Throwaway account for reasons.
So, I have an android phone which I replaced a few months ago with an upgrade, and then never got around to selling it on or trading it in.
I'm now looking to do so, but the thing has been sat in a cupboard for a few months and the battery is completely flat.
I've tried to charge it via trickle charging, fast charging, through a powerbank, all to no avail. It's an Honor phone, and even when I was using it daily, it had an issue whereby it seemed to try to draw more power than the battery could offer when rebooting, so it would occasionally get stuck in a boot-loop showing the android logo for a brief flash before losing power and trying to start up again, sometimes taking 50-100 loops to succeed (part of the reason I got sick of it and upgraded). So now when I plug it in, it's immediately trying to boot up, draining the charge it's accrued in the previous few seconds, and turning straight back off again, never gaining any charge. I've tried leaving it plugged in for several days through different strengths of charger and it still won't work.
It was bought used from a UK retailer which offers a very generous 5 year warranty on all of their electronics, so its failure to boot actually does me a favour in terms of it being more easy to return as faulty.
Here's my issue:
When I was using this phone, my wife and I were experimenting with the boundaries of our marriage. Amongst which, one of our favoured past-times was for her to indulge in the company of other men whilst sending me videos of their activities...
The phone won't turn on, or even hold charge to connect via USB to access the internal storage, so I have no way to delete this 'content', and whilst I now consider this an expensive chunk of e-waste, both myself and my wife would rather that content wasn't discovered by some recovery method of which I'm not aware and posted online. It's locked in the secure folder of the gallery app behind biometrics, so I'm not even sure if it'd be accessible over USB anyway.
Any suggestions as to how I could access and delete this content from the phone, or permanently corrupt it whilst leaving the phone in a returnable condition?