Edmonton man pleads guilty to targeting and sexually exploiting young girls via social media

An Edmonton man has confessed to committing a series of sex crimes against eight young girls he contacted through social media.

Imesh Ratnayake, 23, pleaded guilty to 11 criminal charges in Edmonton District Court on Tuesday, admitting that between January 2020 and December 2022, he solicited and exploited girls in the Edmonton area, aged 11 to 16.

Ratnayake was due to stand trial in October on 37 charges, but pleaded guilty on Tuesday to 11 charges, including:

• Two counts of touching a person under 16 for sexual purposes;
• Six counts of using telecommunications to communicate with a person under 18 years of age to commit a crime;
• One charge of producing child pornography;
• One count of transferring child pornography;
• One case of extortion.

Ratnayake appeared for the hearing via video conference from the Edmonton Remand Centre and pleaded guilty to each charge, confirming to Judge James Neilson said he understood the consequences of declining to sue.

After the pleas, prosecutor Stephanie Morton read a lengthy agreed statement of facts detailing Ratnayake’s offenses.

The court heard that Ratnayake primarily used Snapchat to contact the girls he claimed to be exploiting, although in one case he did so via Instagram.

In some cases, he found out how old the girl was and told her he was a teenager, when by then he was already an adult.

In October 2021, two of the younger girls he had met through Snapchat agreed to meet him in person. Ratnayake offered to give the girls disposable vape pens in exchange for sexual acts, the court document said.

When he met the two girls in November, he filmed himself sexually abusing them both on his phone.

Although both girls met him again, they both tried to break off contact with him in the months that followed. He used other social media accounts to add the girls as friends again.

When one of the girls accepted a friend request from another account name, he sent a message asking, “Do you know who I am?” When she replied that she didn’t, he sent the video he had taken of the other girl.

He shared that video, and at some point the video of the other girl, with other girls he spoke to online.

In May 2022, one of the videos began circulating among the victim’s schoolmates, and she was harassed by her peers online and in person. The video was shared by so many students at the girl’s school that staff found out and contacted police.

Other victims

After the girl was interviewed by police, detectives from the Northern Alberta Internet Child Exploitation Unit were able to identify three other victims, and Ratnayake as the adult male who had communicated with them.

Ratnayake was arrested, charged and released on bail until further forensic examination of his devices could produce more victims.

According to the agreed facts, Ratnayake’s crimes against the other girls were diverse, although they all began through private online chats.

In some cases, he convinced the girls to send him nude photos or explicit videos, or to video chat with them while directing them to perform sexual acts.

When some of the girls tried to stop the communication, he extorted them by revealing that he had made screen recordings of the explicit videos or photos, and threatened to share them if they did not meet his demands for further sexual exploitation. Others obtained the videos of his sexual abuse from the two girls he had met in person.

Ratnayake’s lawyer David Phillips has requested that both a preliminary and psychiatric report be prepared before his client’s sentencing, which is scheduled for November 15.