Singapore — Controversial blogger and vocal pro-paedophilia activist Amos Yee was given a six-year jail sentence on Thursday (Dec 2) in the United States.
Yee, 23, had previously pleaded guilty to two charges of child pornography and grooming. He had solicited and exchanged nude photos with a girl from Texas who was only 14 at the time.
He has been barred from contacting the girl for two years after he is released from jail. She was only 14 when he started messaging her in 2019. They reportedly exchanged thousands of text messages.
Yee was also told by Judge Carol Howard that his guilty plea may mean deportation to Singapore.
The judge told him that he can also be denied naturalisation as a US citizen in the future, should he want this option, and could even be denied entry into the country at all.
Judge Howard also told him that the convictions may have an effect on his ability to obtain housing, employment, and other licences, including a driver’s licence.
Yee had also faced 16 additional charges related to child pornography, but these were put aside as part of his plea deal.
The two charges on which he was convicted are for child pornography and grooming.
The charge of child pornography is a Class One felony and under Illinois criminal law, the second-most serious type of offence.
Between February and July 2019, Yee asked the girl to appear in lewd poses on video and other mediums.
On the second charge of grooming, he knowingly used the WhatsApp messaging platform to seduce the girl and to solicit pictures of naked parts of her body from her. These images he then proceeded to distribute on the app.
A divisive figure infamous for his run-ins with the law at an early age, Yee, has been widely condemned in Singapore, but his cause was taken up by local activists and international rights groups, and media.
Yee has been in the US since December 2016 and was granted political asylum the following year, after a judge ruled that he faced persecution in Singapore for his political opinions.
In October 2020, he was charged with solicitation and possession of child pornography. After his arrest, he pleaded not guilty in a Chicago court to all charges related to his arrest for child pornography.
Yee was then accused of having exchanged nude photos and “thousands” of messages with a Texas girl while he was living in Chicago, according to a report by the Chicago Sun-Times.
Prosecutors said they obtained messages Yee and the girl exchanged between April and July 2019 that included nude photos he requested and received from the girl and nude photos of himself that he sent to her.
The prosecutors added that the girl repeatedly brought up her age in the messages, but Yee instructed her to remove her age from her profile on WhatsApp.
When their relationship eventually soured, she reached out to a group interested in exposing paedophiles, and that led to his arrest. /TISG
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