Police in Northern California this week arrested a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for allegedly possessing child pornography.
Darrin Bell, 49, was booked into the Sacramento County jail after sheriff’s deputies executed a warrant on his home on Wednesday.
Earlier this month, detectives in Sacramento received a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that an online account connected to Bell had uploaded 18 files that depicted child pornography.
Detectives open an investigation, and ultimately recovered 134 videos of child sex abuse material. A warrant executed on Bell’s home this week led police to discover additional files of child sex abuse, some of which were created using artificial intelligence.
The case is the first in Sacramento County to invoke a new law that designates artificial intelligence-images depicting child sex abuse as child pornography. The law took effect on January 1; before, child sex abuse images created by artificial intelligence tools were not considered illegal in the state.
In a television interview on Thursday, Sacramento County Sheriff Amar Ghandi said only some of the images and videos recovered from Bell’s computer during the search warrant were created using artificial intelligence.
Bell is being held on $1 million bond. His first court appearance is scheduled for Friday afternoon.
Bell is a cartoonist whose work is distributed by King Features, a content syndicator owned by Hearst Newspapers. He previously worked for the Washington Post and Universal Press Syndicate.
In 2019, Bell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in the category of Editorial Cartooning “for beautiful and daring editorial cartoons that took on issues affecting disenfranchised communities, calling out lies, hypocrisy and fraud in the political turmoil surrounding the Trump administration.”
The cartoons included one that depicted two separate voter registration drop boxes — one labeled “whites” and the other “colored” — with the latter shredding voter registration applications as they are submitted.
Another Pulitzer-winning cartoon showed a young male riding on the subway, admiring a young woman, while listening to a podcast on his phone.
“It wouldn’t matter if Brett Kavanaugh DID sexually assault that girl — he was 17! No man should be held responsible for a sexual assault he committed at 17!” the speech bubble emanating from the phone read.
