Joseph Downing Barnes Jr., 35, was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison this week for a new round of child exploitation crimes committed after an earlier child pornography conviction.
Barnes, who identifies as a transgender woman, used online chats to pose as a woman and trick underage boys into exposing themselves, according to the US Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Virginia. Prosecutors said Barnes would flash his fake breasts during webcam sessions in exchange for the boys performing sex acts.
The scheme unraveled when Google detected suspected child sexual abuse material in one of its accounts and flagged it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The tech company traced the account to Virginia Beach and notified local police there.
Investigators obtained a warrant for the email address “[email protected]” and discovered screen recordings showing Barnes enticing young boys into compromising situations, according to court documents obtained by the Post. The files showed Barnes had recorded the webcam chats and stored them in the Google account.
Barnes was no stranger to law enforcement. He had pleaded guilty in 2016 to distributing child pornography after police seized his phone during an investigation into another individual and found 74 videos and four images of child pornography, plus additional online accounts containing more images. He served 108 months in prison for that conviction.
The victims in the new case were boys as young as 10 who believed they were communicating with a woman during the online chats. Barnes leveraged that deception to manipulate them into exposing themselves on camera, prosecutors said.
A federal grand jury indicted Barnes in March. The 25-year sentence handed down this week will follow his completion of the earlier prison term.
The investigation involved multiple agencies, with the Virginia Beach Police Department taking the initial report from NCMEC and federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia handling the case. Court documents detailed the specific email address and the nature of the recorded interactions that formed the basis of the charges.
Barnes will serve his sentence in the federal prison system with supervised release to follow.