A Georgia man was sentenced to the statutory maximum prison sentence for a child pornography production and distribution scheme that saw him assume the social media identity of a middle school girl and force her to create child sexual abuse content.
Anthony Sparks Brown, 27, hails from Macon, Ga. but he’ll be spending the next 20 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to one count of distribution of child pornography in March of this year. Following his release from lockup, the defendant will be subject to lifetime supervised release and enrollment in a sex offender registry.
The investigation began in January 2019 when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children sent the Georgia Bureau of Investigation a tip “based on a report originating from Facebook detailing child sexual abuse material communicated between two Facebook users,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Georgia said in a press release.
One of those users was a 57-year-old man. The other was purported to be a middle school-aged female referred to by the U.S. Department of Justice as Jane Doe #1 and in court records by her initials.
“In reviewing the records [GBI Special Agent Haylee] Peacock noted that throughout [the account’s] conversations, she was sending out pictures that were supposed to be of [her], but depicted two completely different girls,” Brown’s plea agreement says. “One of the individuals appears to be a 12-14 year old light-skinned black female. The other female is a slightly older, pubescent, light-skinned black female.”
The court document goes on to note that the younger girl referenced immediately above is “believed to be” the “real” owner of the Facebook account used by the defendant over the course of several months – spanning the period between September 2018 and June 2019 – to engage in “several conversations” with “a number of other individuals” that resulted in “the possession, distribution, and production of child pornography.”
In November 2018, the plea agreement says, the defendant pretended to be 12 years old while talking to the victim online and sent the girl several “nude and sexually explicit pictures” of herself. The victim replied asking Brown how he was able to access her pictures.
After that, the defendant threatened the girl by saying he sure that she didn’t want her parents to see the images in question.
“The defendant then proposes they make a deal whereby in exchange for [the victim’s] Facebook log in [sic] information, the defendant would refrain from sending out her explicit photos,” the plea agreement goes on to say.
The girl complied, the document says, but Brown didn’t nearly stop there – making his demands for sexually explicit material that very same day. After that, the defendant repeatedly and increasingly coerced his victim into sending him sexually explicit content of herself. The court document contains several graphic references to the sorts of images and videos requested by the defendant.
“At any time she displayed hesitancy, the defendant threatens to post sexually explicit images of [the victim] to her Instagram and Facebook accounts,” Brown’s plea agreement explains.
Subpoenas sent to Facebook in March 2019 would later identify the victim as a resident of Tennessee. During forensic interviews, she relayed and confirmed the circumstances of how she met the defendant first on Instagram and the ensuing abuse she suffered.
Law enforcement then followed up further and traced the majority of the Facebook account’s logins to an IP address in Georgia where the defendant lived and worked as the lone employee of a hotel.
Brown, in his own interviews with law enforcement, said that he initially received some of the images from his victim on Instagram just by asking for them. He later admitted to threatening his victim in order to obtain her Facebook passwords and assume her identity. He also admittedly made further threats in order to obtain “sexually exploitative images and videos” of the minor.
The defendant went on to tell law enforcement that he distributed those images to her friends and family members and even sold “some of the images to her uncle via Facebook/CashApp.” But, according to the plea agreement, he didn’t sell child pornography to anyone else.
Brown first claimed the girl started following him on Instagram but that he “left her alone” after learning her age in February 2019. He later admitted to “continuing his sexual exploitation of her” after finding out that she was between 13 and 14 years old.
The plea agreement says Brown understood what he was doing was wrong but that he had just “lost his way.”
The defendant was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Tilman E. “Tripp” Self, III on Tuesday, July 19, 2022.
“Anthony Brown’s ongoing exploitation of a middle schooler came to light thanks to a cybertip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. GBI agents tracked down the defendant, freeing the child from his escalating online threats,” U.S. Attorney Peter D. Leary said on Tuesday. “This case illustrates that it takes a cross-section of groups to include caring citizens and dedicated law enforcement to stop the online exploitation of children.”
[image via Bibb County Sheriff’s Office]
