Man facing child sex charges fired from CNN
Mother of child charged
A Connecticut man who faces federal charges of trying to entice minors for sex was fired from his job as a CNN producer, a spokesman for the cable network said Friday.
Meanwhile, a Nevada woman faces charges connected to the case of John Griffin, 44, of Stamford. Federal authorities and police in Henderson, Nevada, say the woman brought her 9-year-old adopted daughter to Griffin’s Vermont ski house, where the girl was forced to participate in sex with Griffin and the woman.
Federal authorities say Griffin, 44, persuaded the woman he could “train’ the girl in sexual subservience. Griffin also tried to lure other minors for the same purpose, authorities said. Arrested last week, he faces three counts of using a facility of interstate commerce to attempt to entice minors to engage in unlawful sexual activity. Griffin was being held pending a hearing in U.S. District Court in Vermont.
CNN spokesman Matt Dornic said Griffin was fired soon after his arrest. Griffin worked for former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo and was most recently working on the morning show and producing the Reality Check segment, Dornic said.
From April to July 2020, federal authorities say Griffin used the messaging applications Kik and Google Hangouts to communicate with people purporting to be parents of minor daughters and seeking to persuade parents to let him train their daughters to be sexually submissive, according to the indictment.
In June 2020, Griffin advised the Nevada woman that she had to ensure her daughter was “trained properly,” federal officials said. Griffin later transferred over $3,000 to the woman for plane tickets so she and the girl could fly to Boston. Griffin picked them up in his red Tesla Model X in July and drove them to his Ludlow, Vermont, house, where the indictment says the daughter was “directed to engage in, and did engage in, unlawful sexual activity.”
Henderson police said the woman brought a bag full of sex toys to the ski house and made the girl participate in sex with her and Griffin, according to an arrest warrant affidavit. The woman was arrested last year in Nevada on eight counts each of child abuse and lewdness with a minor under age 14 and two counts of sexual assault of a minor under 14. Some of the charges are related to crimes police say were committed in Nevada, but they also cited preparations the woman made for the trip to Vermont to add charges for crimes committed in that state.
Based on Griffin paying the woman to fly east with the girl and other factors, she “did commit acts in the state of Nevada with the intent, partial execution, and which culminated in the commission of a crime that occurred in the state of Vermont, (she) should be punished in the same manner as if the crime had been committed entirely in this state,” the arrest warrant affidavit says.
The Courant is not naming the woman because doing so could identify the girl, an alleged victim of sexual assault.
Griffin faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison on each count in the federal indictment. Also, the government intends to seek forfeiture of his Ludlow house, his Tesla, a Mercedes and other property that was used in the commission of the charged offenses, authorities said.