A former teaching assistant has been sentenced to 50 years in prison for the possession and production of child pornography on Tuesday, Aug. 17.
Matthew Holland, a 29-year-old man from Newark, New York, has been slapped with 50 years behind bars for exploitative practices that allowed him to acquire sexually explicit child pornography from minors, including some of his students, according to a U.S. Attorney’s Office press release.
Holland worked as a faculty member and teaching assistant in the Newark, New York Central School District and in the Canandaigua YMCA. The accused reportedly used his position in both institutions as leverage to blackmail and exploit underage teens to send him sexually explicit material for his consumption.
Between 2016 and 2020, Holland allegedly posed as a 14-to-16-year-old male on Snapchat to chat up minors, befriending them and gaining their trust, before demanding the underage victims to send nude or semi-nude pictures that sometimes included the child’s faces.
He would then use this as blackmail material to coerce his victims to send more sexually explicit pictures. Holland reportedly targeted victims from the school he was employed at the time and would threaten to send the nudes to their peers unless they complied.
An unnamed minor first came forward against Holland after she reported the abuse to the police. Over dozens of victims have since surfaced, all of them within the age range of 13 to 16 years old.
Holland has also been convicted of secretly recording children in various states of undress in the YMCA he worked at, as well as the bathroom of two different minors, and his photography studio Illumination Images with the use of hidden cameras.
He was finally arrested in Virginia in 2020 after he attempted to blackmail another minor into sending more sexually explicit pictures to him, according to NBC affiliate WHEC.
Parents were have been outraged by Holland’s actions and demanded to know why he was kept in the school’s staff for so long. The controversy has caused an internal investigation on school practices as well as the resignation of the school’s principal, according to News10 NBC.
Holland has been convicted under the Department of Justice’s Project Safe Childhood.
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