Ex-Subway Spokesman Jared Fogle Gets More Than 15 Years In Prison
INDIANAPOLIS (CBSNewYork/AP) -- A judge has sentenced former Subway pitchman Jared Fogle to 15 years and eight months in prison for trading in child pornography and having sex with underage prostitutes.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt sentenced Fogle on Thursday after he pleaded guilty to one count each of traveling to engage in illicit sexual conduct with a minor and distribution and receipt of child pornography.
Fogle agreed to the plea deal in August after authorities raided his suburban Indianapolis home in July. Prosecutors sought a 12 1/2-year sentence, while Fogle's attorneys sought five years.
He also agreed pay his 14 victims $100,000 each in restitution.
WEB EXTRA: Read The Plea Agreement
Fogle told the judge that he regrets his actions that destroyed his career and his life and harmed his victims. He said he can't undo the past but will do everything he can to be a better man and father when he gets out of prison.
"I so regret that I let so many of you down," Fogle said. "I want to redeem my life. I want to become a good, decent person."
The sentencing portion of the hearing began with Fogle's lawyers calling John Bradford, a professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada, to testify by phone.
Bradford, a psychiatrist who analyzed Fogle, said he concluded that Fogle suffers from hypersexuality, mild pedophilia, and alcohol abuse and dependency.
He said Fogle appears to have had a compulsive eating disorder and that he began to develop hypersexuality shortly after losing weight.
Fogle has 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 the 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.''
Rochelle Herman-Walrond, a former radio host who interviewed Fogle from 2007 to 2012, became suspicious when she overheard him say he found middle school girls attractive -- Fogle even discussed his sexual interest in children in several audio recordings, CBS2's Matt Kozar reported.
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.
Victims also include a 17-year-old-girl prosecutors say joined Fogle at the landmark Plaza Hotel opposite Central Park on Nov. 3, 2012. Fogle found the girl online, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said the girl told Fogle her age when they first met and that he knew she was a minor.
After the first meeting, the document said, Fogle texted the girl and offered to pay her a fee if she could find him another underage girl to pay for sex acts.
Several months later, prosecutors say he again paid the same girl for sex acts, this time at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, also across from Central Park.
Before Fogle entered his guilty pleas Thursday, one of his attorneys told the judge that Fogle had paid 12 of the 14 victims and turned over the checks for the last two victims before the proceedings began.
Fogle 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 home in July.
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