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A former CNN producer, John Griffin, has pleaded guilty to one of the charges he is facing after being accused of luring a minor to his home for sex.
“John Griffin agrees to plead guilty because he is, in fact, guilty of the above crime,” the plea agreement said, the Vermont Digger reported. He pleaded guilty to “using a facility of interstate commerce to attempt to persuade, induce, entice or coerce a minor to engage in unlawful sexual activity,’ as the other charges from the incident that happened last year were dismissed.
The New York Post reported: “Griffin, of Stamford, Connecticut, met a woman online and persuaded her to bring her 9-year-old daughter to his $2.5 million Vermont cabin, where he engaged in sexual activity with the child, according to prosecutors. Griffin paid the mother $3,000 in July 2020 to fly from Nevada to Boston, where he picked them up in a Tesla and drove them to his Ludlow, Vermont, house, where he directed the young girl to engage in unlawful sexual activity. The mother, Heather Carriker, was also arrested and slapped with child abuse and child sex assault charges. The former producer asked the parents of several minors to bring their daughters to his home for “sexual subservience” training and allegedly bragged about luring girls as young as 7 to his pad.”
Last year a grand jury in Vermont indicted John Griffin, a 44-year-old Stamford, Connecticut resident, on charges of attempting to entice young girls into sexual activity, The Daily Mail reported. Griffin worked on the CNN show “New Day.” He has been charged with three counts that he used a “facility of interstate commerce to abuse underage girls.”
Griffin began working with CNN in 2013, working on New Day when Chris Cuomo was its host. His most recent role saw him acting as a producer for CNN senior political analyst John Avlon.
“According to the indictment, from April to July of 2020, Griffin utilized the messaging applications Kik and Google Hangouts to communicate with people purporting to be parents of minor daughters, conveying to them, among other ideas, that a ‘woman is a woman regardless of her age,’ and that women should be sexually subservient and inferior to men. On these communication platforms, Griffin sought to persuade parents to allow him to train their daughters to be sexually submissive. In June of 2020, Griffin advised a mother of 9- and 13-year-old daughters that the mother’s responsibility was to see that her older daughter was ‘trained properly.’ Griffin later transferred over $3,000 to the mother for plane tickets so the mother and her 9-year-old daughter could fly from Nevada to Boston’s Logan airport. The mother and child flew to Boston in July of 2020, where Griffin picked them up in his Tesla and drove them to his Ludlow house. At the house, the daughter was directed to engage in, and did engage in, unlawful sexual activity,” a press release from the Department of Justice, US Attorney’s Office, District of Vermont, read.
“The indictment also includes specific allegations that Griffin attempted to entice two other children over the internet to engage in sexual activity. In April 2020, Griffin proposed to engage in a ‘virtual training session’ over a video chat that would include him instructing the mother and her 14-year-old daughter to remove their clothing and touch each other in his direction. In June of 2020, Griffin proposed to a purported mother of a 16-year-old daughter that she take a ‘little mother-daughter trip’ to Griffin’s Ludlow ski house for sexual training involving the child,” the DOJ said.
“The United States Attorney’s Office emphasizes that an indictment contains allegations only and that Griffin remains presumed innocent until and unless he is convicted of a crime. On each count, Griffin faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years of imprisonment and a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. The indictment includes a notice that states the federal government intends to seek the forfeiture of Griffin’s Ludlow house, his Tesla, a Mercedes, and other property that was used in the commission of the charged offenses,” it said.
