CNN logo in Atlanta, Georgia in 2020.
A CNN producer faces heinous allegations that he told parents to give up their daughters for sexual abuse. The United State Department of Justice announced their case against Connecticut man John Griffin, 44, on Friday.
“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,” he said.
Griffin allegedly tried to get parents to let him make their daughters sexually submissive. In June 2020, he told the mother of a 9-year-old girl and a 13-year-old girl that her responsibility was to get the older girl “trained properly,” according to the DOJ.
Federal authorities say he was successful in getting to abuse the younger girl, with the mother and her child traveling out to his home in Ludlow, Vermont.
“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,” prosecutors said. “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.”
A separate allegation included him suggesting a “virtual training session” in which he would tell a mother and her 14-year-old daughter to take off their clothes and touch each other at his orders.
In another claim, he suggested that a mother and her daughter to up to his ski house.
“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 DOJ said.
Griffin faces three counts of using a facility of interstate commerce to attempt to entice minors to engage in unlawful sexual activity, the DOJ said. It is unclear if he has an attorney in this matter.
CNN said he was a producer with them for eight years.
“The charges against Mr. Griffin are deeply disturbing,” a spokesperson said in a statement on Saturday. “We only learned of his arrest yesterday afternoon and have suspended him pending investigation.”
[Image via Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images]