Roughly a year after being charged with luring a child to his Vermont home for sex, former CNN producer John Griffin has pleaded guilty to one of the charges against him.
“John Griffin agrees to plead guilty because he is, in fact, guilty of the above crime,” the plea agreement said, according to the Vermont Digger, a nonprofit online news site.
Griffin pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Burlington, Vermont, to “using a facility of interstate commerce to attempt to persuade, induce, entice or coerce a minor to engage in unlawful sexual activity.” The other charges against him were dismissed.
Ex-CNN producer John Griffin pleads guilty to child sex charge https://t.co/9CNh38UzpY pic.twitter.com/sN7rIjEjxN
— New York Post (@nypost) December 13, 2022
Griffin had lived in Stamford, Connecticut, but has been behind bars since his arrest last December. CNN fired him after he was charged with child sex abuse.
Griffin had been accused of enticing a Nevada woman to visit him with her 9-year-old daughter in July 2020 and paying more than $3,000 to cover their travel costs. While at a home Griffin has in Ludlow, Vermont, prosecutors alleged, the girl was forced into sex acts.
He was also hit with a $15 million lawsuit in the case.
Longtime CNN producer John Griffin slapped with $15M civil suit amid federal child trafficking casehttps://t.co/0BkHIyULwS
— Fox News (@FoxNews) January 11, 2022
Fox News reported that the evidence in the federal indictment against Griffin included a video of a “completely naked 9-year-old girl” shown with Griffin, according to court filings.
“When confronted with this video during an interview by FBI agents, Griffin’s first response was merely to suggest he was not looking at the naked girl, despite that she was standing so close to him to be touching,” a pre-trial detention memo stated, according to Fox.
The mother of the child faced child abuse and child sex assault charges, according to the New York Post.
The incident that led to Griffin’s arrest was part of a pattern in which he would try to have parents of underage girls bring them to him for training about sex, prosecutors alleged.
“According to the indictment, from April to July of 2020, Griffin utilized the messaging applications Kik and Google Hangouts to communicate with people purporting to be parents of minor daughters, conveying to them, among other ideas, that a ‘woman is a woman regardless of her age,’ and that women should be sexually subservient and inferior to men,” the Department of Justice said in a news release at the time Griffin was charged.
“On these communication platforms, Griffin sought to persuade parents to allow him to train their daughters to be sexually submissive,” the release said.
“In April of 2020, Griffin proposed to engage in a ‘virtual training session’ over a video chat that would include him instructing the mother and her 14-year-old daughter to remove their clothing and touch each other at his direction,” the release stated.
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“In June of 2020, Griffin proposed to a purported mother of a 16-year-old daughter that she take a ‘little mother-daughter trip’ to Griffin’s Ludlow ski house for sexual training involving the child,” the release said.
Griffin will be sentenced March 20. He faces between 10 years in prison and life behind bars, according to ABC.
Griffin has been fined $250,000 and ordered to pay an undetermined amount of restitution to his victims. Half the profits from selling his Vermont home and a Mercedes will go into the court registry, according to his plea deal.
Griffin has also agreed to forfeit his Tesla and all of his electronics.
Griffin must register as a sex offender and will have five years of supervised release afterward.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
