Jared Fogle Gets 15 Years For Stealing Kids’ Innocence

Jared Fogle at a 2007 event in Boston (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
Jared Fogle at a 2007 event in Boston (image courtesy Winkelvi, available under a Creative Commons-Noncommercial license)

For much of the new millennium, Jared Fogle appeared to be a success story–losing 200 pounds mostly by eating Subway sandwiches. That story was exposed as a fraud this past summer with the revelation that the former Subway pitchman was a child pornographer and child exploiter. In August, Fogle admitted to stealing the innocence of at least 14 children, and to receiving and distributing child porn. The bill finally came due for Fogle’s debauchery earlier today, when he was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison.

In what appeared to be a written statement, Fogle apologized for living a life of “deception, lies, and complete self-centeredness.” He said that he has spent most of this summer and fall thinking about the minors with whom he had paid sex. He told federal judge Tanya Walton Pratt that he wanted a chance to “become a good, honest person” and “redeem my life.”

That’s a marked contrast to the monster recorded on several horrifying tapes made over a four-year period by Rochelle Herman, a former Florida journalist who was so disgusted by Fogle’s inappropriate comments about kids that she went to the FBI. While wearing a wire, Herman recorded Fogle talk openly about stealing kids’ innocence–right down to revealing the age range of kids with whom he preferred to have sex. In July, largely on the strength of those tapes, the FBI raided Fogle’s home in Zionsville, Indiana and removed a welter of evidence.

A month later, federal prosecutors in Indianapolis presented Fogle with a stark choice–plead guilty to one count of receiving and distributing child porn and one count of traveling to have sex with minors, or go to trial and face charges that could have sent him to prison for life. Fogle chose the former course. He agreed to accept a sentence of at least five years in prison, and prosecutors agreed not to seek more than 12-and-a-half years.

However, Pratt was not bound by that agreement, and could have sentenced Fogle to up to 50 years in prison. Pratt rejected Fogle’s request to serve only five years, as well as federal prosecutors’ recommendation for 12-and-a-half years. Pratt felt that the proposed sentence range “does not sufficiently account for the defendant’s criminal conduct.” That conduct, she added, involved a “level of perversion and lawlessness” that was “extreme” in its depravity, and squandered the “professional windfall” he’d gotten when Subway found out about his story.

With this in mind, Pratt sentenced Fogle to 15 years and eight months in prison, of which he must serve at least 13 years–meaning that he will be behind bars until his 50th birthday at the earliest. He will also have to pay a $175,000 fine and forfeit $50,000 in assets. This is on top of the $1.4 million in restitution he has already agreed to pay his victims. Once he leaves prison, he will be on supervised release for the rest of his life, and will also have to register as a sex offender.

I suspect that Pratt was not only thinking about the kids whose innocence Fogle admitted stealing, but also about three other victims–his wife, Katie, and their two children. Based on the timeline agreed upon by Fogle and federal prosecutors, Fogle was engaging in debauched behavior for the entire duration of his marriage to Katie.

Once out of prison, Fogle would have been allowed supervised visits with his children if Katie gave permission. Between the tapes and a text message exchange in which Fogle boasted about setting up a tryst with a minor, I find it hard to believe Katie would have been comfortable having any contact with his kids, supervised or not. Fortunately, that decision will be out of Katie’s hands for awhile.

Forensic psychiatrist John Bradford, an expert witness for Fogle’s defense team, testified that Fogle had compulsive eating disorder for several years. According to Bradford, once Fogle lost the weight, he developed a sense of “hypersexuality” that led him to become attracted to teenage girls. This confirms something I suspected from the moment this story broke. All indications were that Fogle may have gotten the weight off, but didn’t properly address how the weight got there in the first place. As a result, he ended up stealing the innocence of several kids.

Pratt probably took this into account when she ordered Fogle to serve his sentence at the federal prison in Littleton, Colorado. That facility has a program for sex offenders. Hopefully Fogle will get the help he should have gotten several years earlier.

Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook. Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello.