New Jersey Lawyer Sentenced to 12 Years in Prison for Attempted Sex with Minor
Defendant Sought Sexual Rendezvous with 7-Year-Old Daughter of Online Paramour
| U.S. Attorney’s Office November 29, 2011 |
ATLANTA—TOBIN NILSEN, 58, of Buena, New Jersey, was sentenced today in federal court to serve 12 years in federal prison for attempting to entice a minor to have sex with him. NILSEN, a solo-practitioner lawyer, met a woman online and convinced her to let him have sexual access to her daughter, unaware that this woman was an undercover FBI agent. NILSEN was arrested in New Jersey after having purchased a ticket to fly to Atlanta to be with the young girl.
“This defendant provides another stark example of how pedophiles’ use of the Internet emboldens them to step from behind their computers and act on their impulses. It also shows how the Internet expands child predators’ universe of victims far beyond their local community. This defendant made concrete plans to fly nearly a thousand miles to sexually abuse a little girl,” said United States Attorney Sally Quillian Yates.
According to United States Attorney Yates, the charges, and other information presented in court: In May 2010, NILSEN met an undercover FBI agent in an online chatroom entitled “ChildSlaveSex.” The agent was posing as the mother of a 7-year-old girl. NILSEN explained to the agent that he was interested in introducing the agent’s “daughter” to the world of sexual exploration. For several weeks, NILSEN explained to the agent how to groom her daughter for their eventual sexual encounter. This process included exposing the daughter to images of child pornography that NILSEN instructed the agent to download from the Internet.
After NILSEN revealed his true identity to the agent and spoke with her on the phone to confirm that she was a real female and mother, he purchased a ticket to fly from New Jersey to Atlanta so he could have sex with the agent’s daughter. Several days before his flight, in June 2010, NILSEN was arrested in Bergen County, New Jersey, by local authorities when he sought to meet with another minor female as part of a local law enforcement investigation in that jurisdiction.
NILSEN was extradited to Georgia and pleaded guilty in September 2011. District Court Judge Julie E. Carnes sentenced NILSEN today to 12 years in prison, to be followed by a lifetime of supervised release. NILSEN will be required to register as a sex offender upon his release from custody.
This case was investigated by special agents and task force agents of the FBI, as well as officers from the Sandy Springs (Georgia) and Bergen County (New Jersey) Police Departments.
Assistant United States Attorney Robert McBurney prosecuted the case.
For further information, please contact Sally Q. Yates, United States Attorney, or Charysse L. Alexander, Executive Assistant United States Attorney, through Patrick Crosby, Public Affairs Officer, U.S. Attorney’s Office, at 404-581-6016. The Internet address for the HomePage for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia is www.justice.gov/usao/gan.