A Waterbury man who posed as various pop stars to lure teen girls into performing sexual acts on Skype was sentenced Tuesday to 17 years in federal prison, the U.S. attorney's office said.
John Eastman, 50, also was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Hartford to a lifetime of supervised release "for enticing minors to engage in sexually explicit conduct during online video chats," the attorney's office said in a release.
According to prosecution documents, Eastman has 31 previous convictions, including one in 1998 for risk of injury to a minor for having sexual contact with a 9-year-old girl. He was placed on Connecticut's sex offender registry for 10 years but was removed in 2009.
A federal investigation found that Eastman had collected sexually explicit images and videos of teenage girls between July and November 2012 while he posed on Skype as singers like Justin Bieber, Harry Styles, Niall Horan and Louis Tomlinson, and YouTube performer Sam Albert, according to prosecution documents.
The investigation began when a Vermont woman reported to police that her 11-year-old daughter and her friends had spoken to a man using the name "Harry.Styles888" on Skype, a video chat and messaging app. She told police that the man had asked the girls to pose in sexual positions but that they had refused, the prosecution documents said.
Investigators traced the Skype name to a Waterbury IP address belonging to Eastman. He allowed detectives into his home and voluntarily gave them access to a personal computer, the documents said.
"I use the program Skype to chat with girls because you can use the web cam to video chat and see them while chatting," Easton said in a written statement to Waterbury police, which was included in the prosecution documents. ""I like girls that are 14-years-old and have started to develop. Because of this, I made a couple of screen names on Skype that were the names of members of the singing group One Direction."
The statement went on to detail what Eastman asked of the girls, who often were 12 to 15 years old. He also said he used previously recorded videos that the pop stars had uploaded on YouTube to deceive the girls.
On Eastman's computer hard drive, investigators found more than 200 photos taken through Skype, some of which depicted child pornography, as well as a sexually explicit video involving a girl who investigators believe is disabled, according to the prosecution documents.
Eastman also had deleted hundreds of explicit images of children between the ages of 5 and 15 years old, but investigators were able to locate them, the documents said.
In a sentencing memo, federal prosecutors argued that Eastman's action warranted a lengthy sentence and a lengthy supervised release, saying, "There is a need to protect the public from Mr. Eastman and to deter him from engaging in such conduct in the future."
"There is also a need for general deterrence and promoting respect for the law so that others are deterred from engaging in similar conduct. Unfortunately, the online sexual enticement of minors through Skype and other internet-based services is becoming all too familiar," the prosecutor said.
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