A prize-winning cartoonist who was arrested earlier this month on suspicion of possessing child pornography was released from jail on Thursday.
Darrin Bell, 49, was arrested by police in Sacramento County on January 15 on numerous charges of possessing material showing child sexual abuse, some of which were allegedly created using artificial intelligence tools.
Police were first tipped off last year by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which regularly reports online accounts that contain child pornography to law enforcement officials.
That tip related to an account that investigators traced to Bell, a cartoonist with ties to several major newspapers. Police executed an arrest warrant on Bell’s home last week, and reportedly found thousands of images showing infants, toddlers and young children encountering sexual abuse.
A few of the images were apparently created using artificial intelligence tools, police said. Those images were not illegal in California until earlier this year, when a new law took effect that counted artificial intelligence-created images showing child sex abuse as child pornography, and effectuated the same criminal punishments for possession or distribution of those types of images.
Bell’s case is the first to be prosecuted in Sacramento County under the new artificial intelligence law. Police are unsure whether Bell created the images or merely received them, but the investigation against him started last summer, before the artificial intelligence portion of the law kicked in.
On Thursday, a public defender appointed to represent Bell in court argued for his release from custody, saying the matter had received international news attention and that there was “zero motivation not to appear before this court.”
Bell was freed from custody on supervised release. The Sacramento County Court, local law enforcement and the Sacramento County Child Protective Services (CPS) will be monitoring his compliance with post-release conditions. Separately, CPS is investigating whether any of Bell’s four children have suffered physical or emotional harm.
Bell has worked for Hearst Newspapers and the Washington Post in the past. In 2019, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.
