Former ABC News Journalist Pleads Guilty In Child Porn Case

ARLINGTON, VA — A former journalist for ABC News, who often broke investigative stories on national security issues, pleaded guilty on Friday to transportation and possession of child sexual abuse material, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

In February 2020, while visiting South Carolina, James Gordon Meek, 53, of Arlington, used an online messaging platform on his iPhone to send and receive images and videos depicting minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct, and to discuss his sexual interest in children, according to court documents.

Some of the images and videos depicted prepubescent minors and minors under the age of 12, including an infant being raped, according to federal prosecutors. Meek brought the iPhone containing the child sexual abuse material back with him when he returned to Virginia, the prosecutors said Friday.

Meek, an Emmy Award-winning journalist, is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 29. He faces a mandatory minimum of five years in prison and a maximum penalty of 40 years in prison, the Justice Department said.

A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. sentencing guidelines and other factors.

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Meek was arrested in February on one count of transporting child pornography images. He was later formally indicted in March on three counts, including transportation, distribution, and possession of child porn.

In his plea agreement on Friday, Meek pleaded guilty to transportation and possession, each carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The plea agreement dismisses the distribution count.

Meek's last report for ABC News was published April 2022, days before the FBI searched his apartment on Columbia Pike in Arlington. He resigned from ABC News the same month, the network said.

Federal officials said the investigation into Meek began in March 2021, when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received a tip from the company Dropbox about five suspected child pornography videos stored on one of its users’ accounts. The FBI said in court documents that the Dropbox username was “James Meek,” and the internet protocol address was a match with Meek’s apartment, The Washington Post reported.

That lead led the FBI to conduct a court-authorized search of Meek’s Arlington home on April 27, 2002, in the Siena Park apartments in the 2300 block of Columbia Pike. The FBI and police showed up in several vehicles, including a Lenco BearCat armored SWAT vehicle, at Meek's residence for the search.

The FBI Washington Field Office’s Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force investigated the case against Meek. The task force is composed of FBI agents, along with other federal agents and detectives from Northern Virginia and the District of Columbia. Assistance was also provided by the Arlington County Police Department.

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