LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — A former CNN producer pleaded guilty Monday to one charge connected to the transportation and assault of a Nevada minor, court documents said.
John Griffin, 45, of Stamford, Connecticut, initially faced three counts of using a facility of interstate commerce to attempt to entice minors to engage in unlawful sexual activity, the 8 News Now Investigators reported last December. As part of a deal, Griffin pleaded guilty Monday to one count.
In June of 2020, Griffin advised the mother to come to Vermont, where he has a second home, and be “trained properly,” prosecutors said. Griffin transferred $3,000 to the mother so she could buy plane tickets from Nevada to Boston for her and a then-9-year-old girl. The mother and child flew to Boston and Griffin drove them from the airport to his Vermont home, prosecutors said.
“On one occasion, Griffin was pulled over for speeding in his Mercedes convertible with the 9-year-old girl buckled in the front passenger seat,” prosecutors wrote in court documents.
In a separate incident, Vermont State Police charged Griffin with DUI in October 2020.
Griffin used online messaging services Kik and Google Hangouts to talk to people reportedly being parents of young girls, saying, among other things, that young women should be trained to “be sexually subservient and inferior to men,” prosecutors wrote in a news release last year.
A sentencing date was scheduled for March. Griffin faces 10 years to life in prison and a fine. An advocate for the child has filed a civil lawsuit on her behalf.
The child’s mother took an Alford plea this spring on child abuse charges, meaning she did not admit guilty but accepted the fact that prosecutors had enough evidence to obtain a guilty plea from a jury.
