Goodlett was fired as principal of LaRue County HS after being arrested on child porn charges
LOUISVILLE, Kentucky — A Kentucky high school principal has admitted stealing nude photos off of cell phones confiscated from underage students and trading them online.
Stephen Kyle Goodlett, 36, of Elizabethtown, told authorities that he had an addiction to pornography and would hunt for racy images on the phones of students at LaRue County High School, according to a complaint filed in federal court.
Authorities began investigating when a 20-year-old former LaRue student, said she had discovered nude pictures she’d taken for her boyfriend when she was 15, had surfaced on a Russian pornography trading website.
While the site is designed to keep submissions anonymous, investigators were able to track the IP address used to upload the woman’s photos back to Goodlett, the complaint said.
Investigators then executed a search warrant and found 60 images of child pornography on Goodlett’s computer, including several of girls who had attended his school.
In December, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children told the Kentucky state police that they were able to identify a known minor victim in several child pornography images found in Goodlett’s Dropbox account.
Goodlett admitted to authorities that he transferred the images from phones confiscated from students to his personal thumb drive “without their consent or knowledge,” the complaint stated. He said he would then share them to the website “with the intent of trading for more images.”
He was fired after he was arrested in October. He pleaded not guilty last month. If convicted, he faces five years in prison for transporting child pornography and up to 20 years for possessing child pornography.
