Carpinteria man gets prison sentence for receiving child pornography shortly after being released on parole | Local News

A Carpinteria man was sentenced Monday to more than 11 years in federal prison for receiving child pornography, just weeks after he finished serving a sentence in state prison for sexually exploiting children online, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

Justice Department spokesman Cieran McEvoy said Giovanni Gonzalez, 34, pleaded guilty in February to receiving child pornography and was sentenced this week to 135 months in federal prison.

Gonzalez received thousands of videos containing child sexual abuse material within a month of his release from state prison, McEvoy said.

“Within days of his release from state prison for the despicable acts he committed against children, this defendant returned to his deplorable behavior and obtained thousands of videos depicting the sexual exploitation of children,” U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada said in a statement Monday.

Gonzalez would pose online as a 14-year-old girl and use his false identity to convince victims to send him nude photos or videos of themselves, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office said when he was arrested in 2014. He traded those images online and was found in possession of hundreds of images and videos of child pornography that he had illegally obtained online, the sheriff’s office said.

According to court documents, he was sentenced to prison in 2016 and released on probation on Dec. 1, 2022.

Gonzalez’s plea agreement included prison time for “posing online as a teenage girl and coercing at least eight underage female victims into sexual acts and sending him the images, as well as possessing and sharing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on the internet,” McEvoy said.

The same month he was released on probation, “he sought out and began receiving reports of child sexual abuse (CSAM) from sources including WhatsApp, a computer software application on his mobile phone,” McEvoy added.

Gonzalez kept videos on his phone and in January 2023, after he turned his phone over to his probation officer, investigators found more than 2,500 child sexual abuse videos, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

According to officials, several of those videos “depicted prepubescent minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct or sexual exploitation of an infant or toddler.”

The investigation was conducted by the Santa Maria Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with assistance from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

“Child sexual exploitation is unacceptable and will not be tolerated in our society,” said Akil Davis, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office. “This case underscores the FBI’s commitment to investigating all offenders who harm our children, and we will ensure that these individuals no longer pose a threat to our communities.”