Duke’s Lombard May Plead Guilty

Neil Offen at the Herald Sun reports that alleged sex offender and Duke University employee Frank Lombard may be preparing for a plea agreement:

The U.S. Attorney’s Office will file an “information” today in Washington, D.C., District Court against Lombard, charging him with sexual exploitation of a minor. The filing of an information is a legal maneuver by the prosecution that is an alternative to a grand jury indictment, “with the defendant agreeing to be charged by information,” said Ben Friedman, a spokesman for the attorney’s office in the nation’s capital.

The filing of an information, since it implies the defendant’s acceptance of guilt, typically means that a plea agreement is imminent. The one-page information that Lombard will acknowledge today states that he forced a minor to “engage in sexually explicit conduct … for the purpose of transmitting a live visual depiction of such conduct.”

Lombard was the “associate director of the university’s Health Inequalities Program and a Duke employee for 10 years,” according to Offen; he allegedly invited an investigator to come molest his adopted five-year-old, African-American son while his male partner was out of town, telling the undercover agent that he had repeatedly abused the child himself.

Lombard lived at the Eno Commons commune.

Given the sensitive nature of this case, I’ll let those interested in details read the affidavit themselves. (Warning: the attached pdf contains sexually explicit content).

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.