16-year sentence for man who got on live video sex calls with 1,000 girls

A Manassas man who recorded hundreds of explicit video chats with girls he met online was sentenced Wednesday to 16 years in federal prison.

Anthony Benton, 21, admitted he chatted with “at least” 1,000 girls on the online video application Omegle, enticing hundreds of them to expose themselves as he secretly recorded video over a three-year period beginning in 2020. The girls ranged from 7 to 17 years of age, prosecutors said. Benton also purchased approximately 200 videos depicting child sexual abuse in 2022, according to court records.

Benton pleaded guilty to production and receipt of child pornography in May. Federal prosecutors said he spent “three long years exploiting children, while knowing what he was doing was wrong.”

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“This case is not a simple isolated instance of terrible choices,” federal prosecutor McKenzie Hightower wrote in a sentencing brief this month, noting that Benton seemed to have a normal upbringing with a supportive family in Virginia. “The victims of his crime — children desperate for attention and affection online — are the ones who experience challenges beyond imagination.”

Prosecutors sought a prison term of 30 years for Benton. Defense attorney Damon Colbert requested the mandatory minimum term of 15 years required by federal law, citing a clinical evaluation that found Benton suffered from a pedophilic disorder and “was not as mature and cognizant of the effects of his actions” because of his age and level of maturity. U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga handed down a 16-year sentence.

“His offense conduct was reprehensible. But when law enforcement initially confronted him about his conduct, he was forthright, and he remained that way in all of his dealings with law enforcement,” Colbert wrote in a sentencing brief, adding that Benton “never had any physical contact with any of the girls who used the Omegle website, and there is nothing to suggest that he enticed them to visit that website.”

In a statement of facts filed with his guilty plea in May, Benton “admitted to having sexual intercourse” with a girl who was 14 or 15 years old in fall 2020, when he was 19. “He further admitted to having sexual intercourse with the same minor female in July of 2022,” when she was 16 or 17 years old, the document says. The age of consent in Virginia is 18, prosecutors noted. Benton was charged only with child pornography offenses.

Colbert said the sentence Trenga imposed was much shorter than the 30 years that prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia “fervently” requested. Federal sentencing guidelines called for a maximum prison sentence of 50 years, he said.

“Mr. Benton has already begun the rehabilitative process, and he is thankful that the court sentenced him well below the guidelines range after considering his sentencing argument,” Colbert said.

Agents at the Department of Homeland Security found Benton through a payment he made on PayPal to a person they suspected of selling child sexual abuse materials, then executed a search warrant in March at Benton’s home, prosecutors said.