Camp Pendleton Marine Sentenced for ‘Sextortion’ Campaign

A former Camp Pendleton-based Marine was sentenced Thursday for cyberstalking multiple young women.

Johao Miguel Chavarri, 26, used the alias Michael Frito to create numerous online accounts to "repeatedly stalk, harass and threaten women who would not give in to his demands that, among other things, they send him nude, sexually explicit or otherwise compromising photos and videos of themselves," investigators said earlier this year.

On Friday, Chavarri, aka Michael Frito, was sentenced in federal court to five years in prison for stalking, according to prosecutors. Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong also ordered him to pay a $15,000 fine.

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The victims are all connected in some way to Torrance, California, Chavarri’s hometown, officials said in a news release in February, adding that some of the victims were allegedly tormented for more than a year. Prosecutors said in a separate news release issued Friday that Chavarri, who conducted the sextortion campaign while he was an active-duty Marine at Pendleton, knew many of his victims personally.

“Perhaps most troubling is the emotional distress that [Chavarri] intentionally inflicted on his victims,” prosecutors argued in a sentencing memorandum. “He terrified and terrorized them. The young women feared not only for their privacy and their relationships with their friends, family, employers and community, but also for their physical safety. They suffered, and continue to suffer, significant emotional harm.”

Chavarri repeatedly threatened that "if his victims refused to comply with his demands, he would publish sexually explicit photos and videos of the victims online or on well-known pornography websites. He also allegedly threatened to distribute the photos or videos to the victims’ boyfriends, friends, families or employers, whom he would often identify by name."