LOS ANGELES (CNS) – A former US Navy captain whose last known address in the United States was in Southern California was sentenced to 210 years in federal prison on Monday for traveling to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to assault children.
Eight Southeast Asian women testified last year that Michael Pepe, who was working as a teacher in Cambodia at the time, drugged, bound, beat and raped them at his compound in Phnom Penh.
Pepe was found guilty in August of two federal counts, each of traveling with intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct and crossing state lines with intent to engage in sexual acts with someone under the age of 12, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Pepe, 68, was prosecuted under a federal law that makes it a crime for Americans to assault or pay for sex with children while traveling abroad. He was sentenced eight years ago to life in prison after being found guilty of the charge of displacing and engaging in unlawful sexual acts with girls aged 9 to 13 in Cambodia – but the results of the lawsuits were overturned on appeal in 2018.
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The defense argued unsuccessfully at the trial last summer that Pepe could not be found guilty because the Southeast Asian nation was his permanent home, not a temporary stop – regardless of the rape allegations childish – so he wasn’t “travelling” with the intent to harm children, he was just going home.
Pepe maintained that he moved to Cambodia permanently, worked as an English teacher and bought a house there in March 2003.
Federal prosecutors countered that Pepe traveled outside of Cambodia and then returned – via Los Angeles – not because it was his home, but because poor Asian children were readily available to him there.
The federal jury in Los Angeles heard evidence that in the slums of Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh, poor parents were selling their children to Pepe for $30 a month.
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Pepe was working part-time as a teacher when he was arrested by the Cambodian National Police in June 2006.
The investigation began when a young girl reported to Cambodian police that she and several other children had been abused by Pepe. During a search of the villa in Phnom Penh, the police found three girls aged 9, 10 and 11, along with hundreds of pornographic images, various drugs, children’s clothes and ropes and bands of cloth, which the children said Pepe used to bind and gag them.
Pepe was extradited to the United States in 2007.
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“Monstrous doesn’t begin to capture the horror of the crime or the impact on the victims,” U.S. District Judge Dale Fischer said in February 2014 when sentencing Pepe to 210 years in federal prison, or 30 years for each of the seven girls.
In a brief statement that day, Pepe said he had spent 20 years in the Marines and suffered from brain damage and “psychotic effects” due to withdrawal from psychiatric drugs.
As for the casualties, Pepe said “[To] girls, if you think I hurt you. I…wish you good luck for the future.”
Until his conviction was overturned and he was taken to the downtown federal prison to await a retrial, Pepe was incarcerated in a maximum-security prison in Tucson, Arizona.
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