On 15 January, Sacramento County police arrested cartoonist Darrin Bell for possession of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
According to the police statement, detectives searched Bell's home and collected evidence related to the case, including AI-generated images. Bell was arrested and booked into the Sacramento County Main Jail, initially on $1 million bail, and was scheduled to appear in court on 17 January.
Bell is charged with possession of more than six hundred images in violation of California Penal Code section 311.11(a) depicting sexual scenes of a minor, and ten or more of those images involve children under the age of twelve.
He is also charged with an additional charge related to possession of digitally altered or artificial intelligence-related data. This involves material depicting what appears to be a person under the age of 18 engaging in or simulating sexual conduct.
On Thursday 23 January, the judge ordered his provisional release with GPS monitoring. The cartoonist will have to return to court on 4 February, as prosecutors added more child pornography charges to his case.
Bell, 49, who pleaded not guilty, faces a number of conditions on his release and new charges filed in an amended complaint by Sacramento County prosecutors, who now allege that the cartoonist collected thousands of explicit images of children.
Prosecutors filed three new charges at Thursday's bail hearing before Sacramento Superior Court Judge Shauna Franklin - two counts of unlawful possession of child sexual content on June 17 and 18, 2024; and a third count of similar possession on January 15, the day of Bell's arrest. They also asked that all of Bell's electronic devices be searched and that Bell, a father of four, be banned from any contact with minors.(Source).
About Darrin Bell
In 2019 he became the first black cartoonist to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, created in 1922.
The creator of Cardorville, he began working professionally as a cartoonist in 1995 for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Oakland Tribune and other newspapers.
In 1997 he co-created the comic strip Rudy Park for technology magazines before United Media distributed it in 2001. In 2003, Darrin launched Candorville through the Washington Post Writers Group and King Features Syndicate went on to distribute his work.
