Teenage paedophile from Leeds sold sex video of his girlfriend on Twitter

The 18-year-old, who was 16 at the time of the offending, was flagged up to police when he advertised the video on social media. They moved in to arrest him in January of 2022, Leeds Crown Court was told.

Following his arrest, he made “full admissions”, prosecutor Alex Menari said, in which he had recorded the 36-second video with his partner’s permission, but she had no idea that he was selling it online.

It was found that he had made £660 from sales prior to his arrest. The defendant, who is from the west Leeds area, cannot be named to help protest the identity of his victim.

Devices were seized on which they found 61 indecent images of the female, but also abuse videos and photos of children aged seven to nine which he had downloaded. These included Category A – the most serious.

He admitted three counts of making indecent images, one of possessing a prohibited image of a child and two counts of distributing images.

Mitigating, Stephen Smithson said: “His two main mitigating factors are his age and his early guilty pleas. He readily admitted the offences at the police station and stated it was without her knowledge.”

He said that his client was wanting to go to university but admitted he had “severely blighted his future”.

Judge Tom Bayliss KC told the defendant: “It’s a breach of trust, it will impact on her for a long time. The only comfort is that she could not be identified (in the video), but she knows the images are out there.

"You have effectively ruined another teenager’s life. You are an extremely intelligent individual, and you must have known the consequences of what you were doing. You did this for money.

"It is because of your age that you are not going to prison. But you are a sex offender and you are a paedophile.”

He gave him a 16-month sentence, suspended for two years, ordered him to enrol into a sex offender programme, gave him a 10-year sexual harm prevention order (SHPO) to limit his internet use and put him on the sex offender register for 10 years.