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By John Ogunsemore
A court in Kentucky, United States has sentenced 46-year-old Robert Maxwell Werner to 30 years in prison for producing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in the Philippines.
Chief US District Judge David Bunning imposed the sentence on Friday, March 7.
Supervisory Official Matthew R. Galeotti of the US Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Acting US Attorney Paul McCaffrey for the Eastern District of Kentucky, and Assistant Director Chad Yarbrough of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division made the announcement published on the US Justice Department’s website.
Under US federal law, Werner must serve 85 percent of his prison sentence and upon his release from prison, would be under the supervision of the US Probation Office for 20 years.
According to court documents, from February 2021 through November 2021, while living in the Philippines, Werner of Walton, Kentucky, purchased access from a Filipino individual to dozens of minor victims for in-person, livestreamed, and recorded sexual acts.
For several months, Werner was said to have paid this individual for custom-created CSAM, in which the individual would sexually abuse these minors and force the minors to engage in sexual acts together for foreign customers like Werner.
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Werner also paid the individual for five in person meetings with minors at hotels and rental properties in the Philippines.
During those meetings, Werner was said to have sexually abused multiple minors.
In exchange, he would provide money, food, clothing, and basic necessities for the minors, who lived in desperate circumstances.
“As part of his plea agreement, Werner admitted to engaging in sexually explicit conduct with at least one minor for the purpose of producing a visual depiction of that conduct between July 2021 and November 2021, while in the Philippines.
“Werner further admitted to transporting that sexually explicit material into the United States. Additionally, once he returned to the United States, Werner continued to solicit CSAM from the individual for at least another month,” the announcement reads.
The case was prosecuted as part of Project Safe Childhood, a US-wide initiative to combat the epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Justice Department.
