Mark Salling. Photo of Heavy.
Summary: Glee’s Mark Salling pled guilty on Tuesday to owning child porn.
On TV, Mark Salling played a loveable high school rebel, but in real life, the 35-year-old harbored a dark secret–a love for child porn. This week, the actor pled guilty to possession of child pornography, and he faces four to seven years in prison and must register as a sex offender.
Salling played Puck on Fox’s smash hit Glee, which told the story of a group of high school chorus singers. He accrued numerous fans and was seen by millions week after week, so it was a shock when he was arrested in December of 2015.
Salling’s home was raided by the Los Angeles Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce, and they found child porn on his computer as well on a USB flash drive. In May of 2016, he was indicted for two counts of child porn, including receiving and possessing the material on his laptop and the USB. Authorities said that Salling had thousands of images of prepubescents.
In June 2016, Salling pled not guilty in federal court, but he has since changed his plea. He now faces prison, $50,000 in restitution to each victim who requests it, supervision after prison, and registration on the sex offender list.
On Tuesday, Salling pled guilty to “one felony count of possession of child pornography involving a prepubescent minor.”
Salling famously dated his co-star Naya Rivera, who wrote in a memoir published in 2016, that she was not shocked to hear the news of his perversion.
“My son’s nanny actually told me about it when the story broke,” Rivera wrote. “I can’t say I was totally shocked, but still — WTF? Then I had no doubt that God really did have my back along the way. When Mark dumped me, I thought it was the worst thing ever, but can you imagine if that didn’t happen? And I was laying there in bed when the battering ram came through the door?”
Rivera continued that most relationships would not be worthy of regret because you can learn something, but she said she regretted her time with Salling.
“I think everyone should have that one relationship where you look back and ask yourself, ‘What the hell was I thinking?’ You’ll learn something and you won’t regret it,” Rivera wrote. “Unless, of course, that relationship was with someone who had a sizable stash of child porn on his computer. Then, by all means, regret everything.”
Billboard reported that authorities found over 50,000 images and videos of child pornography and erotica on his computer and a thumb drive with 4,000 images and 160 videos. Salling admitted to using software to hide his IP to download the porn, and prosecutors said that some of Salling’s victims were between the ages of three and five years old.
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