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SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- A Herkimer County man posed as his teen-age daughter's texting boyfriend to trick her into sending pornographic pictures of herself to him, he admitted in court today.



The man went so far as to falsely claim the fake boyfriend had committed suicide, then used the photos as leverage when he began sexually abusing the 14-year-old girl, according to federal court records.

The 41-year-old man pleaded guilty in federal court today to 12 counts of enticing a child to produce child pornography and receiving and sending child porn. He's facing sexual abuse charges in Herkimer County Court.

Syracuse.com is not publishing the man's name because that would identify the daughter, the victim of a sex crime.

The man set up accounts with Instagram, AOL and a texting service in September 2013 under a fake name and started chatting online with his daughter, pretending to be a 16-year-old boy from Watertown, court papers said.

They started calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend, even though they'd never met. The girl resisted his requests to send him sexually explicit photos, but finally gave in. By November, the girl told him she wanted to break up with him.

"I tell u what u want to be gone then send me nudes and close ups and I will let u go," the man responded in a text, posing as the teenage boy.

"No," she responded. "I'm not going to do that. That's another reason I'm leaving. All you talk about is sex sex and more sex. Honestly that is not what a relationship is about."

"Then I will send these to your dad and then I won't have to worry about anyone else having u," the man wrote, referring to the child pornographic pictures she'd sent.

The man, posing as the boyfriend, repeatedly made the threat of sending the photos to the girl's father, court papers said.

"I told you that a bunch of times when we were dating that I don't like those pics and now you are threatening me that if I don't send you those then you'll send my dad the ones I sent you before?" she texted. "My life is ruined."

In another text exchange, the man promised the girl that if she took more photos, he wouldn't show them to anyone else.

"You said that about the other one and now you're threatening to send it to my father, who by the way will kill me," she wrote.

At a detention hearing in December, a federal prosecutor asked a judge to consider that it was a father tricking his own daughter.

"Keep in mind the relationship between the defendant and the victim in this case, which makes this all that much more egregious," Assistant U.S. Attorney Lisa Fletcher told U.S. District Judge Brenda Sannes.

The father extorted the photos from his own daughter, Fletcher said.

After the girl broke up with him, the girl received a text from the boy's account from someone claiming to be his mother, court papers said. The text message said the boy had committed suicide.

Soon after that, the father told the girl that the boyfriend had sent him the photos, court papers said. The father often referred to them and how much he liked them while he sexually abused the girl, Fletcher wrote in court papers.

The man's scheme began to unfold a year after the fake suicide, when the girl reported to her school nurse that her father was sexually abusing her, court papers said.

"Only after that did his torture of her subside," Fletcher said at the detention hearing.

When police investigated, the girl told them that she'd been in an online relationship with the 16-year-old boy from Watertown, court papers said.

Police tracked down the texting account that the supposed boy was using and discovered that the texts had been sent from someone in the girl's own home, court papers said.

The man faces up to 250 years in prison when Sannes sentences him in July.

He sobbed in court today as he admitted his guilt. He had difficulty reaching his face with a tissue to wipe away tears because his hands were cuffed and chained to leg irons.

"It is very emotional," he told Sannes. "I'm giving away many years of my life."

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