In a horrendous incident, an influential youth basketball coach was sent to prison for the rest of his life for secretly collecting sexual images of 440 boys and molesting them for more than a dozen over a 20 year period.
U.S District Judge sentenced former Iowa Barnstormers coach Greg Stephan to 180 years in jail. It is the maximum penalty that he faced for sexual exploitation and pornography charges.
The judge said that he abused his position of trust to prey upon the boys who saw him as their mentor who would lead them to the college basketball team.
He also said that the coach’s conduct was of an extreme nature and that was the reason that he got an effective life term.
The sentence came after a daylong hearing and it was termed as one of Iowa’s largest and most stunning sexual abuse case involving youth sports.
The coach, Stephen (43) had worked with Iowa’s most prominent youth players as a co-director and coach of Barnstormers.
The major victims were forced by online personas in which the accused coach pretended to be a teenage girl and attracted them to provide videos and photos of themselves masturbating and get them involved in a relationship that went for years. The other was recorded by devices that he placed in bathrooms in hostels and his home and they were photographed when they slept.
On at least 15 occasions between 1999 and 2018, Stephen touched boys, often as he shared a hotel bed with them during trips to tournaments and professional basketball games, according to Thursday’s testimony.
One of the boys later told police he kept quiet for years because he believed Stephen was his link to college basketball coaches for whom he dreamed of one day playing.
US man faints after court sentenced him to 260 years in jail for sexual abuse & child pornography
