Ex-State Dept. Employee, Cosplay Enthusiast Sentenced For Child Porn

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LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) — A former U.S. State Department employee and cosplay enthusiast was sentenced to 26 years in prison Friday for producing child pornography.

Skydance MacMahon, 45, of Alexandria, Virg., plead guilty back in July after court documents showed he conspired with a Canadian woman to produce over 1,000 sexually explicit images and videos of minor children in Canada, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Prosecutors say the content was "produced at the direction of MacMahon using Skype and hidden camera" over a two-year period while MacMahon worked as a Digital Media Administrator at the Foreign Services Institute of the U.S. Department of State in Arlington.

MacMahon then distributed the files to other users by providing access to the files on his cloud storage services and also by directly sending the files to other users.

In addition to the child pornography images and videos MacMahon himself created, he also received and possessed thousands of images and videos of children as young as nine years old, according to a plea deal signed by MacMahon in July. [Warning: contains explicit material]

An affidavit filed by authorities in May in U.S. District Court stated a woman identified as "K.C." told investigators "she had been sexually assaulting her 9-year-old daughter for approximately one year and producing pornographic images and videos of the assaults".

Skydance Macmahon, in the character Nightwing, takes a selfie at the DC Awesomecon comic book convention in Washington DC, on May 29, 2015. (Photo credit: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)

According to the affadavit, K.C. said the assaults were "conducted at the request of" MacMahon.

Federal investigators later sourced at least some of the content shared by MacMahon back to an IP address associated with the State Department, according to court documents.

MacMahon also deleted items off of his State Department-issued iPhone 7, investigators said.

Online social media profiles under MacMahon's name indicated he was an active member of the cosplay (costumed role-playing) community.

MacMahon was even photographed by Getty Images while attending a DC Awesomecon comic book convention in 2015 dressed as the character Nightwing.

Another image posted to a profile linked to MacMahon on the community site Deviant Art appears to show him in costume posing with two other cosplay participants and a young girl.