A Texas man, Mark P. Barnwell, 35, of Whitehouse, Texas, pleaded guilty to producing child pornography and threatening minor victims in Illinois and seven other states while he was required to register as a sex offender.
Barnwell entered guilty pleas in Peoria before U.S. District Judge Joe Billy McDade on August 29, 2018.
He used false personas on Facebook and controlled multiple female-presenting profiles to contact female Facebook users, including minors, and advertised a modeling opportunity he claimed would pay up to thousands of dollars per photo shoot.
At Barnwell’s urging, the minors who accepted the offer then took, and sent to him, photographs which they believed were being produced for the purposes of a modeling portfolio. The minor victims believed they would be paid by cash, check, or direct deposit once they completed the modeling portfolio process.
However, the photographs taken by the minors progressed from various stages of undress to sexually suggestive and/or sexually explicit photographs of themselves, at Barnwell’s explicit direction. Once he obtained compromising images, Barnwell threatened to injure the minor victims’ reputations and embarrass them by posting their nude pictures online if they failed to comply with demands for additional images.
Barnwell used this scheme to obtain nude photographs from 43 minor victims located in nine judicial districts across eight states. The charges are the result of a joint investigation by the U.S. Secret Service, the Peoria Police Department, and the Peoria County Sheriff’s Office.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Ronald Hanna and Katherine Legge of the Central District of Illinois and Trial Attorney William Grady of the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) are prosecuting the case. This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse.
Key Facts
- State: Illinois
- Category: Sex Crimes
- Source: DOJ Press Release â†â€â€
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