Peoria Man Sentenced to 35 Years in Prison for Producing Child Pornography while Registered as a Sex Offender

Peoria, Ill. – U.S. District Judge Michael M. Mihm sentenced Jordan D. Salem, 25, of Peoria, Ill., to serve 35 years in prison for producing child pornography while registered as a sex offender. Judge Mihm ordered that Salem remain on supervised release for a period of 15 years following the completion of his prison term. Salem pled guilty to the charges on June 28, 2016.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Ronald L. Hanna prosecuted the case. The charges were the result of a joint investigation by the United States Secret Service, the Peoria Police Department, and the Peoria County Sheriff’s Department.

According to court documents, Salem pleaded guilty to the offense of statutory rape in Tennessee in 2012 which required him to register as a sex offender under Illinois law. Beginning in 2013, Salem created several false identities on Facebook using another male’s picture and solicited naked photographs and sexual acts from female victims, including minors. Acting under his false personas, Salem represented that he was employed as a performer by an internet pornography website that was seeking females to produce short pornographic videos. Salem promised that the girls would be paid thousands of dollars by the website and that their identities would not be revealed. When a girl inquired with Salem’s false persona on Facebook, he would provide additional details about the job and would direct them to send several naked images of themselves if they were interested. If a girl complied with his request for naked photographs, Salem would then direct her to his residence for the purpose of producing the pornographic film with him. In the course of his Facebook chats with females he knew to be minors, Salem would reassure them that he had produced pornography with minors in the past and he could either blur their face or keep their face out of the video to protect them from being discovered.

The investigation, including the results of search warrants executed on Salem’s Facebook accounts and e-mail accounts, revealed that Salem used the fictitious Facebook profiles to solicit sex and sexually explicit images from at least 28 females, including 10 minors. Salem utilized the scheme to persuade six of the minor females, including an 11 year-old, to produce sexually explicit images of themselves and send them to him on the internet. Over the course of the scheme, at least 22 females, 7seven of whom were minors, engaged in sexual intercourse with Salem with the expectation that they were going to be paid large sums of money by a pornographic film production company. Salem did not pay any of his victims the money they were promised for taking part in the production of sexually explicit images.

Salem has remained in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service since he was arrested on Oct. 30, 2015.

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. Led by U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS), Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet as well as to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.projectsafechildhood.gov.