He expressed deep regret for his actions, but James Florence, a Plymouth man described by prosecutors as a serial cyberstalker, could not persuade a judge to show him leniency.
Florence, 37, an information technology professional who once held US Department of Defense “secret clearance” status, was sentenced Wednesday to nine years in prison followed by 10 years of supervised release, the federal equivalent of probation.
Florence, who lived in an apartment in the Redbrook neighborhood, pleaded guilty in April to charges that for 16 years he tormented women – friends and lovers — online. He used a variety of techniques, prosecutors said, including posting phony nude images of them and their personal information: creating fake online accounts in their names, and hacking their accounts.
Federal prosecutors said he created “62 accounts across dozens of online platforms to abuse and impersonate women he knew.”
Florence stole some of his victims’ underwear and other items, which he used to harass and scare the women by sending them photos of the items with taunting or provocative messages, wrote the prosecutor, Assistant United States Attorney Luke Goldworm.
In 2017, for example, he posed a photo of a victim’s underwear on Craigslist, in a section soliciting casual sexual encounters. But he made it appear that the woman posted it.
According to Goldworm, who recommended the nine-year sentence, Florence lived a double life, pretending to be a friend of his victims while “callously cultivating, and carrying out his disturbing crimes.”
He used his computer skills to turn their lives into “waking nightmares,” he wrote in his sentencing memorandum.
He “emotionally abused each of them, through relentless and demeaning language and online postings, by humiliating them, through creating and sharing AI- generated pornography of them, stealing their underwear to both shame them and conduct openly perverse fantasies with other likeminded individuals, and by encouraging others online to sextort and torment these women.”
“For these women, there was no safe space,” he added. “At every turn, they were haunted in their professional and personal lives. At the stroke of a key, Florence inflicted lasting harm on these women — harm that in several cases changed the way they related to the world. And he did this all while hiding cowardly behind a keyboard.”
His lawyer, federal defender Jessica Thrall, recommended a 57-month sentence, saying Florence accepted responsibility immediately, and felt “genuine remorse and regard for how his conduct has impacted the victims, and whose life up to this point included no interactions with law enforcement.”
“For a person in his circumstances, his actions and the commensurate punishment are shocking,” she wrote in her sentencing memorandum.
In an emotional handwritten letter to US District Court Judge Richard Stearns, Florence said: “There are no words to express the magnitude of regret and remorse I feel for each and every person affected by my reprehensible, irresponsible, and indefensible actions.
“These were people close to me, people that trusted me, and I violated that trust. There was no justifiable reason for any of this have ever occurred.”
Florence said he would “humbly accept the judgment of this court, and the vow that I will remind myself daily of the toll this has taken as I work to build the best version of myself possible and rebuild the trust people once had in me.”
Andrea Estes can be reached at andrea@plymouthindependent.org.