The Brooklyn Riviera Hostel is a "Filtering System" for Talib Abdul-Hakeem's Illegal Voyeur Porn Business
Hi everyone,
I hate to be the bearer of bad news. What I believed for 3 years to be the best hostel in our world (I've stayed at 50+) has a dark secret.
In case of any doubts, watch this Google Drive link, which I'm currently sharing widely: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Jv-L9S7KCD12stNAgLKoE6oP0G7QgnT0/view?usp=drive_link
Important accompanying notes: https://drive.google.com/file/d/140PqUV-1NUQxuOx_12J3Ab1uKbTs6NCb/view?usp=sharing
Depending on response I will elaborate in comments. I met Talib Abdul-Hakeem—founder/sole owner/"manager" of The Brooklyn Riviera Hostel, in New York City, United States—in June 2023. I was a hostel guest from Australia, and I quickly became friends with Talib. Everyone loved him, and I and other regulars returned to the hostel many times over the years. We were a family, and I started to get to know Talib on a very personal level. In April 2026, I started to hear jokes about footage of me. On May 3rd 2026, I realised it was all true. Since founding The Brooklyn Riviera in 2015, Talib has used secret cameras to film his guests in the bathrooms and dorm rooms of his hostel. He has maintained an illegal porn website with 3,000+ paid monthly subscribers, and the content doesn't show victims' faces, and typically technology is used to change the backgrounds in the footage so as not to incriminate the hostel nor Talib. The content goes up on this website for 3–4 days before automatically disappearing "for legal reasons." A second unknown individual helps operate the website and/or subscriber list. As far as I know, the cameras ("built into the walls" of the hostel's bathrooms and dorm rooms by a third [potentially second] "professional") are permanently installed, almost always recording, and often uploading to the website. Talib uses a bizarre exchange principle he learned from the Italian Mafia in order to decide who gets uploaded and who doesn't—to the best of my knowledge, anyone who breaks the hostel rule 7 Nights Maximum Stay gets uploaded. This is his way of justifying his behaviour to himself. I am a victim of this sex crime. There are dozens and potentially thousands of victims of this sex crime; likely mostly women, as Talib typically has more female dorms than male dorms going at any one time (he rearranges rooms according to the necessities of his hostel business and his porn business). Even if not every hostel guest is uploaded, every guest of the hostel is subject to the presence of hidden cameras. Talib has also been known to keep footage for his own pleasure. I know all of this because Talib has repeatedly told me all of this in detail.
The main reason I'm making this Reddit post is to ask everyone's advice. The only thing I care about is that the filming permanently stops. I personally don't care whether or not Talib gets charged and imprisoned for this Class E Felony (maximum 4 years in prison). I spent 6 weeks living at the hostel and trying to change him. (At one point he agreed to stop, before changing his mind 12 hours later.) I talked to him in person TODAY, effectively giving him one final chance before I would report everything to the police for the first time. He's a proud person, a lifelong criminal (I'm happy to share his myriad unrelated crimes), and still he refused to stop filming; so I finally reported what I had to the NYPD, in person at the 77th Precinct. They were useless and weren't even able to file a report or record any details. Tomorrow I'm going in person to the FBI; I plan to contact Hostelworld, Google Reviews, the online portal for the FBI Internet Complaint Crime Center (IC3); and potentially Talib's mother, the owner of the building in which the hostel illegally operates (an acquaintance of mine named Teji), etc. Talib is fully aware I am blowing the whistle.
Today's NYPD experience was a significant letdown (though part of me was expecting it). Ideally Talib would agree to permanently stop filming, all the cameras would be destroyed, the website and any reproductions of the content would be permanently removed from the Internet, the greatest hostel in the world would be exorcised, and Talib would continue to operate it legally. (All of this constitutes my ideal outcome and this is therefore not a slanderous anti-Brooklyn-Riviera Reddit post, only a report of facts and an effective siren and an appeal for help.) But he's refusing to back down, and has blocked me everywhere (though we're still in intermittent and toxic contact), and this is where I'm at. Let's assume the filming must end no matter what. My question: HOW?
Thank you