Ex-ABC News reporter James Gordon Meek facing minimum 5 years in child porn case following guilty plea
Disgraced former ABC News reporter James Gordon Meek is facing at least five years in prison after pleading guilty to child pornography in a Virginia federal court Friday.
Meek, 53, admitted to transporting and possessing child sexual abuse material, which carries jail time ranging from 5-20 years.
Under federal sentencing guidelines that come with his guilty plea, Meek is likely to face far less than the max at his Sept. 29 sentencing.
Meek, a once-acclaimed national security journalist, was hit with the federal charges in February roughly 10 months after the FBI raided his Arlington, Va., home April 27, 2022, seizing his electronics.
Meek resigned from ABC News and went off the grid immediately after the raid.
On his phone, the feds say they found three conversations in which Meek allegedly expressed a desire to sexually abuse children — and they found he had both received and sent photos and videos of child pornography.
In one troubling message, Meek allegedly asked someone on a chat app, “Have you ever raped a toddler girl? It’s amazing.” And in another message he shared a perverted fantasy of “abducting, drugging, and raping” a 12-year-old girl.
The shamed journalist also kept child porn images and videos on his other devices that showed he’d chatted with minors on the internet, prosecutors allege.
The probe was launched after Dropbox alerted officials that Meek had child porn on his account.
Meek was hired by the network in 2013 after working for the New York Daily News — where he broke a story in 2006 that Al-Qaeda was foiled in its plan to bomb the New York City tunnels.
Meek investigated and produced Hulu’s acclaimed 2021 documentary “3212 Un-redacted” about a US Special Forces mission in Niger that left four soldiers dead in 2017. He also won an Emmy in 2017 for breaking news coverage of the Pulse nightclub shooting.
Meek served as a senior counterterrorism advisor and investigator for the US House Committee on Homeland Security starting in 2011.
His lawyer didn’t immediately return a request for comment Friday.
