District of Columbia | Child sexual abuser sentenced to 52.5 years in prison

WASHINGTON – Matthew Stitt Johnson, 34, of Washington, DC, was sentenced today in U.S. District Court to 52.5 years in prison for two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor and one count of second-degree sexual abuse of children with aggravating circumstances for abusing three minor children.

The sentence was announced by U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves, Acting Special Agent in Charge of the FBI, David Geist of the Washington Field Office Criminal and Cyber ​​Division, and Chief Pamela A. Smith of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD).

Johnson pleaded guilty on August 29, 2022, before U.S. District Court Judge Jia M. Cobb. In addition to the 52.5-year prison sentence, Judge Cobb ordered Johnson to register as a sex offender.

According to the government’s evidence, Johnson sexually abused three children between 2015 and 2020, an eight-year-old, a five-year-old and an eight-month-old baby. Johnson made videos of his sexual abuse of the five-year-old child and the eight-month-old child. While the five-year-old and her sister reported the abuse to their mother, the abuse was not reported to police.

In May 2021, police received a tip that Johnson had downloaded child pornography from a cloud-based service and then served a search warrant on his home. Videos depicting the sexual abuse of the five-year-old and eight-month-old victims were discovered in Johnson’s cellphones, along with 13,000 images of child pornography. Johnson distributed the images of his child sexual abuse on Internet forums devoted to the trafficking of child pornography, particularly the trafficking of images of the rape and torture of infants and toddlers, and actively sought and distributed other child pornography images for a period of two years. year.

This case was investigated by the FBI Washington Field Office’s Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force. The task force consists of FBI agents, along with other federal agents and investigators from northern Virginia and the District of Columbia. The task force is charged with investigating and bringing federal charges against individuals involved in the exploitation of children and those involved in human trafficking. The investigation received valuable assistance from the MPD’s Narcotics and Special Investigations Division, Human Trafficking Unit. The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Robert Platt and Janani Iyengar with the valuable assistance of Victim/Witness Attorney Yvonne Bryant.

This case was brought as part of the Department of Justice’s Project Safe Childhood initiative. In February 2006, the Attorney General established Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative designed to protect children from online exploitation and abuse. Led by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Project Safe Childhood uses federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children online, and to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.projectsafechildhood.gov.

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