Eliot Cutler turned himself in Tuesday morning at Hancock County Jail in Ellsworth after being accused of again violating his probation for his conviction on possessing child pornography.
Cutler, 79, is accused of looking up pornographic materials on the internet on Dec. 28 and again on Jan. 2 from his home in Brooklin, according to court documents.
More than two dozen sexually explicit images that were found Monday at Cutler’s home on his electronic devices have been impounded by the court, preventing them from being publicly released as evidence in the latest complaint, according to court documents.
Last fall, Cutler was accused by his probation officer of violating his probation by visiting a website for a massage parlor in the San Francisco area and filling out a questionnaire about his preferences for a sexual escort.
Cutler was not jailed in October, and paid $1,000 bail last month at a hearing on that probation violation.
“Eliot has and will deny these new allegations,” his defense attorney, Walter McKee, said Tuesday in a brief statement.
Cutler is scheduled to appear in court on Jan. 26 on the alleged violation last fall. It was not immediately clear Tuesday whether he might be given the chance to make bail to be released again from jail prior to that hearing.
The former Maine gubernatorial candidate 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. Nearly 84,000 of those images depicted children under age 12, with some of the children as young as 4 to 6 years old, according to the memo.
In 2023, he pleaded guilty to four felony counts of possession of child pornography. He has served about a third of his six-year probation after he spent roughly eight months in jail and earned an early release for good behavior.