Here’s more news CNN doesn’t need right now: New Day senior producer John Griffin was arrested on Friday by the FBI after a federal grand jury in Vermont charged him with three counts of using a facility of interstate commerce to attempt to entice minors to engage in unlawful sexual activity at a residence in Ludlow, Vt.
Griffin appeared in federal court via Zoom, where Judge Robert Spector said he would file an order requesting his transfer to Connecticut. Griffin has a ski house in Ludlow, but his permanent residence is in Stamford, Ct.
According to the indictment, from April to July of 2020, Griffin used 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.
On these Kik and Google Hangout correspondences, Griffin tried to persuade parents to allow him to train their daughters to be sexually submissive. In June of last year, he 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.”
According to the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Vermont, Griffin later transferred $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 last year, where Griffin picked them up and drove them to his house in Ludlow, Vt. At the house, the daughter was directed to engage in, and did engage in, unlawful sexual activity.
The indictment also includes allegations that Griffin tried to entice two other children over the internet to engage in sexual activity. In April of last year, Griffin proposed to engage in a “virtual training session” over a video chat that would include him instructing the mother and her 14-year-old daughter to remove their clothing and touch each other at his direction. In June of last year, Griffin proposed to a purported mother of a 16-year-old daughter that she take a “little mother-daughter trip” to Griffin’s Ludlow, Vt. ski house for sexual training involving the minor.
“We take the charges against Mr. Griffin incredibly seriously,” says a CNN spokesperson. “We only learned of his arrest this afternoon and have suspended him pending investigation.”
CNN said on Tuesday that it has terminated Griffin’s employment.
Griffin joined CNN in 2013, which also happens to be the same year Chris Cuomo joined the network. Griffin was Cuomo’s anchor producer during his time co-hosting New Day. Prior to joining CNN, Griffin had stops as a producer/writer at ABC News, Fox News, and CBS News.
John Griffin is son of the legendary broadcast TV talent agent Jim Griffin, whose client list includes the late Regis Philbin and Willard Scott, as well as Emeril Lagasse, Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera (who’s now at UTA), and yes, Chris Cuomo.