JCC Camp Counselor Gets 10 Years for Child Porn
Matthew Kuppe, 22, has pleaded guilty to distributing child pornography. Image by Facebook
By Aiden Pink April 19, 2017
A former camp counselor at the Jewish Community Center of Metropolitan Detroit was sentenced to 10 years in prison last week for taking nude photos of his campers in a locker room and posting them on a website frequented by Russian pedophiles.
Matthew Kuppe, age 22, pleaded guilty to distributing child pornography. The presiding judge, Avern Cohn, approved the deal, but criticized it as too harsh, noting that Kuppe had no prior criminal record and that there was no evidence that he had molested any of his campers.
Kuppe was arrested in August 2014 after investigators found his web posts, which contained photos of his campers, aged five to seven, and identified one of them by name.
“We found we were left with so many more questions than answers,” a parent wrote in their victim impact statement. “Did our son experience abuse? How will this impact him? How will we ever really know what happened to our son at camp that summer?”
Three JCC employees, including the camp director, were fired after it was revealed that they didn’t pass a coworker’s concerns about Kuppe to senior management.
Contact Aiden Pink at pink@forward.com or on Twitter at @aidenpink.
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