Former ABC News producer James Gordon Meek was arrested Tuesday night on criminal charges related to child pornography images found at his Virginia home in an April 2022 FBI raid.
According to the Department of Justice, law enforcement “seized multiple devices that allegedly contained evidence of the transportation of images of child sexual abuse” during their court-authorized search.
The images were found after Dropbox notified the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) on March 10, 2021 about five videos uploaded by Meek. They were later confirmed by law enforcement to contain child pornography, according to court documents.
Meek faces a mandatory minimum of five years in prison and up to 20 years if convicted. No trial date has been announced.
Meek resigned after the raid. In October 2022, friends and colleagues reported they hadn’t seen him in months. At the time, his lawyer Eugene Gorokhov implied to the Independent that the items recovered in the search were classified government papers. “If such documents exist, as claimed, this would be within the scope of his long career as an investigative journalist covering government wrongdoing,” he said.
Meek had been at ABC for nine years, where his credits include “Nightline” and “20/20.” He was nominated for four Emmy awards and won one in 2017 for breaking news coverage of the shooting massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
According to his ABC News bio, he previously served as a Senior Counterterrorism Advisor and Investigator for the House Committee on Homeland Security.
Pamela Chelin contributed to this report.
