A former investigative producer for ABC News, James Gordon Meek, 53, has been sentenced by senior U.S. District Judge Claude M. Hilton to six years in prison for the transportation and possession of child sexual abuse material.
Some of the images and videos depicted minors younger than 12 years old, including an infant. He also reportedly used the platform to discuss his sexual interest in children.
The statement further states that Mr. Meek transported the iPhone containing child sexual abuse material with him when he returned from South Carolina to his residence in Arlington, in northern Virginia.
Mr. Meek was also found to possess multiple electronic devices with explicit images and videos of minors.
He pleaded guilty to using an online messaging platform to send and receive child porn, according to a plea agreement made public on July 21.
At the time, he also acknowledged knowingly violating 18 U.S. Code Section 2252, which outlaws transporting child porn, and knowingly possessing or accessing child porn “with intent to view.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Zoe Bedell and Whitney Kramer, trial attorney for the Department of Justice’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, prosecuted the case. They argued for a sentence of at least 16 years in prison.
In court documents filed on Sept. 25, Mr. Meek’s attorney, Eugene Gorokhov, argued for the minimum sentence of five years.
The case was investigated by the FBI Washington Field Office’s Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force, which is made up of FBI agents, along with other federal agents and detectives from northern Virginia and the District of Columbia.
Tip From Dropbox
Authorities were initially alerted to Mr. Meek’s activities in 2021 by the file-hosting service Dropbox, which had found an account containing explicit material depicting minors. Dropbox notified the FBI.After investigating the IP addresses associated with the Dropbox account, Mr. Meek was identified.
A search warrant was subsequently executed at Mr. Meek’s Arlington home on April 27, 2022. He was later arrested in January and held by authorities throughout the trial and sentencing.
Mr. Meek was hired to join the ABC News Washington bureau as an investigative producer in April 2013, and he started working at the network the following month.
Previously, he had been employed as a reporter for the New York Daily News and as a senior counterterrorism adviser and investigator for the House Committee on Homeland Security.
A spokeswoman for ABC News previously told The Epoch Times that the company employed Mr. Meek until April 2022. He left the publication at about the same time that his house was raided, with his last story for the outlet published on April 14, 2022.
ABC News didn’t respond to a request for further comment by press time.
