Julian Wachner, the former music director at Trinity Church in New York who moved to Indianapolis when his career unraveled, has agreed to plead guilty to five counts of possession of child sex abuse material and one count of possession of cocaine.
Mr. Wachner signed the plea agreement with the State of Indiana on July 15, according to court documents. A jury trial for him that was scheduled for July 20 was canceled.
According to the agreement, Mr. Wachner waives his right to appeal any sentence imposed by the court and faces up to 10 years in prison.
Mr. Wachner was charged last summer with 10 counts of possession of child sex abuse material and one count of possession of cocaine.
Five of those counts will be dismissed at his sentencing, the plea agreement said.
Representatives for the prosecutor’s office in Marion County did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. A lawyer for Mr. Wachner, Bill Frederick, declined to comment.
The plea agreement concludes an episode that began when the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department received a tip that Mr. Wachner had used cryptocurrency to buy child sexual abuse material. The authorities recovered two devices from his home in Indianapolis that contained dozens of files, according to court papers.
He was arrested in August 2025 and pleaded not guilty to the charges.
In an affidavit detailing the investigation, Detective Jason Zotz wrote that Indianapolis investigators were first alerted to the case by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit organization that operates a tip line. Investigators were then able to examine Mr. Wachner’s activity on the dark web through information provided by a cryptocurrency company that allowed them to track his purchases on a site selling child sexual abuse material.
Mr. Wachner later admitted in an interview with the police that he had downloaded abuse material from the dark web over a period of several years.
The detective wrote that Mr. Wachner led the authorities to a laptop and hard drive at his home containing the material in addition to a “substantial quantity” of cocaine.
In the years before the investigation, Mr. Wachner’s career had unraveled. Trinity Church, one of Manhattan’s wealthiest and most influential churches, fired Mr. Wachner from his post in 2022 after a former Juilliard School employee publicly accused him of kissing and groping her in 2014.
Mr. Wachner later relocated to Indianapolis, where he taught fourth-grade math at a charter school.
That school, Invent Learning Hub, fired him around the time the initial charges were announced and said in a statement that neither its employees or board members were aware that he was under investigation.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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