Former Subway spokesman Jared Fogle is due in federal court today to learn how much time he’ll spend in prison on child porn and sex crime charges.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt was scheduled to sentence Fogle after formally accepting his plea to one count each of travelling to engage in illicit sexual conduct with a minor and distribution and receipt of child pornography.
Fogle agreed in August to plead guilty to the charges following a July raid on his suburban Indianapolis home. The resulting criminal case destroyed his career with Subway.
Prosecutors are seeking a 12 ½-year sentence, while Fogle’s attorneys have asked for five years. But federal judges have wide discretion, and Pratt could go beyond the prosecution’s recommendation. The child porn charge carries a maximum 20 years in prison, and the sex with a minor count is punishable by up to 30 years.
The 38-year-old Fogle admitted paying for sex with girls as young as 16 and receiving child pornography produced by Russell Taylor, the former executive director of The Jared Foundation, a nonprofit Fogle started to raise awareness and money to fight childhood obesity.
Authorities said Taylor secretly filmed 12 minors as they were nude, changing clothes, or engaged in other activities using hidden cameras in his Indianapolis-area residences to produce child pornography. Taylor has agreed to plead guilty to child exploitation and child pornography charges.
Prosecutors said in a sentencing memorandum filed last week that Fogle received photos or videos from Taylor of eight of those 12 youths, and that some of those images were of girls as young as 12. Fogle could have stopped Taylor from victimizing some of minors, prosecutors have said, but he instead encouraged Taylor to produce additional child pornography.
In the government’s filing, prosecutors said “Fogle has sacrificed absolutely everything he had built — including his family — to engage in sexually explicit conduct with two minors. He emboldened a molester and a producer of child pornography.”
Court documents detailing the charges against the 38-year-old father of two say that Fogle had sex at New York City hotels with two girls under age 18 — one of whom was 16 at the time — and paid them for that sex.
Fogle has agreed to pay a total of $1.4 million to his 14 victims, with each getting $100,000. He became a Subway spokesman after shedding more than 200 pounds as a college student, in part by eating the chain’s sandwiches.
Subway ended its relationship with Fogle after authorities raided his suburban Indianapolis home in July.
In their sentencing memorandum seeking a five-year prison term, Fogle’s attorneys said he “is profoundly sorry for what he has done.” They also wrote that Fogle suffers from “hypersexuality and alcohol abuse/dependence” and is committed to receiving treatment for his medical conditions.
In addition, Fogle’s attorneys stressed that he never engaged in any sexual conduct with any of Taylor’s minor victims and played no role in producing any of the images or videos recorded by Taylor.
Fogle’s attorneys said in their sentencing memorandum that Fogle’s offer to pay each victim restitution demonstrates “both the genuine remorse he feels and his commitment” to help his victims “move forward” with their lives.
As of last week, 11 of those victims had received their restitution and the three others should have arrangements in place to be paid by Fogle’s sentencing hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven DeBrota said.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
The headline is unfair to Subway. As soon as they learned of the charges they fired Fogle. Perhaps Subway spokesman to be sentenced as a sexual predator would be better, or just leave Subway out of the headline.
This sentence should alert others involved in child exploitation that they will go to prison if they are caught with child porn or molesting a child. Too many times celebrities have a way of getting off the hook. A 12 year prison sentence may discourage others from engaging in this behavior.
In my view, the only thing this perv is sorry for is that he got caught!
He blatantly disregarded his family, and Subway and did not care who he took with him.
He threw it all away for nothing!
That’s the thing Rob, these scum just do not care about anything but ruining young people’s lives. Put them to death, as they are below animals on the food chain
It is widely known that pedophiles rarely recover. Instead they steal children’s happiness and dreams for a lifetime. Either find a cure for these unrepentant sinners or put them to death. We the People cannot afford to repeatedly pay to put these scum into a special jail so other prisoners won’t kill them. Put them out of Our Misery
BTW on the other hand, it does make Subway food sound fresher…
There must be a lot of predator’s in upstate NY. I know of a certain small city were girl’s between 12 and 18 go to bed with male’s all the time. It is very common. I saw a girl 13, 8 month’s pregnant. I was told she became pregnant at 12. I was the only one surprised. The hospital’s and the average citizen said that it was a common thing. In the mountain town’s it is the same. I’m not saying that all girl’s are like that but there were plenty that were. Poulan Devaine was sold to a 32 year old man for a bike and a cow when she was 12 to be his wife. This happened in India and a movie was made about it called the “Bandit Queen”.