Ex-Bellevue Teacher Gets 20 Years In Prison In Federal Child Porn Case

BELLEVUE, WA — A former Bellevue teacher already serving a prison sentence for repeatedly raping a young boy was sentenced in federal court to two decades in prison after he pleaded guilty to related child pornography charges in what the judge called every parent’s “worst nightmare."

Stuart Hoffman, 31, pleaded guilty in February to producing and possessing child porn. He was sentenced to prison and a lifetime of supervised release, federal prosecutors announced Tuesday.

Hoffman, a former Bellevue School District high school teacher, sent explicit child sex images to a contact in the United Kingdom, triggering a law enforcement investigation, court documents showed.

Investigators searched his home and found child molestation videos of children between 5 and 11 on his devices, prosecutors said. Hoffman was talking to the child outside his duties as a teacher. He was reportedly an instructor at Newport High School, working with the school’s Career and Technical Education program, prosecutors said.

In total, he had seven videos of sexual molestation and more than 1,700 images of child sex abuse, prosecutors said. He was arrested in May 2020.

Court documents showed that the abuse dated to at least 2016. Investigators in the state case said Hoffman bribed the boy — who was just 11 years old in 2020 — with food if he “would get through” the sexual abuse, The Seattle Times reported.

Hoffman and the contact in the U.K. exchanged emails, and prosecutors in the state's case said he clearly admitted to abusing the child.

“In those emails this defendant admits to sexually abusing the victim, admits to recording those acts of sexual abuse, and even complains about our current COVID-19 pandemic as he no longer has free access to the minor victim,” Senior Deputy Prosecutor Christian Brown wrote in the charges against Hoffman. “One of the more chilling emails is where the defendant tells another child pornographer that he only recently started filming the sexual assaults and regrets not recording the sexual abuse of the minor victim sooner, when the victim was even younger.”

In one email, Hoffman said he abused the boy starting when he was as young as 5, prosecutors said.

On April 15, Hoffman was sentenced in King County Superior Court to 20 years in prison for child rape. He will serve both prison sentences simultaneously and must register as a sex offender upon his release from prison.

Hoffman must also pay at least $3,000 to each known victim. In this case, the initial restitution figure is $108,000, and may be higher. The judge will determine the full amount of the restitution at a later date.