Former federal prosecutor and child protective advocate Francey Hakes discusses some of the biggest U.S. cases involving child pornography and sexual abuse, and also outlines how the Internet is making it more difficult for law enforcement personnel to apprehend and prosecute offenders.
The conversation delves into the case of James Bartholomew Huskey, a tennis coach for young girls who was eventually apprehended through some good police work by law enforcement personnel in Maine and was convicted of sexually assaulting his own daughter.
“The child he was abusing was very close to him and he was able to have complete and total access to her,” Hakes said. “He used a clown mask sometimes when he was sexually assaulting the child – it’s very creepy, it was a very serious case, the worst images I’ve seen in any case and there were hundreds and hundreds of them, of him molesting and sexually assaulting this child.”
She said one of the most frightening parts of the case was that during a debriefing session after Huskey agreed to plead guilty, they asked him to explain why he began molesting his daughter at age 5, what was it that brought the behavior on. “He said that he had been trading child pornography with others and he’d run out of ‘fresh’ child pornography. It’s like baseball cards to these guys, they want new, they want fresh, they want the latest, sometimes they want on-demand.”
The idea was that Huskey said by abusing his own child and providing those fresh images to trade with others, he was able to get much more child pornography to consume himself.
Watch the full episode to also hear Hakes outline the typical timeline for capturing and punishing offenders, and for a discussion on the disturbing case of Philip Gerry, an Atlanta, Georgia man caught using a file-sharing network and possessing tens of thousands of horrifying explicit images of children being abused and involved in sex acts.
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