Independence Man Sentenced for Child Pornography

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – An Independence, Mo., man was sentenced in federal court today for uploading hundreds of images and videos of child pornography to his online storage accounts, as well as sending videos of child pornography to an Ohio teenager.

Joshua M. Rodgers, 29, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Greg Kays to eight years in federal prison without parole. The court also sentenced Rodgers to spend the rest of his life on supervised release following incarceration and to pay $35,000 in restitution to his victims. Rodgers will be required to register as a sex offender upon his release from prison and will be subject to federal and state sex offender registration requirements, which may apply throughout his life.

On July 17, 2023, Rodgers pleaded guilty to one count of transporting child pornography. Rodgers admitted that he uploaded hundreds of images and videos of child pornography to his cloud storage online Google account, particularly in his Google Drive file, as well as to Dropbox, an online cloud file storage program, from Dec. 4, 2017, to Feb. 27, 2019.

On April 29, 2019, the Western Missouri Cyber Crimes Task Force received four CyberTip reports from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children regarding a total of 548 videos of child pornography uploaded to Rodgers’s Google accounts. Investigators then identified 728 images and 771 videos of child pornography in Rodgers’s Google account. Of those, roughly 101 files involved infants or toddlers. An additional 1,022 images and 124 videos depicted “age difficult” persons and child erotica.

On Oct. 22, 2019, federal agents executed a search warrant at Rodgers’s residence. They seized his computer, which contained 658 videos and 139 images of suspected child pornography, including prepubescent victims, sadomasochistic behaviors, and bestiality.

Rodgers also admitted to previously communicating with a female from Ohio, beginning when she was 15 years old, and he admitted to sharing images and videos with her. Rodgers repeatedly asked her to send him pornographic images and videos of herself. He even bought her a sex toy, and had it sent to her to use in videos she could create for him. Rodgers also sent her videos of child pornography.

This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth W. Borgnino. It was investigated by Homeland Security Investigations and the Western Missouri Cyber Crimes Task Force.

Project Safe Childhood

This case 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."