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A man from St. Louis, Missouri has been charged by complaint in U.S. District Court with production of child pornography and accused of making and disseminating videos involving multiple victims.
Tracy Jenkins, 57, was charged Friday and appeared in court Monday. Charging documents say the local office of the FBI received information Thursday that FBI headquarters had potentially identified and located one of the victims in a series of videos containing child sexual abuse material that had been circulating online. Investigators verified the identity of that victim and conducted interviews that led to the identification of four other minors who were also subjected to years of sexual abuse by Jenkins that Jenkins recorded, the charging documents say.
A court-approved search of Jenkins’ home located a hard drive that contained well over 100 videos that matched those circulating online and containing recordings of the abuse of the identified minors as well as others who have not yet been identified, the charging documents say.
The complaint says Jenkins has a prior conviction for misdemeanor sexual misconduct in a 1997 case in St. Louis Circuit Court.
“The FBI has been continuously working to identify these victims since 2017 when we first became aware this child sexual abuse material,” said Special Agent in Charge Jay Greenberg of the FBI St. Louis Division. “In fact, the FBI initiative called 'Operation Rescue Me' has identified more than 600 child victims like these since 2008 using technology and painstaking investigative work.”
“The FBI worked tirelessly to identify and rescue the minors whose abuse was depicted in videos circulating online,” said U.S. Attorney Sayler A. Fleming.
The production of child pornography charge is punishable by 15 to 30 years in prison, a $250,000 or both.
Charges set forth in a criminal complaint are merely accusations and do not constitute proof of guilt. Every defendant is presumed to be innocent unless and until proven guilty.
The case was investigated by the FBI. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jillian Anderson is prosecuting the case.
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