Twin Falls Man Pleads Guilty to Attempted Coercion and Enticement of a Minor

BOISE – Jerry Bob Stewart, 50, of Twin Falls, pleaded guilty today in United States District Court to attempted coercion and enticement of a minor, Acting U.S. Attorney Rafael Gonzalez announced.

According to the plea agreement, between July and August of 2015, Stewart communicated online with a ten-year old child located in California. The child told Stewart she was 19 years old, but Stewart proposed they engage in a father-daughter “fantasy” where the child was 14 years old. The communications were sexual in nature, and were discovered by the child’s grandmother. A detective with the Nevada County, California Sheriff’s Office took over the child’s accounts, and began communicating directly with Stewart, posing as the child. Between September and December of 2015, the detective repeatedly told Stewart that she was only 13 years old. Stewart continued to express his desire to have sexual contact with the child, and sent sexually explicit images to the child’s accounts. Stewart acknowledged the child’s age, stating “we can’t get in trouble,” and “let’s just say you are 18 or over . . . if anyone ask[s].”

In November of 2015, Stewart agreed to pay for a bus ticket for the child to travel to Idaho so that he could have sexual contact with the child, and sent an envelope containing $300.00 in U.S. currency to the child via U.S. Mail. On December 10, 2015, Stewart rented a room at a Twin Falls hotel under the child’s name, and traveled to a bus stop in Twin Falls to meet the child. Agents with Homeland Security Investigations contacted Stewart and discovered a box of condoms, two male sexual performance enhancement pills, and a bottle of lubricant in his vehicle.

Sentencing is set for November 28, 2017, before Chief U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill. Attempted coercion and enticement of a minor is punishable by up to 20 years imprisonment, a $250,000 fine, a term of supervised release of not less than five years and up to life, and a $5,100 special assessment. As part of his plea, Stewart also agreed to forfeit a cell phone, tablet, and portable wireless internet device used in the commission of the charged offense.

The case was investigated by Homeland Security Investigations and the Nevada County, California Sheriff’s Office, with assistance from the Idaho Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force, the Twin Falls Police Department, and the Twin Falls County Sheriff’s Office, and was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by the United States Attorneys’ Offices and the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state, and local resources to locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who sexually exploit children, and to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.usdoj.gov/psc. For more information about internet safety education, please visit www.usdoj.gov/psc and click on the tab “resources.”