Federal prosecutors say 50-year-old John Eastman (pictured) had manipulated young girls over the Internet
A Connecticut man who pretended to be pop stars like Justin Bieber and Harry Styles to entice young girls into performing sexual acts during online video chats has been sentenced to 17 years in prison.
Federal prosecutors say 50-year-old John Eastman, of Waterbury, was also sentenced Tuesday to a lifetime of probation ‘for enticing minors to engage in sexually explicit conduct during online video chats,’ the U.S. attorney’s office said.
Prosecutors say Eastman contacted girls through online video chatting services between July and November 2012 using screen names such as justin.bieber727 and Harry.Styles888 and enticed them into sexually explicit conduct, which he then recorded and saved on his computer.
Eastman was convicted of enticing young girls to performing sexual acts during online video chats by posing as celebrities like Justin Bieber ( L) and Harry Styles (R)
Eastman has 31 past convictions, including one in 1998 for risk of injury to a minor for having sexual contact with a 9-year-old girl (Pictured: Louis Tomlinson September 2017)
Eastman also posed as Niall Horan and Louis Tomlinson,The Hartford Courant reported.
He used previously recorded videos the singers had uploaded on YouTube to further deceive the girls.
The police were first made aware of Eastman’s online activities by a Vermont woman who filed a report after discovering that her daughter 11-year-old daughter had been chatting with a man with the username Harry.Styles888 over Skype.
Eastman was placed on a state sex-offender registry for 10-years until 2009 following the end of his probation (Pictured: Niall Horan November 2017)
The Vermont mother said that the man had asked her daughter to pose in sexual positions, according to the Courant citing court documents.
Authorities were able to trace the IP address belonging to Eastman’s and paid a visit to his home in Waterbury. He invited investigators into his home and willingly allowed them to search his personal computer.
He was arrested in May 2013 and pleaded guilty in March.
‘I use the program Skype to chat with girls because you can use the web cam to video chat and see them while chatting,’ Easton said in a written statement to Waterbury police.
‘I like girls that are 14-years-old and have started to develop. Because of this, I made a couple of screen names on Skype that were the names of members of the singing group One Direction.’
Court documents show that Eastman collected more than 200 pictures through his Skype chats with underage girls, some of which depicted child pornography, and a sexually explicit video believed by investigators to be a disabled girl.
‘There is a need to protect the public from Mr. Eastman and to deter him from engaging in such conduct in the future,’ prosecutors argued in a sentencing memo.
Eastman has 31 past convictions, including one in 1998 for risk of injury to a minor for having sexual contact with a 9-year-old girl, according toThe Courant.
Eastman was placed on a state sex-offender registry for 10-years until he was removed in 2009 when his probation concluded.