Mom of 7 accused of offering man on Snapchat to sexually assault her infant daughter for $400
Morgan Stapp, 32, was charged with child sex trafficking after allegedly attempting to facilitate the assault between the man and her seven-month-old daughter.
In a probable cause affidavit, seen by PEOPLE, it is alleged that Stapp sent a message in November last year saying the unknown man could sexually assault her daughter.
'U can f*** her for $400. Half now, rest after. I'll send my address I do live alone and her dad is not in the picture', Stapp is alleged to have said to the man.
The message was flagged with authorities and FBI agents met with her shortly after, the affidavit said.
Stapp allegedly told agents she did not have access to her Snapchat after it was 'recently compromised' and had purchased a new phone.
It adds that she then admitted to a caseworker from the Indiana Department of Child Services that this was not true.
The affidavit alleges that agents found over 7,000 messages had been sent between October 29 and November 1 including 81 that offered sexual pictures of her daughters 'to pay for diapers'.
Appearing in court last week, Stapp said that she is a stay-at-home mom and receives government aid, and help from her parents.
She added that she is unemployed but does DoorDash and Instacart deliveries for additional income.
Stapp said she had her children taken from her in December by the Department of Child Services and got them back in June.
Her bond was set at $200,000 surety before it was then lowered to $100,000 She was handed a no-contact order for two of her children.
Stapp remains in jail, with a pretrial conference set for September 15.
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He fled to the United States in 2004, seeking asylum with his wife and daughter, entering legally on a tourist visa. He has been reporting for Spanish-language media in the United States ever since, riding a wave of Latino immigration to the Atlanta suburbs to career success and community accolades. He began reporting on immigration crackdowns under the Obama administration, one of the few reporters to note a tripling of noncriminal immigration arrests in the Atlanta area, as noted in a 2019 New York Times video profile of his work.. He meticulously documented cases and interviewed the families of arrestees. People around Atlanta began to recognize him on the street as the journalist chasing la migra. His work continued through the Trump administration, drawing an audience of millions that followed him from Mundo Hispánico to the startup news operation he founded last year: MGNews or Noticias MG. 'It's a unique niche that was met by Mario's innovation and entrepreneurialism, if you will,' said Jerry Gonzales, executive director of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials and GALEO Latino Community Development Fund. 'He developed a really strong relationship with the community. He developed significant trust with much of that community. And because of that, his eyeballs started increasing.' An immigration court judge denied Guevara's asylum claim in 2012 and issued a deportation order. Guevara's lawyers appealed, and the court granted administrative closure of the case. He wasn't being deported. But he wasn't given legal residency either. Instead, the government issued him a work permit, his lawyer said. With a shrug, he went back to work. Guevara is arguably the most-watched journalist covering Ice operations in the United States, a story that the English-language media had largely been missing, Gonzales said. And local police were well aware of his work. 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The Department of Homeland Security has not responded to a request for comment about their relationship with local law enforcement. The Gwinnett county sheriff's office said in a response to a lawmaker's inquiry that it cooperates with Ice when deemed 'mutually beneficial' but has not responded to requests for additional comment. Doraville's police chief, Chuck Atkinson, has not replied to an email seeking answers and fled from questions about the case at a city hearing. But Doraville's mayor, Joseph Geierman, denied a connection between Ice and Doraville's arrest of Guevara. On 14 June, the day of his arrest, in Atlanta's DeKalb county, Guevara darted around a Doraville police truck. A group of riot cops nearby took note. One shouted 'last warning, sir! Get out of the road!' Guevara was helmeted and wearing a black vest over his red shirt with the word 'PRESS' in white letters. James Talley, an officer with the Doraville police department, was wearing an olive drab Swat jumpsuit with a helmet and gas mask. A masked demonstrator set off a smoke bomb near the cops. Guevara ran into the street with a stabilized camera in hand to capture the police reaction and the crowd scampering out of the way, as was shown on a police body camera video. Police had issued a dispersal order and were kettling protesters out of Chamblee-Tucker Road. They chased the suspected bomb thrower into the crowd, to no avail. But Guevara was in front of them on a grassy slope. Police from DeKalb county managing the raucous protest had been taking verbal abuse from demonstrators for a while – a sharp contrast from other protests around Atlanta held that day. The protest was winding down. Body camera video from the event suggests Talley was in an arresting mood. 