By Josh Mitchell
Editor
River Mississippi News
CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE — A 44-year-old Georgia man was sentenced Thursday in federal court to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to distributing child porn and sending videos with minors and dogs involved in “sexually explicit conduct,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Tennessee announced.
Lookout Mountain resident Eric Lee Bagley pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Chattanooga, Tennessee to distribution of child pornography and distribution of a “crush” video,” which is a “sexually explicit image of a non-human animal.”
Bagley will be on supervised release for a decade after his 20-year prison term is over, must register as a sex offender, comply with “special sex offender conditions” and can have no access to animals. In his guilty plea, Bagley admitted to contacting an undercover officer on the online platform Kik, thinking the officer was “an adult female who had access to her 8-year-old niece.”
Bagley wrote that he was interested in having sexual contact with the adult and child and wanted a dog involved as well, the release adds. According to the news release, Bagley sent several videos “depicting minors and dogs engaging in sexually explicit conduct” in hopes of enticing an encounter between a woman and an 8-year-old girl.
He traveled to Athens, Tennessee last July and was arrested after authorities determined he intended to “engage in sexual contact with the notional adult female and the notional 8-year-old,” the release states. This case was was a result of an undercover effort targeting crimes against children and was part of the FBI’s Operation Cross Country.
The FBI was assisted by the Shelbyville Police Department, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Red Bank Police Department, Chattanooga Police Department and the McMinn County Sheriff’s Office. It fell under the umbrella of Project Safe Childhood, which is a DOJ effort to reduce “child sexual exploitation and abuse.”
