Silver State Times

Former senior CNN television producer John Griffin is being charged with the alleged child sex trafficking of a 9-year-old girl from Nevada.

On Dec 22, Griffin pleaded not guilty to his charges and is now awaiting trial, reported 8 News Now. Griffin allegedly paid a woman from Nevada to fly her pre-teen daughter to Griffin’s ski house in Vermont to engage in criminal sexual activity. Griffin faces up to life in prison if convicted and was recently fired from his job at CNN.

The Associated Press reports that Griffin communicated with the child’s parents using the messaging systems Kik and Google Hangouts. In these communications, Griffin stated that young girls should be taught to be “be sexually subservient and inferior to men.” Griffin also tried to pay off another member of the Nevada family.

According to FOX News, there was a 17-month delay between the search warrant obtained by the feds against Griffin and his actual arrest. 

Evidence against Griffin includes video footage he took of himself standing in his underwear next to the naked 9-year-old victim.

Griffin paid the child’s mother more than $3,000 to travel to Vermont with her daughter, the Vermont Digger reported. Griffin “forced the girl into unlawful sex acts he purported to be ‘sexual training,'" according to the indictment against him.

Jane Turner, a former FBI agent and whistleblower, has condemned the Bureau for its mishandling of child trafficking cases.

"He obviously is a sexual predator, and has gone from grooming children into actually ‘capturing’ them," Turner told FOX News, calling Griffin a "very, very dangerous offender."

Turner condemned the delay in investigations and said that the allegations against Griffin were so serious that the case should have been immediately investigated by the Bureau.

"I can’t think of any legitimate reason for the delay in arresting Griffin, especially when the adoptive mother was arrested in August 2020," Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor who has been monitoring the case, told FOX News. "Even if he were cooperating, it would usually be post-arrest and indictment."

Nevada is ninth in the nation for most human trafficking cases, reporting 199 cases in a single year, according to the UNLV Center for Crime and Justice Policy. In Nevada, sex trafficking is the most common form of trafficking, comprising 89% of trafficking cases in the state. This is higher than the national percentage of sex trafficking cases, where 71% of total trafficking cases are centered around selling sex.