'Keep your eye on the guy in the red shirt,' Talley said to another Swat officer from Doraville. 'If he gets to the road, lock his ass up.' Talley pulled another police officer aside. 'If he gets in the road, he's gone,' Talley said. 'He's been warned multiple times.' The other officer drew a finger across his chest. 'The press?' Yep, Talley replied. The three of them waited about 50ft away as a DeKalb county police officer approached Guevara on the hill, ordering him to get on the sidewalk. Guevara backed away from the officer, his attention focused on the recording, took two steps into the street, and the Doraville police pounced. Guevara pleaded for the police to be reasonable. 'I'm with the media, officer!' Guevara said. 'Let me finish!' People shouted at the officers 'That's the press!' as they walked him handcuffed to a vehicle. 'Why are you all taking him! He didn't do nothing.' More than one million people were watching Guevara's livestream when he was arrested. Trump has stepped up his rhetorical attacks on journalists since his inauguration. Last week, he described a reporter asking about warnings and emergency response in the Texas flooding disaster as 'an evil person', an epithet he has turned to with increasing frequency. The Guevara case is a sign of increasing hostility toward a free press, said Katherine Jacobsen, a program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists. She traced a through line from the Associated Press being barred from government briefings after it refused to accept the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the 'Gulf of America', then lawsuits and investigations reopened against media companies, then attacks on journalists covering protests in Los Angeles, then Australian writer Alistair Kitchen's deportation seemingly in relation to his reporting on student protests. 'Next thing you know, we have Mario Guevara, a long time Spanish-language reporter in the Atlanta metro area, who is in Ice detention,' she said. 'It's growing increasingly concerning by the day.' Guevara's audience views it as more than an attack on press freedom, though. They view it as an attack on themselves. 'He's a test case to push the envelope for legal immigrants that have committed no crime, to trump up charges against them,' GALEO's Gonzales said. 'And the second piece is how to target journalists.' Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion Guevara's arrest set off an immigration nightmare akin to the kind he has spent the last decade documenting. His arrest on a Saturday led to a weekend in DeKalb county's decaying jail and a bond hearing that Monday. A magistrate court judge granted Guevara a no-dollar bond, but by then Ice had become aware of the arrest and placed Guevara on a hold. The jail released him into Ice custody, and held him briefly in a metro Atlanta facility. The next day, Gwinnett county charged Guevara with three misdemeanor traffic offenses, claiming that they were related to Guevara livestreaming a law enforcement operation a month earlier. The charges would be sufficient to keep him in jail and provide Ice an argument for his deportation at a federal bond hearing. The Gwinnett county sheriff's office said Guevara's livestreaming 'compromised' investigations. Guevara's attorneys tried to work quickly, Diaz said. 'The detained dockets are so backed up, and the immigration detention centers are so overwhelmed that what used to take us two or three days to get a bond hearing now is taking about a week,' he said. Attorneys working for immigration enforcement argued in court that Guevara's reporting constituted a 'threat' to immigration operations. Jacobsen with CPJ was listening to the hearing when the government made that argument. 'We felt a sense of alarm,' she said. 'Alarm bells were raised by the government's argument, as well as the judge not necessarily pushing back against the government's argument that live streaming poses a danger to threaten law enforcement actions.' The immigration judge granted Guevara a $7,500 bond for the immigration case. But Guevara's family was not allowed to pay it because government attorneys appealed the bond order to the board of immigration appeals. But it took seven days for the court to issue a stay to the government's appeal. Meanwhile, Ice began playing musical jail cells with Guevara. Over the course of the next three weeks, Ice shuttled Guevara between three different counties around Atlanta and eventually to the massive private prison Ice uses in Folkston, Georgia, 240 miles south-east of Atlanta on the Florida line. 