GREENEVILLE, Tenn. (WJHL) — A former downtown Johnson City business owner at the center of two federal lawsuits against Johnson City and its police department was indicted Tuesday by federal authorities on three separate counts of sexual exploitation of children (production of child pornography).
Williams, 51, who is already jailed on other federal charges, is accused of violating federal child sexual exploitation law on three separate occasions in U.S. District Court, Tennessee’s Eastern District: January 2009, May 2020 and December 2020.
Conviction on each count would carry a prison sentence of 15 to 30 years.
The counts, filed by U.S. Attorney Meghan Gomez, read identically aside from the dates of the alleged offenses and initials of the victims.
They allege Williams did knowingly “employ, use, persuade, induce, entice or coerce a minor,” or knowingly attempted to do the same, “to engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing any visual depiction of such conduct.”
Each count also alleges Williams knew or had reason to know the depictions “would have been transported or transmitted” across state lines or that they were produced using materials that had been transported across state or national boundaries, including by computer.
The filing on the federal court system’s PACER system also includes a sealed document, which is where any additional details about the charges could be. No court dates have been set on the charges, but Williams faces a Nov. 2 federal trial on being a felon in possession of ammunition and on attempting to escape custody.
News Channel 11 has been covering civil and criminal cases involving Williams since June 2022, when former assistant U.S. Attorney Kat Dahl filed a lawsuit against Johnson City and its police department.
Dahl, who worked in tandem with the Johnson City Police Department (JCPD), claimed that after being brought in as JCPD was investigating a woman’s Sept. 19, 2020 non-fatal fall from Williams’ fifth-story window, she learned of several rape allegations women had made against him.
Williams owned Glass and Concrete Contracting starting in 2008. The LLC provided exterior cleaning of multi-story buildings. The company was dissolved this year.
Property records show Williams bought the entire fifth floor of Downtown Towers, and one of two third-floor units, for a total of $325,000 in October 2015. In 2018, he paid $135,000 for the other third-floor unit.
Dahl was brought into the Williams case in November 2020 because police had allegedly discovered weapons in a safe they’d seized from the apartment of Williams, who was a convicted felon. Dahl’s role through the federal Targeted Community Crime Reduction Project included helping JCPD when cases involved drug, trafficking or weapons that could result in stiffer penalties at the federal level.
Dahl’s suit, which accuses the city of retaliatory discharge, claims she pressed the JCPD to further investigate Williams’ alleged sexual assaults. It also claims she learned of additional alleged victims beyond those who had filed reports, and that the women shared similar stories of being drugged by Williams and then raped inside his fifth-floor apartment in Johnson City’s Downtown Towers building.
Attorneys for Johnson City and the other defendants have denied all the allegations in Dahl’s lawsuit.
No sexual assault charges were filed. After Dahl had Williams indicted on the weapons charge in April 2021, JCPD officers went to his apartment on May 5, 2021 and attempted to serve the warrant.
Williams was not arrested that night and in fact became a fugitive until being arrested and charged with drug trafficking in Cullowhee, N.C. on April 29 of this year.
JCPD declined to renew a “memorandum of understanding” with the federal prosecutor’s office in July 2021, effectively ending Dahl’s role in Johnson City.
About halfway between the time he absconded and his arrest, Williams managed to sell all three of his Downtown Towers properties for a total of $800,000 to Blount Investments LLC, owned by Travis Blount, on May, 27, 2022.
Nearly a year after Dahl filed suit, another law firm filed a federal civil suit against Johnson City, JCPD and four separate officers on behalf of nine alleged sexual assault victims of Williams. It claims JCPD enabled Williams’ alleged ongoing series of druggings and sexual assaults of women in his apartment.
All the defendants in this lawsuit have also denied the allegations in their entirety.
News Channel 11 exclusively reported last month that when Western North Carolina University police arrested Williams in his car late at night, 12 ounces of cocaine and 14 ounces of methamphetamine were not all they allegedly found.
Search warrant affidavits filed later by Tennessee First Judicial District Investigator Mike Little revealed that Williams allegedly possessed two digital thumb drives with thousands of images and video on them. They allegedly included folders, some of them named, with images or video showing Williams allegedly sexually assaulting women.
“These assaults all appear to occur while the female victims were in an obvious state of unconsciousness and are identifiable as having occurred at Williams’s apartment at 200 E. Main Street in Johnson City…” Little’s May 31 affidavit stated. Little was requesting a search warrant for four laptop computers, four phones and two SD cards that JCPD had seized when it began investigating Williams.
As News Channel 11 reported, the alleged images weren’t limited to adults.
The North Carolina files are alleged to include at least two series of digital images showing Williams sexually abusing an infant boy less than a year old and a girl less than eight years old. One of the thumb drives also allegedly contained more than 5,000 downloaded images of child pornography.
Williams was transferred to federal custody in early May, but has been held in county facilities. He was in the Washington County Jail until late July, when he allegedly attempted to escape, and since July 31 has been held in the Laurel County, Ky. jail.
