BURLINGTON, Vt. — The FBI arrested a Stamford man who is now facing federal charges of unlawful sexual activity after luring several women and girls into his Ludlow, Vermont residence, the Vermont Department of Justice announced Friday.
Officials said 44-year-old John Griffin of Stamford is accused of messaging parents of minor daughters and attempting to lure underage girls into engaging in sexual activity from April to July 2020.
He faced a federal grand jury in Vermont and was charged with three counts of using a facility of interstate commerce to attempt to entice minors to engage in unlawful sexual activity.
Griffin has been a producer for CNN for about eight years, according to the network.
"The charges against Mr. Griffin are deeply disturbing," a spokesperson for CNN said in a statement Saturday. "We only learned of his arrest yesterday afternoon and have suspended him pending investigation."
While allegedly enticing moms and minors, he used the narrative that women should be sexually subservient and inferior to men, conveying ideas such as a "woman is a woman regardless of her age."
He gave a mother and a 9-year-old over $3,000 dollars to travel from Nevada to Boston, where he picked them up at the airport in his Tesla to bring them to his home in Ludlow. At the house, the daughter was told to engage in and had engaged in unlawful sexual activity.
He tried to entice two other children over the internet to engage in sexual activity. One involved proposing to host a "virtual training session" that involved him instructing the mom and her 14-year-old daughter to touch each other. The other attempt was to get a mother and 16-year-old daughter to come to the Ludlow house for sexual training during a "little mother-daughter trip".
Griffin could face a minimum of 10 years of prison and a maximum of life in prison per count.
The federal government intends to seek forfeiture of the Ludlow home, his Tesla, a Mercedes, and other property used in these incidents.
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