Prosecutor Is Facing Child Porn Charges
A suspended deputy state attorney general will be arraigned today on charges of possessing several thousand images of child pornography on a home computer, authorities said Monday.
David Bornstein, 54, of Cypress is scheduled to appear at West Justice Center in Westminster on charges that he downloaded the images between March 2003 and March 2004 -- when he also served as a deputy prosecutor specializing in tax cases at the state attorney general’s Los Angeles office, said Paul Chrisopoulos, who is prosecuting the case for the Orange County district attorney’s office.
“This is a huge quantity of child porn,” said Chrisopoulos. He said some of the images depicted toddlers engaged in sex acts with adults and other children. “It’s not simply photos,” he said, “but there are also video clips depicting ... very graphic stuff. The sheer quantity is one of the largest I’ve heard of in Orange County.”
The images were allegedly discovered during a sting operation by the Department of Homeland Security in which Bornstein’s name appeared on the client list of a company called RegPay, which acts as a financial intermediary for customers paying electronically to download images from Russian and Eastern European websites, Chrisopoulos said.
Apparently, Bornstein “used his own Visa card to pay for this service,” Chrisopoulos said.
If convicted, he said, Bornstein could face up to a year in prison and mandatory registration as a sex offender.
Start your day right
Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
