Former CNN producer John Griffin has been sentenced to 19 years in prison on Tuesday for committing child sex crimes in Vermont.
John Griffin, 45, confessed to coercing a woman online into bringing her nine-year-old daughter to Ludlow, Vermont for illicit sexual acts.
The US Attorney’s Office for the District of Vermont charged Griffin with three counts of using a facility of interstate commerce to attempt to entice minors to engage in unlawful sexual activity in 2021, however, Griffin entered into a plea agreement in December and the government dropped two additional charges of enticing a minor after he confessed his crimes.
A criminal complaint filed in the state of Nevada against a mother accused of pimping her 9-year-old daughter out to CNN’s John Griffin revealed that authorities arrested the mother in August 2020 and seized Griffin’s devices the following month.
This means that law enforcement allegedly knew about Griffin’s abuse for more than a year before his arrest.
Court records reveal that Griffin paid the mother to fly with the girl from Nevada to Boston, where the girl said Griffin assaulted her.
According to court documents, federal investigators seized computer storage media, devices, phones, cameras, MicroSD cards, images, and video from Griffin on Sept. 2, 2020.The indictment alleged that Griffin lured a mother and her underage daughter to his home for the purposes of sexual abuse in July 2020. From April to July 2020, Griffin used online messaging systems such as Kik and Google Hangouts to reach out to parents with underage daughters.
Griffin is also alleged to have attempted to “entice two other children over the internet to engage in sexual activity,” and tried to engage a mother and her 14-year-old daughter in a “virtual training session” where he would instruct them to take off their clothes and touch each other per his wishes.
Griffin also was said to have attempted luring another mother and her 16-year-old daughter to take a “little mother daughter trip” to his Vermont property so that he could engage in “sexual training” with the teen.
Griffin was a producer for CNN’s senior political analyst John Avlon before he was arrested by the FBI in December 2021 following charges filed by a federal grand jury in Vermont.
Griffin “cannot have contact with people under the age of 18, except in the presence of an adult who has been approved by a probation officer, and is prohibited from being in areas where children congregate, such as schools, playgrounds and theme parks, unless approved by the probation office beforehand” WCAX reports.