Retired United States Army veteran Michael Carey Clemans was sentenced to life imprisonment today for paying to use Filipino children for sex and pornography.
The Associated Press (AP) reported that Clemans, a 57-year-old from Sacramento, California, has paid for sex with children as young as 7 years old with the help of a Filipino woman named Lyan Tandeg.
According to authorities, there was a time he was working with more than 50 child pornography providers and has collected more than 27,000 images of child pornography.
According to prosecutors, Clemens directed how young girls should pose in photos and even sometimes instructed them to spread oil all over their bodies.
“His true plan was to find young girls, virgins, and then go have sex with them,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Andre Espinosa was quoted in the AP report. “A 57-year-old man doesn’t have sex with a 7-year-old girl — he rapes her.”
A press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office said Clemans was convicted on charges of “attempted travel and travel with intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct, conspiracy to travel with intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct, and buying of children.”
Clemans was hoping for a lighter sentence because he had a clean criminal record, accepted responsibility, and helped authorities catch others who were in on the crime, but U.S. District Judge John Mendez said that his help was not enough to absolve him of the “unthinkable, inexcusable” crimes.
According to the AP, Clemans was an Army veteran and worked as a pilot in Bangkok, Thailand, for two years. He started buying and using Filipino children for pornography in 2014. Tandeg would take photos of the children and send them to Clemans so he can decide who to rape when he visits the Philippines.
To make things worse, Clemans instructed Tandeg to target orphans and typhoon victims. He paid another Filipino woman, Shellina Atad, to get custody of these children to produce child pornography.
Both Tandeg and Atad received a 15-year sentence in Philippine prison after authorities arrested them in 2015.
Clemans plans to appeal his life sentence.
