Photograph Illustration by Kelly Caminero / The Day by day Beast / Getty
Former ABC Information producer James Gordon Meek was arrested late Tuesday on little one porn prices, the Division of Justice introduced on Wednesday.
The previous producer, who resigned from ABC in April 2022, the day after an FBI raid on his dwelling, was charged with one depend of transporting photographs of kid pornography, carrying a compulsory minimal sentence of 5 years in jail.
Regardless of an preliminary report by Rolling Stone suggesting Meek was raided by the feds over his journalistic work, Confider reported in October that there was much more to the story. The FBI raid was under no circumstances about Meek’s reporting work, the DOJ subtly prompt in a press release on the time.
In a 15-page affidavit supporting the costs this week, a federal agent detailed two years’ value of communications between Meek and different folks on the messaging app Kik. The usernames, which the division withheld, and mentioned with Meek their shared, extraordinarily graphic fantasies involving little one sexual abuse and exchanged photographs and movies of such abuses, in keeping with the agent. The conversations had been despatched in February 2022 and had been discovered on an iPhone at Meek’s dwelling in the course of the raid.
FBI brokers then linked the SIM card of the iPhone within the exchanges to a quantity related to Meek, who traveled between North and South Carolina and Virginia. The brokers additionally discovered IP addresses linked to the Kik account in these vicinities, in keeping with the affidavit.
Through the raid, FBI brokers additionally discovered a laptop computer, iPhones, and a tough drive with varied types of little one porn on them. The laborious drive additionally contained iPhone screenshots of a Telegram group chat that appeared to focus on little one sexual abuse, in keeping with the agent.
One screenshot, from April 2020, confirmed that the iPhone’s proprietor despatched a video that depicted a younger woman about to carry out oral intercourse on an older man, which was obtained and skim by some within the group. A November 2022 search warrant of Meek’s iCloud account unveiled the identical screenshot, the agent wrote.
Investigators additionally discovered proof that Meek used Snapchat and Instagram to speak with minors, together with sending images of his penis and bare physique. On Instagram, Meek allegedly impersonated a minor woman to speak with different minors.