Ex-CNN producer lured 9-year-old to ski house for sex acts, feds say. He’s prison bound
A former CNN producer “thought he could get away” with forcing a 9-year-old girl into sex acts at his $2 million ski house in Vermont, according to court documents.
Now John Griffin is going to prison after federal prosecutors said he lured the child and her adoptive mother to his house on the side of a ski hill in Ludlow during the summer of 2020.
A judge sentenced Griffin, 45, who used to live in Norwalk, Connecticut, to serve more than 19 years in federal prison, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Vermont announced in a June 21 news release. His sentence will be followed by 15 years of supervised release.
U.S. District Judge William K. Sessions III, who described Griffin’s actions as “outrageous” in court, also ordered him to pay $1.1 million to the child, the release said.
McClatchy News contacted his defense attorney David V. Kirby, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Vermont, for comment on June 21 and didn’t receive an immediate response.
CNN fired Griffin after his arrest and indictment by a grand jury in December 2021, according to the Associated Press. He worked for the network for about eight years, according to CNN.
McClatchy News contacted CNN for comment on June 21 and was awaiting a response.
Griffin’s sentencing comes after he pleaded guilty to using a facility of interstate commerce to persuade, induce, entice, or coerce a minor to engage in unlawful sexual activity, officials said.
“Mr. Griffin preyed on a vulnerable woman and her child, using his wealth to lure them to his home to manipulate and sexually exploit them,” Janeen DiGuiseppi, FBI special agent in charge of the Albany Field Office, said in a statement.
At his sentencing hearing held on June 20 via video, the child spoke in court and Sessions commended her for her strength, according to VTDigger, an investigative online newspaper based in Vermont.
“I’ll never trust anyone again,” the girl told Sessions, before telling Griffin “you make me sad and angry,” the newspaper reported.
At trial, Griffin told Sessions that he was “deeply remorseful,” according to VTDigger.
More on the case
Griffin has been accused of messaging parents with underage daughters online to persuade them into letting him train their children “in sexual submission” since 2019, prosecutors said.
Griffin met the child’s adoptive mother on an adult website and began communicating with the pair in video calls for “training” before having them travel to his Vermont home, according to a sentencing memo submitted by the government and provided to McClatchy News.
He told the mother “a woman is a woman regardless of age” during text message exchanges in which he expressed views of sexual misogyny, the sentencing memo says.
In the summer of 2020, Griffin paid for the girl and her mother to fly to Logan International Airport in Boston where he drove to pick them up in his Tesla, prosecutors said.
Then, he drove them to Vermont, according to officials.
There, Griffin sexually abused the child and forced her into sex acts, prosecutors said.
“The depravity of this crime, and Griffin’s sustained and persistent efforts to commit it, are difficult to overstate,” prosecutors wrote in the sentencing memo.
They accuse Griffin of trying to “minimize” his actions because he argued he’s not solely responsible for the child’s “issues” as she was victimized before, the sentencing memo says.
Ahead of his sentencing, prosecutors said Griffin may put blame on the COVID-19 pandemic for disrupting his life at the time, including causing his isolation at his Vermont home and cocaine abuse.
However, they argued that he “was already preaching his child-centric sexual misogyny message” before the pandemic and had a history of using cocaine for years, the sentencing memo says.
“Griffin has had every advantage in his life,” the sentencing memo continued. “He went to elite schools, had steady employment, and enjoyed extraordinary wealth, among other things. Despite those advantages, Griffin is before the Court for sentencing because of his deviant sexual interest in and abuse of children.”
At CNN, Griffn was involved as a producer on the Chris Cuomo show, according to VTDigger.
In sentencing Griffin, Sessions said he deserved a severe penalty, the release said.
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