NYC man gets life in prison for sextorting 13-year-old girl
A Manhattan man was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison for running a sextortion scheme on a 13-year-old girl and forcing her to have sex with him in an Atlantic City hotel, authorities said.
Zachary Williams, now 37, was convicted last year in New Jersey federal court on four charges related to the appalling plot. He had been arrested in a March 2021 sting operation.
'Zachary Williams is a callous sexual predator whose crimes against children were especially cruel,' New Jersey U.S. Attorney John Giordano said in a statement. 'First and foremost, the court's imposed sentence will forever protect our children from further abuse by Williams.'
Williams began messaging his victim on Snapchat in September 2020 and told her he was 17 years old, according to police. He convinced her to send him nude photos, then began threatening to send the pictures to her friends and family, cops said.
Using the blackmail scheme, Williams forced the girl to meet him at a hotel in Atlantic County, N.J., in October 2020, investigators said. He then forced her to have sex with him in the hotel and refused to delete the nude photos as promised, according to authorities.
Cops caught Williams by posing as the 13-year-old girl and setting up a second meeting in the same hotel. Officers who seized his phone found additional images of child pornography, leading to investigations in New York and Connecticut. The Connecticut case involved sextortion of an 11-year-old girl, police said.
Williams was convicted on two counts of traveling across state lines to have sex with a minor, one count of possessing child pornography and one count of coercing a minor into sex.
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