models.” Predators, on the other hand, love any “industry gateway” disguise because it invites minors to approach them, send photos, and chase approval. Broadcasting that identity to a youth audience is not neutral. It’s an endorsement.

Public Red Flags Were Not Subtle

This is not a situation where the record is buried. The issue is not that information was impossible to find. The issue is that it was ignored.

The Baltimore City Paper profile “Sociable Satanist” is a core piece of the public footprint, including a claimed radio appearance framed around occult “spells” and sex with 12-year-old girls, later brushed off as “performance art.” Even if you buy that excuse, choosing that subject matter is disqualifying for a kids platform. “It was a bit” is not a safety policy.

Later, the “performance art” dodge becomes even harder to defend when the language shifts into self-labeling and provocation, including “Hebephile Pride!” in public comments. Hebephilia is a clinical term for attraction to pubescent minors. The host of The Tiberius Show sits right in that age range. Putting a man publicly signaling attraction to that demographic in direct conversation with a 14-year-old is not a quirky booking mistake. It is reckless.

There are also repeated claims in public discussions of stalking and harassment behaviors, including allegations of sabotaging critics’ lives and collecting images from social media. Some commenters mention reports to law enforcement. These are not the kinds of smoke signals you “wait and see” about when your product is a child’s face and voice.

Why the Episode Stayed Up

Keeping Episode 370 online after warnings is the point where this stops being about a bad booking and becomes about the producers.

High-volume shows run on momentum. Every episode is a unit of output, a number on a chart, a line in a catalog that helps sell the show to sponsors and platforms. Removing an episode means admin work, broken links, awkward questions, and a visible gap that looks like an admission. So the lazy incentive is to freeze, sanitize, and move on.

Silence is also a tactic. If you do not acknowledge the controversy, you can pretend it doesn’t exist, especially if you can manage comments on your own channels. Turning comments off, filtering keywords, or deleting criticism doesn’t resolve risk. It just pushes the warnings somewhere you don’t have to look at them.

This is the legal and reputational trap the producers walked into. Refusing to act can feel like “avoiding drama,” but it increases exposure. If a guest uses the credibility of the appearance to approach minors, and you had public notice and did nothing, you don’t get to play innocent later.

Two Different Realities, Depending Where You Look

Outside watchdog spaces, the tone is fear, anger, and active warning. People share aliases, patterns, and current locations. The words used are not casual insults, they read like people trying to keep others from getting hurt. The guest’s own engagement in those spaces, mocking and baiting, adds to the sense that attention is the fuel.

On official Tiberius Show platforms, the controversy is nearly invisible. That absence is not reassuring. It’s suspicious. If a guest has a widely debated footprint and the official comment sections are spotless, the simplest explanation is moderation and suppression, not harmony.

The Religious Persona Problem

Part of the rebrand involves spiritual authority, especially claims tied to Judaism and ordination. The stated basis is the Universal Life Church, which offers instant online ordination with no meaningful formation, oversight, or background check. Using ULC ordination to imply legitimacy within established Jewish religious structures is, at best, misleading.

The “keyword stuffing” pattern is also hard to miss. Listing every major branch of Judaism at once as “affiliations” reads like search optimization, not lived identity or serious practice. Orthodox and Reform Judaism are not interchangeable hats you stack for better SEO. Hasidism is not a vibe add-on. This isn’t theological complexity, it’s a résumé made of tags.

There’s also a troubling identity-conflation issue around “Rabbi Daniel,” including references that appear to overlap with a legitimate, distinct rabbi in New York. If the public can confuse the two, and the persona benefits from that confusion, that’s not an accident that favors truth.

The “Author” Credential and Synthetic Authority

On the show, “sci-fi author” functions as credibility, especially to a young host who likes books. But the authorship described is heavily AI-assisted, with ChatGPT presented as a core writing engine. That is not automatically immoral, plenty of people use tools, but it matters because it lets someone generate “credentials” quickly and use them as access tokens to rooms that trust “author” as a vetted status.

Even worse, some of the themes and titles associated with the writing output are grotesque in context, including explicit references to pedophilia in titles. If you are booking someone for a youth platform and you miss that, you didn’t vet them. If you saw it and booked them anyway, that’s beyond negligence.

What This Actually Means for The Tiberius Show

The show sells “Nobility” and “Integrity” as a mission, but the operational behavior says something else. When confronted with credible public warnings, the producers kept the episode, controlled the visible narrative, and left the audience in the dark. The child host is the brand, and the producers treated child safety like an optional add-on.

Until Episode 370 is removed, and a clear corrective statement is issued, The Tiberius Show functions as reputation laundering. Not by accident, by refusal to clean up the mess they made.

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