A 40-year-old Bronx man has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for enticing minor children to send him nude and sexually explicit photographs and videos of themselves over the internet. On April 5 of this year, Jonathan Skolnick, 40, of The Bronx, pled guilty before U.S. Judge Colleen McMahon, who imposed the sentence. Damian Williams, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, made the announcement on Oct. 6, when Skolnick was sentenced.

 

In the context of the announcement, Williams said, “For approximately seven years, Jonathan Skolnick abused his position of trust as an associate principal and teacher in New York City schools by posing as a teenage girl online and successfully enticing minor victims, including his own students, to send him child pornography.” He added, “This lengthy prison sentence holds Skolnick accountable for his horrific crimes and the extraordinary harm and trauma he caused to many minor victims and their families.”

 

According to the charges, court documents, and based on statements made in open court, between in or around August 2012 and in or around June 2018, Skolnick worked as a high school teacher at a school in Brooklyn. In or around July 2018, he became an associate principal at a middle school in The Bronx, where he worked until his arrest in September 2019.

 

According to the prosecution, while in those roles, Skolnick posed as a teenage girl online, contacted minor victims by email, social media message, and text message, engaged in sexually explicit conversations with the minor victims, and enticed the minor victims to send him nude and sexually explicit photographs and videos. Many of the minor victims were students at the schools where Skolnick worked.

 

According to the prosecution, during the time period of his crimes, Skolnick used at least 21 different email and social media accounts to contact nearly 100 different individuals and solicit nude and sexually explicit images and videos. When certain minor victims stopped communicating with him, Skolnick threatened to release the photographs and images that the minor victims had sent.

 

Norwood News has previously reported on a letter sent to Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, by by New York Attorney General Letitia James in which she urged him to abandon plans to launch a version of Instagram for children under the age of 13, in efforts to protect children from potential online predators. (It was not specified in the Skolnick case which apps, if any, were used to communicate with the impacted children.)

 

In addition to his 15-year prison term, Skolnick was sentenced to five years of supervised release.

 

Williams praised what he called the outstanding investigative work of the FBI and the NYPD. The prosecution is being handled by the Office’s General Crimes Unit. Assistant U.S. attorneys, Elizabeth A. Espinosa and Rebecca T. Dell, are in charge of the prosecution.

 

Without identifying any victims either directly or indirectly, Norwood News asked the prosecution team if they could provide any further information about which Bronx neighborhood or school was impacted by the case. We will update this story should we receive more information. The Bronx Times previously reported that Skolnick had previously worked until September 2019 at Salanter Akiba Riverdale Academy (SAR), located at 655 West 254th Street in Riverdale.