A man who was a volunteer student manager for Kodiak High School’s volleyball team was sentenced last week to spend 18 years in federal prison for the production of child pornography.
Vince Jay Deliguin, 20, will spend the rest of his life on supervised release after he’s released from prison, court records show.
Alaska State Troopers began investigating Deliguin in May 2021 after a 15-year-old reported that Deliguin had sexually abused him on multiple occasions and used explicit photos as blackmail, according to an affidavit signed by FBI Special Agent Lisa Watson.
Deliguin graduated from Kodiak High School in 2020 and had remained a manager for the volleyball team, the affidavit said.
He created a fake social media profile in April 2021 and pretended to be a young woman in order to begin exchanging messages with a teenager he had met through the school volleyball team, the affidavit said. Using the fake account, Deliguin asked the teenager to send him explicit photos, and the affidavit said he then used those photos to blackmail the teen into performing sexual acts that he would record.
Deliguin was initially arrested in May 2021 on 14 state charges, including counts for sexual abuse, enticement and exploitation of a minor. He was indicted on federal charges in November.
He pleaded guilty to a federal charge of production of child pornography in February. As part of the federal plea agreement, two other related federal charges and the state case were dismissed.
Deliguin’s attorney, Steven Wells, asked for the judge to sentence him to 15 years in prison — the minimum sentence for the charge. He wrote in a sentencing memorandum that Deliguin was not actively seeking out minors and the gap in ages between him and the victim was a matter of several years and not a large gap as is commonly seen in such cases.
The victim suffered extreme trauma from Deliguin’s actions, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Ebell wrote in a sentencing memorandum.
Judge Ralph Beistline sentenced Deliguin to spend 18 years in federal prison during a hearing Friday in a Fairbanks courtroom. He will spend the rest of his life on supervised release and was also ordered to pay more than $13,000 in restitution.
Antony Jung, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Anchorage office, called Deliguin an online predator in a statement Wednesday.
“Through coercion, Deliguin used extortion or ‘sextortion’ as a means to perpetuate a horrible cycle of child sexual exploitation and abuse, which caused significant harm to the child and the child’s family,” he said.