A 34-year-old California man is accused of having hundreds of child pornography images after his wife discovered a hidden camera in their home’s guest bathroom earlier this month.
The Redding Police Department said when Ryan Rovito’s wife found the camera, she confronted him, Fox News reported Saturday.
The woman questioned him about the device, and he admitted he knew about it but “vowed to remove and discard it,” the law enforcement agency explained in a social media post on Thursday:
The wife seized the camera and hard drive it had been connected to before Mr. Rovito destroyed it and subsequently contacted the Redding Police Department, fearing Mr. Rovito had nefariously recorded their young children using the bathroom.
Redding Police Detectives obtained a search warrant for the electronics, and High-Tech Crimes Detectives performed a preliminary forensic analysis of the items. The investigation resulted in the discovery of more than 900 images of child pornography and multiple videos from the covert bathroom camera. The videos showed children and adults using the bathroom who did not appear to know they were being recorded.
An arrest warrant for Rovito was obtained, and officers later contacted him during a traffic stop, where they arrested the suspect.
He was later booked at the Shasta County Jail on charges related to the possession of child porn “and the surreptitious recording of an identifiable person who was undressed,” the department stated.
Child pornography is described as a form of child sexual exploitation, and “images of child pornography are also referred to as child sexual abuse images,” per the United States Department of Justice.
Even though the term child pornography is widely used, it is more accurate to describe it as evidence of child sexual abuse, according to the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network (RAINN).
“Just as kids can’t legally consent to sex, they can’t consent to having images of their abuse recorded and distributed. Every explicit photo or video of a kid is actually evidence that the child has been a victim of sexual abuse,” the site read.