Several years ago a 12-year-old girl in Tennessee typed a message to the man who had been tormenting her from Maryland. “You are such a pervert,” she wrote. “I hope you go to jail for so long you die in there for forcing kids to do stuff.”
This week, owing in part to the child’s help in a sweeping federal investigation, Chase Mulligan, 28, was sentenced to 50 years in prison. Authorities say he coerced at least 108 girls from around the world to send him sexually explicit videos and photos of themselves. To get them to send more images, prosecutors say, Mulligan often threatened to post the earlier content online or come to their homes.
“Depraved, heinous,” said the FBI agent who supervised the case.
“Abhorrent,” acknowledged Mulligan’s own attorney in court filings and an interview.
The sentence, handed down at the U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Tuesday, by Judge Theodore Chuang, recommended that Mulligan be sent to a sex offender management program at a prison in Virginia.
Federal prosecutors had asked for the maximum sentence of 60 years. Mulligan’s attorney requested 30.
“Chase accepted responsibility and pleaded guilty,” said the attorney, Craig Kadish. “It made it unnecessary for prosecutors to bring these victims into court and put them through a trial.”
Most of Mulligan’s victims, ages 5 to 17, lived in the United States, but others resided in Australia, Canada, Demark, Spain, the Philippines and the United Kingdom, according to prosecutors. He targeted and communicated with the girls on Snapchat, Instagram, Skype, Discord, Roblox and other applications.
“The defendant directed the minor victims to turn on their cameras, undress, pose in sexual positions,” prosecutors Megan McKoy and Elizabeth Wright wrote, going on to describe the acts that Mulligan coerced the children to do. The emotional trauma he imposed, they said, could persist into adulthood.
Mulligan, who holds a graduate degree in marketing and held a retail manager job before his arrest, communicated online from a two-story, red-brick family home at the end of a long driveway about 10 miles north of Washington, in the Colesville area of Montgomery County, and from a family home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
The case against him dated to the summer of 2022, when investigators became aware that someone using Snapchat under the name “accorposting” had exploited the 12-year-old Tennessee girl. They spoke with her, and she said the Snapchat user had obtained naked videos and photos of her by threating to come to her house, according to court documents.
The girl showed investigators messages in her phone. She said she had sent the person sexually explicit images and videos of herself almost every day for weeks.
When the person learned the girl’s 12-year-old friend had a 5-year-old sister, he coerced the older girls to have her participate in video calls. In subsequent messages with the friend, whose cellphone investigators also reviewed, the man threatened her for not communicating more quickly. “I will post the vid of you and your sister if you keep it up,” he wrote, later issuing a deadline. “You have 1 min to start or I will start.”
Investigators set out to find the predator by subpoenaing Snapchat for IP addresses linked to the user’s account. That eventually led them to Mulligan and the Montgomery County house, which they raided on Dec. 20, 2023, walking out with a laptop, two hard drives and four iPhones.
Further investigation led them to more victims like a 12-year-old in Alabama, who sent Mulligan videos after he threatened to come find her and her family, and an 11-year-old in Massachusetts, whom Mulligan demanded give him access to a specific social media account. “Add me back,” he wrote, “or I’ll post all your vids online and in servers. I have everything saved.”
Supervisory FBI Special Agent Leslie Adamczyk — who leads the Crimes Against Children and Human Trafficking Task Force in the bureau’s Baltimore office that investigated Mulligan — said the 50-year sentence would be meaningful to the victims.
“It’s essentially a life sentence,” she said. “It gives them, for lack of a better word, a voice. They know he’s not going to hurt them any longer.
Speaking generally about what victims go through in such cases, Adamczyk said that many children who are persuaded to send sexually explicit videos or photos think that — at first — they are speaking with another child.
Once they learn they’ve been communicating with an adult, the children face two choices: Try to extract themselves on their own, which can make things worse by digging themselves in deeper, or go to their parents or a trusted adult. Adamczyk says she is constantly trying to educate children and parents to make the latter choice. A key part of that message is advising parents to let their children know that their door is always open.
“When parents give their kids a phone, the message should be: ‘I’m trusting you with the device. But if you do find yourself in some kind of trouble, please, please come to me. I’m not going to be angry with you. You’re not going to get in trouble. We’ll work through it together.’”
In 2024, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received more than 546,000 reports concerning online enticement, a category that includes sextortion, marking a 192 percent increase from 2023. Adamczyk said the numbers are still increasing but the rate has slowed — a trend she attributes in part to children and parents becoming more aware of the threat.
Mulligan attended high school in Montgomery County, where he played team handball, his attorney wrote in court filings. He went on to Seton Hall University, where he earned an undergraduate degree in finance and a graduate degree in marketing, the filings say. While there, he wrote a message to his family used in an “I’m Ready” graduation promotion: “Dear Mom, Grandpa and little bro, I know you are all probably just as surprised as I am that I made it, but in all seriousness, I could not have done it without all of you. So, uh, thanks. Love, Chase Mulligan.”
(In a statement, a university spokesman said: “Seton Hall condemns the criminal conduct described in the federal case. The individual is not affiliated with the University in any current capacity.”)
In his request for a 30-year sentence, Mulligan’s attorney, Kadish, acknowledged the seriousness of his client’s crimes. But he also said the federal guidelines in the case were too high because their ranges were similar to crimes that include kidnapping and sexually assaulting a minor, armed carjacking resulting in death and attempted murder with a gun.
“What he did was an abhorrent crime,” Kadish said in an interview, echoing his court filings. “However, there was no physical contact with the children.”
Under federal prison procedures, if Mulligan follows rules he could amass as many as 54 days a year of good time credit, meaning he could shave about seven years from his 50-year sentence, according to Kadish.
“With a 30 year sentence,” Kadish wrote in documents filed before the sentencing, “there is adequate time for intensive treatment while in custody, followed by strict supervision and mandated therapy upon release to ensure continued risk management and public safety.”
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