'We weren't surprised that they appealed, because the government's reserving and in most cases appealing everything, even stuff where they shouldn't appeal because they're wasting everybody's time,' Diaz said. 'But we didn't really know the breadth of what they were trying to do to him.' Earlier this week, Todd Lyons, Ice's acting director, issued a memo changing its policy on bond hearings, arguing that detainees are not entitled to those hearings before their deportation case is heard in court. Immigration advocates expect to challenge the move in court. But Guevara is not facing a criminal charge. The Gwinnett county solicitor's office dropped the traffic charges last week, noting that two of them could not be prosecuted because they occurred on private property – the apartment complex – and the third lacked sufficient evidence for a conviction. For now, Ice has mostly kept Guevara in medical wards in jails even though he is healthy, Diaz said. 'From the beginning, they've been keeping Mario under a special segregation because they're claiming he's a public figure. They want to make sure nothing happened to him.' Doraville is a municipality of about 10,800 in DeKalb county with a separate police force, and had been asked to assist managing the protest in the immigrant-heavy Embry Hills neighborhood nearby. Protests have become a regular occurrence in DeKalb county since the Trump administration's immigration raids began. Doraville's cops have displayed a more cooperative relationship with immigration law enforcement than many other metro Atlanta departments, and observers have raised questions about whether its police department arrested Guevara to facilitate an Ice detainer. Geierman, the mayor, denied those accusations. 'The Doraville police department was not operating under the direction of, or in coordination with, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) during the June 14th protest,' he said in a statement. 'To the department's knowledge, no Ice personnel were present at the event. Doraville officers were on site to support the DeKalb county sheriff's office as part of a coordinated public safety effort.' Observers have also questioned Guevara's charges from Gwinnett county – ignoring traffic signs, using a communication device while driving, and reckless driving – that stemmed from an incident that occurred in May, a month before his arrest. 'Mario Guevara compromised operational integrity and jeopardized the safety of victims of the case, investigators, and Gwinnett county residents,' the department said in a statement. But Gwinnett's belated prosecution left his attorneys gobsmacked. 'In the narrative that they put out, they say he was livestreaming a police operation, and he was interfering,' Diaz said. 'But when they went to a judge to get warrants, the only warrants the magistrate was able to sign for them was for traffic violations. I mean, that's kind of telling.' 'I think the whole thing is suspicious,' he added. 'From the beginning, just everything seemed they were really making efforts to make it difficult for him to go free.' Marvin Lim, a Filipino American state representative whose district contains the apartment complex in Gwinnett in Guevara's citation, has asked the sheriff's office a detailed set of questions about the department's relationship with federal immigration enforcement. He has not received an adequate response, he said in an open letter to the sheriff. An array of six advocacy organizations challenged Gwinnett's sheriff, Keybo Taylor, in a letter Tuesday over Guevara's arrest and the sheriff's posture toward immigration enforcement, demanding details about the relationship. GALEO, among them, also issued a separate letter Wednesday calling on Taylor to be transparent about the Guevara arrest. Guevara 'was arrested while doing the vital work that journalists in a democracy do', GALEO's letter states. 'Not only do the circumstances surrounding his incarceration and subsequent immigration detainment stir serious civil rights concerns, but they also build upon an expanding sense of fear and confusion in Georgia's most diverse county.' 'I am being persecuted,' Guevara wrote in a 7 July letter seeking humanitarian intercession from, of all people, Nayib Bukele, El Salvador's rightwing president. 'I am about to complete a month in jail, and I need to get out in order to continue with my life, return to my work, and support my family,' Guevara wrote. 'I have lived in the United States for nearly 22 years. I had never been arrested before. In these past three weeks, I have been held in five different jails, and I believe the government is trying to tarnish my record in order to deport me as if I were a criminal.' Guevara's American-born son turned 21 this year, permitting him to sponsor Guevara's green card and eventual citizenship. His application is pending, Diaz said. It may not matter. 'This is the first time I've ever seen a stay filed for someone who has no convictions, has almost no criminal history in 20 years, and only had pending traffic violations,' Diaz said. 'It's clear that everybody's working really hard to keep him detained.'
