Disgraced former independent candidate for Maine governor Eliot Cutler will serve nine months behind bars as part of a plea deal for possessing child pornography.
Cutler, 76, had 142,000 pornographic images and videos of children saved on his electronic devices when police searched his Brooklin home in March 2022, according to a sentencing memo filed by Hancock County District Attorney Robert Granger. Of those images, nearly 84,000 depicted children under the age of 12, with some of the children as young as 4 to 6 years old, Granger wrote.
The former candidate downloaded the images over a seven year period beginning in November 2014 — the same month he lost his second gubernatorial campaign to Paul LePage, according to court documents.
Cutler, who previously pleaded not guilty, will change his plea to guilty and be sentenced on Thursday in Hancock County Unified Criminal Court on four felony counts of possession of sexually explicit material of a child under 12, according to his defense attorney, Walter McKee.
McKee wrote in his sentencing memo that the volume of the photo and video files that his client kept or viewed are likely “several times” less than the number police have estimated that Cutler downloaded. He also said that a forensic psychologist who evaluated Cutler over three months following his arrest determined that Cutler is at “very low risk” for reoffending.
Prosecutors announced last month they reached a plea deal with Cutler that included jail time, but details of the agreement had not been revealed until Tuesday.
Under the plea agreement, Cutler has an underlying sentence of four years. If he violates his probation after he is released, he could be sent to prison for the remainder of the time he has not served behind bars.
He also will have to register as a sex offender for 10 years and will be required to make a $5,000 donation to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, according to court documents. After he is released, he will have to serve 6 years of probation.
McKee wrote in court documents that Cutler was addicted to pornography “over the course of decades” and that this addiction eventually led him to seek out child pornography. Cutler acknowledges “the great harm” caused to the children in the images he had and the harm his actions have caused his family, he said.
“His fall has been catastrophic, his reputation is in tatters, and he will now live out the final years of his life in a way he never imagined,” McKee said.
Cutler is expected to begin serving his sentence at 9 a.m. on June 1, McKee wrote. With a period of incarceration of 9 months, Cutler is expected to serve that time in Hancock County or at another county jail. Sentences of more than 9 months are served at state prisons run by the Maine Department of Corrections.
McKee also wrote that Cutler’s health is “compromised” by a type of lymphoma that makes him susceptible to cellulitis, “a life threatening skin infection that he has experienced on five occasions and for which he has twice been hospitalized.”
A tip to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children is what led to the investigation of Cutler. The electronic file sharing firm Dropbox notified the center on Dec. 15, 2021 that an email account bearing Cutler’s name had been used to upload sexually explicit material through its system. On Jan. 5, 2022, the center notified Maine State Police about the file transfer.
Police searched Cutler’s homes in Brooklin and Portland on March 23, 2022, and in Brooklin found flash storage cards with “literally thousands of videos of very young children being sexually abused,” police later said.
Two days later he was arrested at his house in Brooklin. He spent a few hours at Hancock County Jail in Ellsworth before he was released that same day on $50,000 cash bail.
Prosecutors opted to negotiate a plea deal with Cutler because of an extensive backlog of criminal cases and his age created a real possibility he would never “see the inside of a courtroom during his lifetime,” Hancock County District Attorney Robert Granger told the Bangor Daily News last month.
Granger said that the evidence against Cutler — which includes a statement to his wife in front of police at his Brooklin home that they would find child pornography on one of his computers — put prosecutors in “a very strong position” with respect to getting a conviction.
“I believe Mr. Cutler considered that his only reasonable option was to enter a plea in this situation,” Granger said.
Granger wrote in court documents that he could have charged Cutler with more severe felony charges based upon the sheer volume of images Cutler had downloaded, but he decided not to after Cutler agreed to plea to the four Class C felony counts. Cutler also has consented to psychological evaluations, treatment and “significant counseling” while his case has been pending.
“The stigma of convictions for these crimes will weigh heavily on [Cutler],” Granger said.