VERMONT – A former CNN producer has received a 19-year prison sentence for committing child sex crimes in Vermont. John Griffin, aged 45, entered a plea agreement in December, confessing to connecting with a woman through a website and coercing her to bring her nine-year-old daughter to Ludlow for illicit sexual acts.
In exchange for his plea, the government dropped two additional charges of enticing a minor.
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.
On these communication platforms, Griffin sought to persuade parents to allow him to train their daughters to be sexually submissive. In June of 2020, Griffin advised a mother of 9- and 13-year-old daughters that the mother’s responsibility was to see that her older daughter was “trained properly.” Griffin later transferred over $3,000 to the mother for plane tickets so the mother and her 9-year-old daughter could fly from Nevada to Boston’s Logan airport. The mother and child flew to Boston in July of 2020, where Griffin picked them up in his Tesla and drove them to his Ludlow house. At the house, the daughter was directed to engage in, and did engage in, unlawful sexual activity.
The indictment also includes specific allegations that Griffin attempted to entice two other children over the internet to engage in sexual activity. 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. 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.
Following his arrest in 2021, CNN terminated his employment.
News by Breaking911
