YouTube star Austin Jones was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for coaxing underage girls to send him sexually explicit videos of themselves.
The sentence was handed down Friday in federal court in Chicago, according to WGN, the Chicago Sun-Times and the ChicagoTribune.
“He preyed on their youth, their vulnerabilities and most glaringly, their adoration of him, and he did it over and over again,” prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois said in a court filing last week, reports the Tribune. “He coached the girls on what to wear, what to say, how to dance and what to do in the videos.”
Jones, 26, of Bloomingdale, Illinois, pleaded guilty in February to one count of receipt of child pornography. He admitted in a plea agreement that in 2016 and 2017 he enticed six girls, as young as 14 years old, to produce and send the videos to "prove" they were his "biggest fan." His YouTube channel has since been cancelled.
In the videos, which were sent through Facebook Messenger, Jones allegedly told the victims to twerk — a form of dancing — and expose their buttocks and repeat how old they were, in the course of which they also showed their genitals, according to the complaint obtainedby PEOPLE.
“You need an intro to the video,” he allegedly told one of the girls, identified in court documents as Victim A. “At the beginning, get super close and say these lines: hey Austin, it’s [name] and this butt is [age] years old and then make it clap for 30 seconds. Got it?”
The court documents show she appeared to follow this request.
“Hey Austin, my name is [Victim A’s first name] and my butt is 14 years old,” she began one video, allegedly sent to Jones, before she danced against a wall, according to the complaint.
With more than 500,000 YouTube subscribers at the time, Jones produced videos that were viewed millions of times.
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