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Michael Anthony Baxter, 50, of Sterling, and the man conspired to use children some as young as three years old to produce more than 30 live-streaming webcam shows showing the sexual abuse of children, said Jessica D. Aber, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Baxter, a registered sex offender convicted in Prince William County Circuit Court in 2009 for possession of child pornography, and his co-conspirator used an online app to arrange the time and location of the livestreams, between April 2017 and November 2020, Aber said.
They'd preview the children who would appear in the livestream, discuss the sexual acts the children would perform, and direct the sexual acts in real time via text chat, according to Aber. Baxter paid the child sex trafficker through a third-party website to sexually abuse the young children while he watched via livestream.
Baxter’s co-conspirator was arrested in the Philippines in February 2021 for human trafficking offenses. After that arrest, Baxter continued to engage with other suspected child sex traffickers.
In December 2023, a federal search warrant was executed at Baxter’s home, where they found him actively engaged in a chat on the same Internet application with another suspected child sex trafficker.
Records obtained from the Internet application showed that Baxter had purchased livestreams of the other user’s 7- and 10-year-old daughters engaged in sexually explicit conduct, officials said.
In addition to the children victimized through the livestreams, Baxter — who worked at the Silver Diner in Reston, online records show — also had hundreds of files on his computers depicting child sexual abuse.
On Thursday, June 6, Baxter was sentenced to 32 years in prison.
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