Former ABC News producer James Gordon Meek was arrested late Tuesday on child porn charges, the Department of Justice announced on Wednesday.
The former producer, who resigned from ABC in April 2022, the day after an FBI raid on his home, was charged with one count of transporting images of child pornography, carrying a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison.
Despite an initial report by Rolling Stone suggesting Meek was raided by the feds over his journalistic work, Confider reported in October that there was far more to the story. The FBI raid was not at all about Meek’s reporting work, the DOJ subtly suggested in a statement at the time.
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In a 15-page affidavit supporting the charges this week, a federal agent detailed two years’ worth of communications between Meek and other people on the messaging app Kik. The usernames, which the department withheld, and discussed with Meek their shared, extremely graphic fantasies involving child sexual abuse and exchanged images and videos of such abuses, according to the agent. The conversations were sent in February 2022 and were found on an iPhone at Meek’s home during the raid.
FBI agents then linked the SIM card of the iPhone in the exchanges to a number associated with Meek, who traveled between North and South Carolina and Virginia. The agents also found IP addresses linked to the Kik account in those vicinities, according to the affidavit.
During the raid, FBI agents also found a laptop, iPhones, and a hard drive with various forms of child porn on them. The hard drive also contained iPhone screenshots of a Telegram group chat that seemed to center around child sexual abuse, according to the agent.
One screenshot, from April 2020, showed that the iPhone’s owner sent a video that depicted a young girl about to perform oral sex on an older man, which was received and read by some in the group. A November 2022 search warrant of Meek’s iCloud account unveiled the same screenshot, the agent wrote.
Investigators also found evidence that Meek used Snapchat and Instagram to communicate with minors, including sending photos of his penis and naked body. On Instagram, Meek allegedly impersonated a minor girl to chat with other minors.
