Nicholas Attalla, a 34-year-old self-styled predator hunter from Pennsylvania who goes online as Niky Sal, was stabbed during a brawl he started after wrongly identifying two strangers as a paedophile at a coffee shop in Jamestown, New York, and has now been charged alongside them, the New York Post reported.
Attalla, James Morris, 43, and Morris's friend Eric Spencer were charged on September 4 with disorderly conduct and endangering the welfare of a child. The charges relate to a one-year-old boy who was in the coffee shop and was struck during the fight, though he was not hurt.
How the sting was set up
Attalla built his online following by posing as a minor to lure adults seeking sex with children, then confronting them in person while filming the encounter, a tactic used by a wider community of self-described predator hunters who post their stings on social media.
In December 2025, Attalla said he came across a man online who claimed to be a 16-year-old boy looking to meet girls. He posed as a 14-year-old schoolgirl and arranged to meet the man at a coffee shop in Jamestown, a small city in western New York state.
A confrontation with the wrong men
When Attalla arrived at the coffee shop, he decided that Morris and Spencer, who were sitting together at a table, were the pair he had been messaging online. He approached them, accusing them in public of trying to abuse a minor and filming the confrontation on his phone.
The argument quickly escalated into a physical fight, during which Morris stabbed Attalla in the arm. Attalla was taken to hospital for treatment.
Charges follow a wrong identification
In January, Morris was charged with assault, tampering with evidence and illegal possession of a weapon. But a subsequent check of his phone showed he was not the person Attalla had been corresponding with online, and that the man who had posed as a 16-year-old was someone else entirely.
The new charges filed on September 4 against Attalla, Morris and Spencer stem from the danger the brawl posed to the toddler in the coffee shop at the time. All three now face proceedings over the incident, which began with an attempt to expose a predator and ended with a stabbing, a mistaken identity and charges against the accuser himself.
