LEXINGTON, KY— A Nicholasville, Ky., man, Noah James Grimes, 30, was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison on Monday, by U.S. District Judge Karen C. Caldwell, after pleading guilty to enticing a minor to engage in sexually explicit conduct outside the United States, with the purpose of producing a visual depiction of that conduct.
According to Grime’s guilty plea, a minor victim from Ontario, Canada, told their parent that someone had taken sexually explicit pictures of them at daycare. That person had been talking on a video chat with Grimes around the time the pictures were taken. Law enforcement discovered that the person who had taken the sexually explicit photos of the minor had been asked to do so by Grimes and had previously sent pictures of herself to Grimes, when she was a minor. A search warrant of Grimes phones revealed more than a hundred images of minor males, under the age of 12. Grimes admitted to knowingly persuading someone to produce sexually explicit images outside the United States and having those images sent to him.
Grimes pleaded guilty to the charge in January 2022.
Under federal law, Grimes must serve 85 percent of his prison sentence. Upon his release from prison, he will be under the supervision of the U.S. Probation Office for life.
Carlton S. Shier, IV, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky; Jodi Cohen, Special Agent in Charge, FBI, Louisville Field Office; Chief Frank Bergen, Hamilton Police Department, Ontario, Canada; and Chief Bryan MacCulloch, Niagara Regional Police Service, Ontario, Canada, jointly announced the sentence.
The investigation was conducted by the FBI, the Hamilton Police Department and Niagara Regional Police Service. The United States was represented by Assistant U.S. Attorney David Marye.
This case was prosecuted as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. Led by U.S. Attorneys' Offices and the Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS), Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet as well as to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.projectsafechildhood.gov.
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