The Texas man who founded a company that develops and publishes blueprints to create 3-D printed guns was charged with child sexual assault Wednesday, according to the Austin Statesman.
An affidavit reviewed by the newspaper alleges that a girl under the age of 17 told her counselor at the Center for Child Protection that she had sex with a 30-year-old man, whom she identified as Cody Wilson, at a local hotel on Aug. 15. The man paid her $500, according to the report.
Wilson is not yet in custody, according to the Statesman. He did not immediately respond to TPM’s email requesting comment, and his cellphone inbox was full.
Texas considers sexual assault a second-degree felony punishable by between two to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.
Wilson allegedly met the girl on SugarDaddyMeet.com and began exchanging messages with her. He went by the username “Sanjuro,” per the affidavit reviewed by the Statesman. In the lead-up to their encounter, they shared nude photographs, and Wilson, via text, allegedly shared his name and told her he was a “big deal.”
The Austin resident is currently embroiled in a high-profile battle with the federal government over the legality of the open-sourced 3-D printed gun blueprints his company, Defense Distributed, has shared online. After the State Department in 2013 ordered Wilson to pull the plans from the internet, Wilson sued the Obama administration on First Amendment grounds. The Trump administration settled with Wilson earlier this year, allowing him to share the 3-D weapons plans online.
Various states have subsequently sued Wilson on national security and public safety grounds, and a Seattle federal judge has ordered him to halt the distribution of his plans.
Wilson also served as the founder of the now-defunct Hatreon, a far-right answer to Patreon, a platform that allows content creators to solicit paid subscriptions from supporters.
After last summer’s deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Wilson told TPM that he spent “12 grand a month” of his own money to fund the site, which he called a “passion project.” He said he was personally “not right-wing” but was “sympathetic” to the “alt-right” and didn’t believe they should be “banished from the internet.”
