Former FAU student who preyed on girls via social media gets 24 years in child-porn case
While he was attending Florida Atlantic University, a student in his early 20s randomly preyed upon nine teenage girls through social media platforms and coerced one of them online into sending explicit videos of herself, according to federal authorities.
He would threaten to post graphic images of the victims on the internet if they didn’t comply with his repeated requests to send him more sexually explicit videos — his M.O., authorities say.
After pleading guilty to sexually exploiting a 14-year-old girl to produce videos of herself masturbating, Shawn Anthony Jackson Outler was sentenced to 24 years in prison on Monday by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in Fort Pierce federal court. Outler, who has been held without bail since his arrest by the FBI in March, is 23 years old and no longer attends FAU in Boca Raton.
As part of his plea agreement reached in September, federal prosecutors dismissed two other charges: enticing minors on the internet and receiving child-porn images. When Outler is released from prison, he must register as a sex offender in Florida and will be on probation for 25 years.
Under federal sentencing guidelines, Outler faced a mandatory minimum of 15 years up to 30 years in prison. Such long prison terms are routine in online child-pornography cases, especially those involving the production of sexually graphic materials of minors. The FBI makes dozens of these internet child-porn cases with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Florida every year, and the feds spotlight them to raise public awareness in their effort “to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse.”
According to court records, Outler communicated between July 2018 and August 2021 with the minor girls, several of whom had histories of mental illness, self-harm or sexual abuse. He started off asking the girls to send sexual videos of themselves via livestream.
According to interviews with the girls, who ranged in age from 13 to 17 years old, FBI agents found that Outler engaged the victims “in a dominant/submissive online sexual relationship, belittling them, and demanding that some of them lick toilet seats, drink urine, or burn themselves on video for him,” according to a magistrate judge’s detention order finding the former FAU student was a danger to the community.
The victims told the FBI that Outler “would threaten to post sexual videos of them if they hesitated or refused his requests,” according to the judge’s summary.
In January 2021, two victims began complaining about Outler’s online activity on Instagram. Search warrants of his Instagram and Snapchat accounts showed that even after victims began publicly complaining about him, he asked a 14-year-old girl to send him a video of herself masturbating with a hairbrush in April 2021, according to the summary. The girl complied.
According to a factual statement signed by Outler along with his plea agreement, the former FAU student communicated with the girl on social media platforms such as Snapchat and FaceTime between July and September 2021. He reached out to her randomly and began interspersing sexual comments into their conversations, the statement says.
Outler told the girl, who was living in Palm Beach County, that he wanted to send her a video of himself ejaculating. She refused, the statement says, but offered to send sexually explicit videos of herself for money. She proceeded to send him three videos of herself with the hairbrush.
His defense attorney with the Federal Public Defender’s Office, Scott Berry, challenged prosecutor Diana Acosta’s effort to enhance Outler’s sentence beyond the mandatory minimum of 15 years by arguing that the girl had made the videos prior to meeting him.
This story was originally published December 20, 2022 at 3:11 PM.
