A 27-year-old Benton man arrested in May for "cat-fishing," or using a fictional online persona to lure someone into a relationship, pleaded guilty to two federal charges Wednesday in exchange for a 17-year prison sentence.
Chief U.S. District Judge Brian Miller accepted Joshua Reile's guilty pleas to charges of extortion and attempted production of child pornography, the latter of which is punishable by 15 to 30 years in prison. In return for his guilty plea, negotiated through attorney Molly Sullivan of the federal public defender's office, Assistant U.S. Attorney Allison Bragg asked Miller to drop the other five charges Reile faced, and Miller agreed.
Those charges included lying to a federal agent, production of child pornography and three counts of electronic stalking.
Sullivan told the judge that Reile also agreed to register as a sex offender and to pay restitution, the amount of which hasn't been determined.
Bragg told the judge that in August 2015, agents with the FBI's Denied Innocence Task Force who were investigating another case came across online chats between Reile, using the name Stasi Reese, and a 16-year-old girl. In those chats, Reile said he would pay the girl for naked pictures and videos.
Court documents show that Reile, using the name Stasi, had met the girl on the social media site MeetMe.com. The agents reported finding the conversations while reviewing chat rooms that electronic records showed had been repeatedly accessed by the other person under investigation.
An affidavit filed in support of Reile's arrest said "Stasi" told the 16-year-old girl that another adult was her "sugar daddy" and would pay her to have sex.
Agents traced a TracFone used by Reile in his conversations with the girl on MeetMe.com and another social media site, Kik, to his Benton home, according to the affidavit. It said he initially denied that he had ever pretended to be a girl on social media or used the name Stasi, but a forensic examination of his mobile phone unearthed messages indicating he had assumed the identities of various females without their permission. The affidavit said Reile communicated through those identities with unsuspecting females, some of whom were under 18.
It said that from Aug. 24, 2015 to Dec. 15, 2015, he used a phony identity he called B.D. to converse with 11 women whom he repeatedly asked for nude pictures and sought to have sex. It said he also had conversations with three women, including one who was in high school, in which he pretended to be a male named K.J.
The high school woman later told agents that she had developed "strong feelings" for K.J. and sent pictures of herself in her underwear to him. She said he responded by calling her a "whore," and after she confronted him about using a fake identity, he threatened to post the pictures she had sent him on Facebook and the MeetMe.com site.
The affidavit said Reile also impersonated the high-school woman, using her initials to chat with 27 different women between Aug. 31, 2015 and Dec. 9, 2015, again seeking nude photographs. It said that sometimes he sent them the girl's photographs, which he had stolen from her Facebook page, apparently to legitimize his fake identity.
Using that identity, it said, he told one of his correspondents who wrote that she hadn't been responding to his messages because her sister had died, "I'm posting your pics on Facebook. Go join your sister whore."
Reile is expected to be sentenced in about three months.
Metro on 11/10/2016