COLUMBUS, Ohio – A Logan, Ohio woman, and her Boyfriend plead guilty in U.S. District Court to sexually exploiting minors and possessing child pornography.
Robert Gemienhardt, 37, was charged federally in April 2022, along with his significant other Carrie Daniels, 41, for their child exploitation offenses. Daniels has pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor and one count of possession of child pornography and awaits sentencing.
“All child exploitation crimes are serious and create lasting effects on the victims and their families. Gemienhardt’s conduct – the grooming and sexual abuse of the minor victims in this case – is particularly heinous,” U.S. Attorney Kenneth L. Parker said. “He earned every bit of his sentence to multiple decades in federal prison.”
More than 1,000 images and 350 videos depicting child sexual abuse were ultimately recovered from Gemienhardt’s digital media devices, some of which depicted minors as young as toddler age engaged in oral sex, masturbation, bestiality and sexual acts with adults.
According to court documents, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) received a tip from Kik messenger regarding Gemienhardt’s online child exploitation activities. The Ohio Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force and the Hocking County Sheriff’s Office then began investigating the allegations.
Subsequent search warrants executed by the Hocking County Sherriff’s Office, in conjunction with the FBI, revealed that Gemienhardt and Daniels were acting together and produced child pornography through the grooming and sexual abuse of minor victims they had access to between April and June of 2020.
Gemienhardt and Daniels exchanged thousands of illicit text messages detailing their sexual fantasies about the minor victims. Those text messages further revealed both Gemienhardt and Daniels had plans to act out some of the detailed fantasies by sexually abusing the minors. Daniels also distributed images she created of the sexual abuse of minors to Gemienhardt.
Gemienhardt is a registered sex offender from a prior Franklin County conviction in July 2021. He pleaded guilty in his current federal case in September 2022.
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