ABC News Producer Arrested on Child Pornography Charges

It seems like a story only a Hollywood screenwriter could make up. Nearly one year ago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the home of ABC producer James Gordon Meek in Arlington, Virginia. For nearly a decade, Meek was a member of the Walt Disney family, and a top producer for ABC News, working on shows like 20/20 and ABC News Nightline. Not long after the raid, Meek quickly resigned from his position at ABC News and completely fell off the grid, with friends reporting they had not seen him in months.

It was originally thought that the raid had to do with confidential documents Meek may have had in his possession that were a part of his work. However, months later, it was reported that his work was not related to the raid. Sadly, the reason for the raid was much darker.

On Tuesday, January 31, Meek was arrested for possession of child pornography that was discovered in his home during the FBI raid. Some of the images were reported to the National Center For Missing and Exploited Children after they were uploaded to the file-sharing site Dropbox.

Per a report from Variety, which first broke the news :

According to the Department of Justice, law enforcement “seized multiple devices that allegedly contained evidence of the transportation of images of child sexual abuse” in a court-authorized search of Meek’s residence, located in Arlington, Va., in April 2022.

Several of Meek’s devices allegedly held images depicting children engaged in “sexually explicit conduct,” as well as numerous “sexually explicit” chat conversations with other users who “expressed enthusiasm for the sexual abuse of children.” According to the DOJ, “in two of those conversations, a username allegedly associated with Meek received and distributed child sexual abuse materials through an internet-based messaging platform.”

Per court documents, the investigation into Meek, 53, was “initiated from an investigative lead sent by Dropbox and ultimately received by the FBI Washington Field Office’s Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force.”

If convicted, Meek faces a mandatory minimum of five years in prison. The maximum penalty is 20 years.

Before he started his career with The Walt Disney Company, Meek worked for the Daily News, reporting on many big news stories. He was the first reporter to publicly report on the Al-Qaeda-organized Hudson River bomb plot. Then, in 2011, Meek actually began to work for the federal government, becoming a senior counterterrorism advisor and investigator for the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security. During his time working for Homeland Security, meek investigated events like the Boston Marathon bombing.

During his time with Disney and ABC, Meek was nominated for several Emmy Awards, winning one in 2017 for his coverage of the Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando, Florida.