Former gubernatorial candidate Eliot Cutler has reached an agreement to plead to child pornography charges and will face “a period of incarceration,” prosecutors say.
Former Maine gubernatorial candidate Eliot Cutler, shown in 2010, is charged with possessing child sex abuse material on multiple electronic devices. Joel Page/Associated Press
Cutler, 76, will plead to all four counts of possession of sexually explicit material of a child under 12 at a hearing on May 4 in Hancock County Superior Court, Hancock County District Attorney Robert Granger said in an emailed statement on Tuesday.
Details of what that plea deal will look like were limited Tuesday.
Granger said that his office reached a “specific agreement that will include an underlying sentence, a period of incarceration and a term of probation” upon Cutler’s release.
Granger later said that he did not know what type of plea Cutler intends to present, leaving room for the possibility that Cutler could enter a plea of no contest.
“The result with either such plea will be a finding of guilty which is all the state is concerned with here,” Granger said.
Cutler’s attorney, Walt McKee, declined to share any additional information about the upcoming hearing.
It’s unclear how much time, if any, Cutler will spend behind bars. Both Granger and McKee will submit sentencing recommendations to the judge. His charges are punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
“Among the factors considered are the age of the children presented in the images and videos, the specific nature of the sexual conduct depicted, the volume of contraband contained on a defendant’s devices, whether additional charges could have been presented, whether persons who are depicted in the images can be identified, defendant’s acceptance of responsibility and the extent of defendant’s cooperation in the investigation,” Granger wrote.
Cutler has waived his right to be indicted by a grand jury. Cutler did not return voicemails and an email Tuesday afternoon.
Cutler, who remains free on bail, was arrested last year at his waterfront home in Brooklin in Hancock County.
His fall from grace began with a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that prompted a two-month investigation and search warrants at his homes in Brooklin and a townhouse in Portland, which he later sold.
Police found thousands of videos depicting the sexual abuse of minors on electronic devices in Cutler’s possession, according to court records that were unsealed in May. It all began with a report from Dropbox, a file-hosting system, in December 2021 after an employee reported a file that was uploaded by Cutler and appeared to depict the abuse of a girl between the ages of 4 and 6.
His bail was set at $50,000 when he was released from custody in late March. In May, a judge granted his request to use the internet and a smartphone with strict monitoring of his online activity by a third-party company that Cutler agreed to pay for.
Cutler, a lawyer, ran for governor twice as an independent and used his personal wealth to bankroll both campaigns. He lost by less than 2 percentage points to Republican Paul LePage in a multi-candidate race in 2010. He lost again in 2014.
Years earlier, Cutler served as an aide to the late Democratic Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine, and later as a top adviser on environmental and energy issues for former President Jimmy Carter. Cutler went on to serve as an environmental attorney and founded the Cutler & Stanfield law firm in Washington, D.C.
Jeffrey Stanfield said Tuesday that he’s been following the charges against his former partner in the news, but has been retired for about 15 years and didn’t have anything to say about Cutler other than Cutler had been a good partner at the law firm.
“I hope he’s doing OK,” Stanfield said. “And I hope he gets the help he needs.”
After a career in Washington, the Bangor native returned to Maine and lived in Cape Elizabeth, where he owned a mansion that he later sold for $7.55 million to a nephew of former President George H.W. Bush. In 2015, the University of Maine System hired him to oversee the creation of a new graduate business and law school in Portland, an initiative he resigned from in 2017.
Up until police searched his home last March, Cutler was board president of the Lerner Foundation, a Portland-based nonprofit overseeing projects across Maine that support rural students pursuing higher education. Director Don Carpenter said at the time the foundation was “deeply disturbed” by the charges, and that Cutler was involved in “high-level strategy and governance and did not directly interface with students who participated in grant funded programming.”
Cutler and his wife, Melanie, a psychiatrist specializing in adolescent care, were in the Brooklin home when police conducted their search, according to records.
Police recorded Cutler telling his wife that the search warrant “was for child pornography” and that police would “probably find some on one of his computers,” Maine State Police Special Agent Glenn Lang wrote in an affidavit for Cutler’s arrest.
Throughout the search, Cutler attempted to call his attorneys while agents seized dozens of electronic devices. This included USB and flash drives and external hard drives stored near a sleep apnea machine that Cutler said he used in the upstairs bedroom. Agents later viewed the files on the devices and discovered “a very large number” of child exploitation videos, including videos of girls estimated to be about 4 years old being sexually assaulted.
Analysts found “literally thousands of very young children being sexually abused” while sifting through the terabytes of information the following day.
“I feel that because Mr. Cutler’s high volume of very young child pornography and extreme wealth while facing a felony prosecution he is a very high flight risk,” Lang wrote.
This report contains material from The Associated Press.
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