Ex-ABC News Producer Charged With Transportation of Child Pornography

ARLINGTON, VA — A former producer for ABC News has been charged with “transporting” images depicting the sexual abuse of children, the Department of Justice said Wednesday.

James Gordon Meek, 53, of Arlington, an Emmy Award-winning producer who covered wars, terrorism and major crimes for the news network, was arrested Tuesday night, months after his home was searched by federal authorities.

If convicted of the charge of transportation of child pornography, Meek faces a mandatory minimum of five years in prison and a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, the Justice Department said.

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.

A federal judge ordered home confinement for Meek and electronic monitoring of his computers and devices while he awaits trial, but postponed her ruling from taking effect, according to The Washington Post. Prosecutors are seeking to keep Meek in jail until his trial.

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.

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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 created a stunning scene, with several unmarked federal law enforcement vehicles, including a Lenco BearCat armored SWAT vehicle, showing up for the search.

According to court documents, officials found that several of Meek’s devices contained images depicting children engaged in sexually explicit conduct and multiple chat conversations with users engaged in sexually explicit conversations where the participants expressed enthusiasm for the sexual abuse of children.

In two of those conversations, a username associated with Meek received and distributed child sexual abuse materials through an internet-based messaging platform, federal prosecutors said.

Investigators also found that Meek engaged with minors on platforms like Snapchat, The Associated Press report. A minor interviewed by law enforcement told authorities that Meek approached her through Snapchat and pressured her to provide sexually explicit photos, according to court papers.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Zoe Bedell said at a hearing Wednesday that Meek communicated online with minors and suspected minors, and his electronic records show he chatted with other people about wanting to engage in child sexual abuse, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Bedell said federal prosecutors took nine months after the search of Meek’s Arlington apartment to file the charge against him because officials “had to review voluminous amounts of data.”

A review of an iPhone found in Meek’s apartment showed that the phone’s user and another person on the messaging application Kik exchanged videos of minors being sexually abused, the FBI said. An external hard drive in Meek’s kitchen and a laptop in his living room also contained images of child sexual exploitation, according to the FBI filing.

Defense attorney Eugene Gorokhov said Meek has no prior criminal record and never attempted to meet with minors, according to The Washington Post.

“There’s not a single allegation of contact — actual, hands-on, physical contact — with a child,” Gorokhov said.

Meek joined ABC News as an investigative producer in 2013. He previously worked for the New York Daily News and served as senior counterterrorism adviser and investigator for the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security.

He was a writer and narrator for “3212 Un-redacted,” a Hulu documentary released in 2021 that came from an investigation by ABC into the deaths of four U.S. Special Forces soldiers in Africa.