Eliot Cutler, shown during a run for Maine governor in 2014. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer
Former gubernatorial candidate Eliot Cutler has agreed to serve nine months behind bars for possessing child pornography, according to a plea agreement filed in Hancock County Superior Court.
In exchange for pleading guilty to four counts of possession of sexually explicit material of a child under 12, Cutler, 76, will spend nine months of a four-year sentence behind bars and then remain on probation for six years. He has agreed to start his sentence on June 1.
Cutler is scheduled to appear in court Thursday and enter the new plea, which is subject to the judge’s approval.
For decades, Cutler was respected and admired as one of Maine’s brightest attorneys and wealthiest philanthropists. An Ivy League graduate who worked on Capitol Hill and in the White House, Cutler had a hand in major national policy shifts on energy and natural resources in the 1970s. He co-founded a successful environmental law firm in Washington, D.C., and later returned to Maine, where he unsuccessfully ran for governor as an independent in 2010 and 2014.
Cutler was arrested at his home in Brooklin in March 2022 after investigators found thousands of child pornography images on his computers. Between 2014 and 2021, prosecutors say Cutler downloaded more than 80,000 images of children younger than 12 engaged in often violent and unusual sexual acts, according to the agreement.
Cutler’s attorney, Walt McKee, wrote in court records Monday that the charges were the result of Cutler’s long-held addiction to pornography, and that Cutler “has and will accept total and full responsibility for his crimes for which he feels deeply ashamed.”
“Eliot has gone from being a highly successful attorney and respected public leader to a person viewed by many as a pariah,” wrote McKee. “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.”
The prosecution, however, described Cutler’s conduct as egregious.
“These videos depict the brutal and savage rape of 4- to 6-year-old girls,” Hancock County District Attorney Robert Granger wrote in the plea agreement. “To possess these videos and images for purposes of sexual gratification is to be complicit in the acts perpetrated against these children.”
THOUSANDS OF IMAGES
Cutler was released weeks after his arrest and has remained free on $50,000 bail since then. In May 2022, a judge allowed Cutler to resume online activity, with strict monitoring by a third-party company that Cutler agreed to pay for.
Once he completes his sentence, likely in a county jail, he will still face numerous restrictions. His online activity will be monitored. He could be randomly searched at any time.
If at any point Cutler is caught viewing or downloading sexually explicit images of children, he risks additional prison time.
He also will have to register as a sex offender for 10 years and has agreed to pay $5,000 to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which prompted the investigation that led to his charges.
In December 2021, the center received a tip from an employee at Dropbox, a file-hosting system, who found a file uploaded by Cutler that appeared to depict the abuse of a girl between the ages of 4 and 6.
The center, a nonprofit organization that helps investigate the abduction and sexual exploitation of children, sent the tip to the state, helping initiate a two-month investigation that resulted in police searching Cutler’s homes in Brooklin, and a townhouse in Portland, which he later sold.
The Maine Crime Lab said the trove of images they discovered revealed Cutler was “a hoarder.”
Based on the volume of the materials and their “egregious nature,” Granger, the district attorney, wrote that his office could have charged Cutler for each file, and potentially with a higher level crime for distribution. But prosecutors ultimately agreed to forgo additional counts, they wrote, in exchange for Cutler’s plea before presenting the case to a grand jury.
“Trying to describe these videos in this Sentencing Memorandum completely sanitizes the acts,” Granger wrote, after briefly describing the expression of “sheer horror” seen on one victim’s face.
McKee said in court records that the state has likely inflated the actual volume of materials seized. It’s possible the state was considering single videos as hundreds of images, he wrote, upping the prosecution’s count.
He also states that Cutler didn’t actually view the images of extremely young children, or those in which children were “subjected to unusual harm,” and that Cutler only had them because they were part of an “en masse batch downloading process,” which he held onto in a “‘hoarding’ behavior pattern.”
McKee said that Cutler has received mental health treatment since his arrest, including psychological evaluations in April, May and September of last year. He started meeting with a therapist specializing in sex addictions last fall, according to court records, and meets weekly with a psychologist.
Cutler also participated in a 30-day residential treatment program for problematic sexual behaviors, where an evaluator concluded that Cutler was unlikely to re-offend and that she didn’t believe he met the diagnostic criteria for pedophilia because any “sexual interest in children” he had was “exclusively through digital means.”
‘A PUNISHMENT UNLIKE ANY OTHER’
In determining a sentence, Granger said his office analyzed dozens of similar cases dating to 1996. In some cases, the entire sentence was suspended, some served 90 days, and others between four and two years.
McKee said the median unsuspended sentence for the crime between 2013 and 2023 was six months.
Cutler’s defense attorney described him in court records as an elderly man who has been hospitalized twice now for a rare cancer that causes life-threatening skin infections. Records also outline the decades of accomplishments Cutler has had in the private and public sectors.
Cutler used his personal wealth to bankroll both gubernatorial campaigns. He lost by less than 2 percentage points to Republican Paul LePage in a multi-candidate race in 2010. He lost again in 2014.
Years earlier, Cutler served as an aide to late Democratic Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine, and later as a top adviser to former President Jimmy Carter. He went on to open the Cutler & Stanfield law firm in Washington, D.C.
The Bangor native returned to Maine and lived in Cape Elizabeth, where he owned a mansion that he later sold for $7.55 million to a nephew of former President George H.W. Bush.
In 2015, the University of Maine System hired him to oversee the creation of a new graduate business and law school in Portland, an initiative he resigned from in 2017.
Up until police searched his home last March, Cutler was board president of the Lerner Foundation, a Portland-based nonprofit overseeing projects across Maine that support rural students pursuing higher education.
“While those accomplishments cannot be taken away from Eliot, today when the name Eliot Cutler comes up there will be few that mention his prior success and service,” McKee wrote, “and the first thing that will come to mind is that he was that person convicted of possessing child pornography. And that, in and of itself, is a punishment unlike any other.”
The Ellsworth American Staff Writer Jennifer Osborn contributed to this report.
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