(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office announced Thursday that prominent Washington Post cartoonist Darrin Bell has been arrested for possessing child pornography.
According to a press release, the Sacramento Valley Internet Crimes Against Children Detectives stated investigating Bell after receiving a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The tip was reportedly related to 18 files of child pornography with 134 videos linked to an account owned by the 49-year-old Bell.
Detectives served a warrant on Bell’s home Wednesday, recovering evidence related to the initial tip, as well as computer-generated/AI child porn.
Here's one of Darrin Bell's cartoons accusing Donald Trump of being a sex pervert. What a surprise. https://t.co/4CYDLhTCIS pic.twitter.com/69EqZnWJr4
— RAW EGG NATIONALIST (@Babygravy9) January 16, 2025
Bell was arrested and is being held on $1 million bond. His initial court appearance is set for Friday.
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office noted that this is its first case involving a charge of AI child porn.
“Bell is a well-known cartoonist, having been featured in several prominent publications,” the office added. “His booking photo is not available for public release, per California law.”
The Washington Post hasn’t commented on the matter as of the publication of this article. Online pundits quickly noted the irony of Bell’s arrest, given his previous work depicting Donald Trump as a deviant.
“Here’s one of Darrin Bell’s cartoons accusing Donald Trump of being a sex pervert. What a surprise,” said online poster Raw Egg Nationalist, whose real name is Charles Cornish-Dale.
The charge against Bell for possessing AI child porn comes about eight months after the Justice Department filed the first such case in the country. According to the DOJ, Steven Anderegg, 42, of Holmen, used a text-to-image generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI, model called Stable Diffusion to create thousands of realistic images of prepubescent minors.
In that case, Holmen’s attorney is disputing that some of the AI images found on his computer actually constituted child pornography. Since no children were abused to produce such images, the DOJ should have been held to a higher standard to be able to obtain a search warrant against Holmen in the first place, his lawyer argued in a November brief.
Setting aside who this person is, it's interesting that Bell was charged with having AI-generated CP.
The DOJ filed the first charge for AI CP last May. That case is still open, and a lawyer is arguing that AI CP doesn't qualify as, well, CP.
In the federal case, a defense… https://t.co/kFQZv5XcR5 pic.twitter.com/JDQM2vXLMt— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) January 16, 2025
“This case is not about child pornography: the rules and analysis for those cases don’t apply here. This is all about obscenity and the First Amendment, and it’s a much, much different framework,” defense attorney Joseph Bugni argued in a Nov. 8 motion to suppress the search warrant.
“We don’t even have a sex act being displayed. We have nudity, which is not obscene and often not even enough to find that the image is child pornography,” he said.
“Here, there is nothing about the images that would make them into remotely patently offensive, hard- core pornography. Is it pornography? Maybe—probably, sure. But it doesn’t matter because the question is: Is the image patently offensive, hard-core pornography? Certainly not. Those descriptions just don’t cut it.”
A judge has yet to rule on the motion.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
