OAKLAND — A Bay Area man was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for posing as a 14-year-old girl online and eliciting sexually explicit pictures and videos from teen boys, court records show.
William Marigny Jr., 42, was sentenced last week by U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar. He pleaded guilty to child enticement last year and faced a minimum of 10 years in prison.
At the time of his arrest on the state warrant, he was a volunteer at The Movement Church in Oakland, and before that worked at Central Baptist Church in Alameda, according to law enforcement sources. In both churches, he sought positions to work directly with children, though authorities say no victims have been identified from either church.
Prosecutors argued that he was able to pose as a teen effectively because he surrounded himself with kids at his job. They asked for a 15-year prison term.
“The defendant has used these positions and their access to children to, at minimum, ingratiate himself with kids,” assistant U.S. Attorney Samantha Bennett wrote in a sentencing memo. “He has learned how to speak like them, how to fit in with them, how they communicate with each other – which is how he learned exactly what to say and do in order to entice his victims into producing and sending him child pornography.”
Bennett wrote that prosecutors identified 10 victims, including children in the Bay Area, and that Marigny had tried to meet a 13-year-old boy who discovered Marigny was an adult and turned the phone over to his parents. The defense said Marigny himself cancelled the meetings.
Marigny’s attorney, assistant federal public defender John Paul Reichmuth, argued for a 10-year prison term. He wrote in a sentencing memo that Marigny was abused as a child and suffered from PTSD after a tour in Iraq as a U.S. Marine, and added that Marigny is unlikely to re-offend.
Marigny has been in Santa Rita Jail in Dublin since 2020 and will receive credit for that period of incarceration toward his prison term.
