WASHINGTON — A U.S. State Department employee pleaded guilty Monday to producing thousands of images of videos of child pornography over a two-year period.
Skydance MacMahon, a 44-year-old Alexandria resident, used hidden cameras to produce sexually explicit images and videos of minor children in Canada, according to court documents. MacMahon worked with a woman in Canada to produce the child pornography and distributed the videos and images through cloud storage and email.
Police found pornographic images of children on an Ohio man’s cellphone in November 2017, and authorities were able to link Dropbox media of child porn to an account associated with MacMahon, according to court documents.
MacMahon worked as a Digital Media Administrator at the Foreign Services Institute of the U.S. Department of State in Arlington while he committed the offenses, according to prosecutors.
On Monday, MacMahon pleaded guilty in United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to conspiring to produce child pornography and producing child pornography.
He faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years and a maximum penalty of 60 years in prison. He is scheduled to be sentence Oct. 12.
MacMahon’s case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, an initiative to fight child sexual exploitation and abuse.
