A CNN employee has been charged on Friday accused of luring a mother and her young daughter to come his home to ‘train’ her to be sexually submissive.
John Griffin who worked with former anchor Chris Cuomo
Officials confirmed that a grand jury in Vermont indicted 44-year-old John Griffin for attempting to rape various underage girls. He appeared in New Haven federal court via Zoom before Judge Robert Spector who said he would file an order requesting his transfer to Connecticut.
The indictment comes just days after CNN host Chris Cuomo was fired from his job after evidence emerged that he sexually assaulted female employees.
“According to the indictment, from April to July of 2020, Griffin utilized the messaging applications Kik and Google Hangouts to communicate with people purporting to be parents of minor daughters, conveying to them, among other ideas, that a ‘woman is a woman regardless of her age,’ and that women should be sexually subservient and inferior to men,” the Department of Justice said in a statement.
The DOJ added:
On these communication platforms, Griffin sought to persuade parents to allow him to train their daughters to be sexually submissive. In June of 2020, Griffin advised a mother of 9- and 13-year-old daughters that the mother’s responsibility was to see that her older daughter was “trained properly.” Griffin later transferred over $3,000 to the mother for plane tickets so the mother and her 9-year-old daughter could fly from Nevada to Boston’s Logan airport. The mother and child flew to Boston in July of 2020, where Griffin picked them up in his Tesla and drove them to his Ludlow house. At the house, the daughter was directed to engage in, and did engage in, unlawful sexual activity.
Griffin began working with CNN in 2013, working on the show ‘New Day’ when Chris Cuomo was its host.
Photos below:
.@ChrisCuomo says he can get me blessed by #PopeFrancis thanks to my "giant baby head." Let's try it, shall we?? pic.twitter.com/2Eed5dlySF
— John Griffin (@JGriffNYC) September 26, 2015
If proven guilty in a court of law, Griffin could face 10 years in prison at a minimum, and life in prison as a maximum sentence.
“We take the charges against Mr. Griffin incredibly seriously,” CNN said on Friday in a statement. “We only learned of his arrest this afternoon and have suspended him pending investigation.”
Meanwhile anchor Chris Cuomo has denied an allegation of sexual misconduct after he was fired from CNN.
Cuomo, one of the network’s star anchors, was the subject of an investigation, unrelated to the misconduct allegations, by the New York attorney general which concluded that Cuomo had helped his brother, former Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo, defend himself against sexual misconduct allegations. However, following Cuomo’s termination from CNN, an allegation of sexual misconduct came to light.
Following his termination on Saturday, Cuomo denied the sexual misconduct allegation that had this time been made against him. The allegation was first reported by The New York Times.
“These apparently anonymous allegations are not true. To the extent that they were sent to CNN to negate what Chris Cuomo told his audience, he fully stands by his on-air statements about his connection to these issues, both professionally and in a profoundly personal way,” a statement from Cuomo’s representative Steven Goldberg reads.
“If the goal in making these false and unvetted accusations was to see Mr. Cuomo punished by CNN, that may explain his unwarranted termination.”
