Disturbing new details emerged this week from the federal charges against CNN senior producer John Griffin, 44, stemming from allegations that he tried to and did groom children for sex.
Griffin, of Stamford, Connecticut, was arrested on Friday after a federal grand jury charged him with multiple counts of using a facility of interstate commerce to attempt to entice minors to engage in unlawful sexual activity.
The DOJ said in a statement:
According to the indictment, from April to July of 2020, Griffin utilized the messaging applications Kik and Google Hangouts to communicate with people purporting to be parents of minor daughters, conveying to them, among other ideas, that a “woman is a woman regardless of her age,” and that women should be sexually subservient and inferior to men. On these communication platforms, Griffin sought to persuade parents to allow him to train their daughters to be sexually submissive.
The statement said that Griffin brought a mother and her 9-year-old daughter to his home in Vermont where “the daughter was directed to engage in, and did engage in, unlawful sexual activity.”
New details that emerged from unsealed court documents provided disturbing new revelations about the case and the type of alleged criminal activity the CNN producer, who used to work with recently-fired host Chris Cuomo, was involved in.
Prosecutors say that Griffin stated that he believed that there is a “wanton wh*re” at the “core of any” woman and “a woman is a woman regardless of her age.” Prosecutors said that Griffin used apps to seek “parents who would allow him to train their minor daughters to be sexually subservient.”
Griffin allegedly told one mother that he believed that “one of the big lies of this society is that women are delicate innocent angels and they are in actuality, naturally, the dirtiest sl*ts possible, in EVERY metric.”
Heavy.com added:
According to court documents, Griffin told a woman he was chatting with that he had “sexually trained girls as young as 7 years old,” and he thought the woman’s daughter “would be a good candidate for such training alongside her mother.” He told her they would start with a video chat in which Griffin would instruct the 14-year-old girl and her mother to remove their clothing and touch each other, prosecutors said in the indictment. He also said the “sexual training would eventually include in-person meetings featuring ‘spanking’ and ‘c*** worship,’” prosecutors said.
“We take the charges against Mr. Griffin incredibly seriously,” a CNN spokesperson told Fox News. “We only learned of his arrest this afternoon and have suspended him pending investigation.”
Griffin’s LinkedIn account said that he worked on CNN’s “New Day,” which is the show that was co-hosted by Cuomo for a number of years before Cuomo got his own show in primetime. Griffin specifically stated on LinkedIn that he “works shoulder-to-shoulder with lead anchor Chris Cuomo, seeing him through each show and producing live breaking news across the country and around the world.”
Griffin faces up a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years for each of the three felony counts that he was charged with, and could face up to life in prison.
DOJ also said that it “intends to seek the forfeiture of Griffin’s Ludlow house, his Tesla, a Mercedes, and other property that was used in the commission of the charged offenses.”