LEXINGTON, Ky. – A Versailles, Ky., man, Austin David Stafford, 31, was sentenced on Friday to a total of 540 months in prison, by U.S. District Judge Danny C. Reeves, for production of child pornography.
The sentence is the result of two separate court cases against Stafford. According to his plea agreement from the first court case, Stafford and his co-defendant and girlfriend, Crystal Campbell, now deceased, used a minor victim to engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of creating visual depictions of that conduct on two occasions, once at the couple’s trailer and once in an outdoor setting. Stafford’s Facebook records contained two instances of Stafford distributing the videos.
According to his plea agreement from the second court case, law enforcement was alerted to Stafford because of a minor victim’s father seeing a group message on Facebook Messenger that contained nude photos of the minor victim. An investigation revealed that Stafford was using a fake persona, “Craig Wright,” on social media to lure the minor victim into an online romance. Under this persona, he obtained intimate details and visual depictions of the minor victim. He then created additional fake personas and used the information that he had learned about the victim to extort and manipulate the minor victim. The “sextortion” scheme led the minor victim to send more sexually explicit visual depictions to Stafford and to engage in sexual acts with him. Eventually, Stafford communicated with James Campbell, 26, of Versailles, Ky., Stafford’s co-defendant, and on June 10, 2022, coerced a minor to engage in sexually explicit conduct with Campbell and film it, under the guise that one of his fake personas would hurt her family if she didn’t comply. Stafford admitted to orchestrating the sexual exchange with the victim and Campbell, and that Campbell knowingly and willingly aided and abetted the product of the June 10th series.
Campbell is scheduled to be sentenced on April 21, 2025.
Under federal law, Stafford must serve 85 percent of his prison sentence. Upon his release from prison, he will be under the supervision of the U.S. Probation Office for 30 years.
Paul McCaffrey, Acting United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky; Michael Stansbury, Special Agent in Charge, FBI, Louisville Field Office; and Phillip J. Burnett, Jr., Commissioner of the Kentucky State Police, jointly announced the sentence.
The investigation was conducted by FBI and KSP. Hart Megibben, Commonwealth Attorney for the 53rd Judicial Circuit, and Assistant Commonwealth Attorney, Jon Fee, also provided significant assistance to the investigation and prosecution of Stafford’s second case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Mary Melton is prosecuting the case on behalf of the United States.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office prosecuted this case as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in 2006 by the Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS), Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state, and local resources to better locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet as well as to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.projectsafechildhood.gov.
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