Warrant: Mom hospitalized during trip with child and TV producer

A Nevada woman was twice hospitalized during a weeklong visit to a former CNN producer’s Vermont ski home where they trained her adopted 9-year-old daughter to be “sexually submissive,” according to the mother’s arrest warrant.

The 48-year-old woman, whose name Hearst Connecticut Media Group is withholding to protect her daughter’s identity, has been charged in Nevada with two counts each of sexual assault of a minor under 14 and first-degree child abuse as well as three counts of lewdness with a minor under 14.

The woman was arrested in August 2020, about a month after she and her daughter made a crosscountry trip to John Griffin’s ski home in Ludlow, Vt., arrest warrants stated. The woman, whose attorney could not be reached for comment, has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is scheduled to appear in court Wednesday in Henderson, Nev.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Griffin

in New Haven last week on an indictment, charging him with three counts of using a facility of interstate commerce to attempt to entice minors to engage in unlawful sexual activity, the U.S. attorney’s office for the district of Vermont said.

The woman’s eight-page arrest warrant includes text messages describing her visit to Griffin’s home, references to sexually explicit photos the girl was forced to take of the woman, and interviews with the girl, her biological mother and her grandmother, who was assigned temporary custody of the child.

Griffin, 44, of Stamford, has been accused of trying to lure women and their daughters to his ski home to sexually “train” the underage girls, according to his indictment.

Griffin’s attorney, Joseph Martini, said he and his client will not be commenting on the case.

In a statement to Hearst Connecticut Media, CNN said Griffin was fired Monday from the network, where he had worked since 2013, according to his

LinkedIn profile. Griffin was once a producer for the Chris Cuomo show and was most recently a producer for CNN senior political analyst John Avlon.

Investigators said Griffin paid more than $3,000 for the Nevada woman to fly with her daughter to Boston, where he picked them up and drove them to his Vermont house in July 2020, the indictment stated.

The investigation into

Griffin began in August 2020 after the Nevada woman contacted local police about a custody dispute she was having with her daughter’s biological mother, according to her arrest warrant obtained by Hearst Connecticut Media.

Police in Henderson, Nev., contacted the girl’s biological mother, who said she discovered a series of text messages the woman sent from her daughter’s phone to another man describing their trip to Vermont and how she engaged the child in sexual activity, the warrant stated.

The warrant states that it’s “unknown” why the woman was hospitalized.