Chicago —  A prosecutor has requested a federal choose to condemn Jerry Harris, a former star of the Netflix documentary collection “Cheer,” to 15 years in jail for coercing teenage boys to ship him obscene photographs and movies of themselves and soliciting sex from minors at cheerleading competitions.
Attorneys for Harris are in search of a sentence of six years.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelly Guzman wrote in a sentencing memo late Wednesday that Harris used “his status as a competitive cheerleader, his social media persona, and eventually his celebrity and money, to persuade and entice his young victims to engage in sexually explicit conduct for him or with him.”
Guzman additionally requested the sentence embody 10 years of supervised launch after the jail term.
Harris, 22, of suburban Naperville, pleaded responsible earlier this year to at least one rely every of receiving little one pornography and touring with the intention to interact in unlawful sexual conduct. He is because of be sentenced July 6 by U.S. District Judge Manish Shah.
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Defense attorneys, in asking {that a} six-year sentence be adopted by eight years of supervised launch, described Harris as “both victimizer and victim,” saying he was sexually assaulted himself when he was a toddler.
“The trauma he experienced as a child normalized his skewed version of what he understood to be appropriate relationships. No one was there to stand up for him when he was sexually assaulted as a minor. He is grateful that is not the case for his victims in this case, to whom he is profoundly remorseful.” protection attorneys wrote.
Federal prosecutors acknowledged the actor’s traumatic childhood was a mitigating think about his crimes, however mentioned “while Harris’s childhood was very difficult, it was not a blank check to commit sex offenses against minors.”
Harris stays in custody at a federal detention facility.
Harris was arrested in September 2020 on a cost of manufacturing of kid pornography. Prosecutors alleged on the time that he solicited movies and pictures from two 14-year-old brothers.
According to a criticism, federal prosecutors mentioned that Harris admitted to repeatedly asking a minor teen for pornographic movies and pictures between December 2018 and March 2020.
Then in December of that year, he was indicted on extra costs alleging misconduct in Illinois, Florida and Texas. According to the indictment, Harris allegedly solicited sex from minors at cheerleading competitions and persuaded teenage boys to ship him obscene pictures and movies of themselves.
Harris admitted to FBI brokers to asking a teenage boy to ship him lewd pictures of himself, and to requesting little one pornography on Snapchat from a minimum of 10 to 15 others he knew to be minors, in response to the indictment.
“Cheer” was an enormous success when it was launched in January 2020 and Harris grew to become wildly widespread for his upbeat perspective and his encouraging “mat talk.” Harris even interviewed celebrities on the pink carpet on the Academy Awards for “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”
The docuseries follows the aggressive cheerleading squad from Navarro College in Corsicana, Texas.
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