Cartoon Art Museum Curator Andrew Farago Arrested for Secretly Recording Party Guests, Including Children, in Bathroom
Andrew Farago, the curator of San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum and one of the more prominent progressive voices in the organized comics community, was arrested June 3 on 20 counts of invasion of privacy after secretly recording birthday party guests using the bathroom at his Berkeley home, according to court documents obtained by The Berkeley Scanner.
The allegations date to May 23, when Farago co-hosted a birthday party at his South Berkeley residence. During the party, a woman found Farago’s cellphone concealed and recording video in the bathroom. The phone contained footage of Farago himself setting up the recording, according to police, as he had hidden the device under a towel and positioned it to capture guests’ genitalia as they used the restroom. Party guests included both adults and children.
When the woman confronted him, Farago made admissions and stated he had deleted the videos from his phone and the cloud, according to Berkeley police. Officers subsequently obtained an arrest warrant, arrested Farago at his home on June 3, and served a search warrant seizing approximately a dozen electronic devices.
Following the incident but before his arrest, Farago emailed party guests to express remorse. He wrote, according to court papers: “I hid my phone in our bathroom for the purpose of spying on our guests, my closest friends in the world. I had never done anything like that before and don’t know what possessed me to do it. This was an inexcusable violation of your privacy and our friendship and I am prepared to face whatever consequences will come from this tremendous lapse in judgement.”
As of publication, no criminal charges have been filed. Berkeley police said they could not release additional details due to the ongoing investigation. Farago did not respond to the Berkeley Scanner’s request for comment. He is presumed innocent under the law.
The arrest is significant within the comics community because of Farago’s institutional position and his long record of public ideological commentary.
Farago has served as curator of the Cartoon Art Museum since the mid-2000s, building it into one of the country’s foremost repositories of cartoon and comic art history. He received the Inkpot Award from Comic-Con International in 2015, one of the industry’s most prestigious honors for contributions to comics and popular art. He chairs the Northern California chapter of the National Cartoonists Society. His published books include the Harvey Award-winning Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Visual History, Batman: The Definitive History of the Dark Knight in Comics, Film, and Beyond, The Complete Peanuts Family Album, and most recently A Minecraft Movie: From Block to Big Screen. He is published by Simon and Schuster. He is married to webcomics creator Shaenon K. Garrity.
Alongside that professional record, Farago maintained an active social media presence that was consistently and combatively left-wing in its orientation toward comics industry controversies. He was a vocal opponent of the Comicsgate movement, describing its participants as bigots and comparing them to racist fictional villains. In February 2024, Bleeding Fool documented a series of his posts, including one stating: “Never forget that everyone in ComicsGate took personal offense when Superman took a stand against the Klan,” and another drawing a comparison between Comicsgate creators and the X-Men villain Graydon Creed, writing: “Watching the X-Men cartoon again. Graydon Creed, the shrill, screaming bigot seemed so over the top and ridiculous back then, but today he’d be running the Mutants of TikTok social media account and would be cranking out a dozen YouTube videos a day about the Woke menace.”
Farago took to The Daily Beast where he was quoted by the media at length in his attacks on ComicsGate: “[Comicsgate] is made up of people who were into the Gamergate thing and when that ran out of steam they noticed that they hadn’t made comics miserable for enough people yet.”
He spent a lot of time on social media, especially Twitter pre-Elon Musk takeover, harassing artists and professionals such as Cyberfrog creator Ethan Van Sciver who put up with his relentless attacks for years. Van Sciver reacted to the news, “It doesn’t surprise me that someone who mercilessly worked to ruin my life and career, and the careers of so many others who loved to make comic books, but were political conservatives or followers of our Savior Jesus Christ, trespassed on the sacred privacy of the friends and guests he invited into his home. Andrew Farago represented so many pillars of the mainstream comic book industry, like The Comics Journal, San Diego Comic Con, DC Comics, Hachette Group Distribution, and the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. He even wrote a book about Snoopy. His behavior, which involved hiding his cell phone under a towel in his guest bathroom in order to film the genitals of his party guests, is emblematic of the sickness that lurks in mainstream comics, where evil is welcomed and feted, and traditional American values are hunted and despised. I hope he finds Jesus Christ through diligent prayer and bible study should he be sent to prison, where he belongs.”
He used his institutional position and platform to position himself as a guardian of progressive values within the comics community. He curated museum programming and public appearances through that lens. He spoke with the authority of someone who ran a respected cultural institution and was regarded as a credible voice on what comics should and should not be.
That same man wrote to his closest friends that he hid his phone in their bathroom to record them using the restroom at a birthday party.
The Cartoon Art Museum has not yet issued a statement.