Just a few hours before the NCAA crowns its men’s basketball champion, we have a winner in the Above the Law March Madness Biglaw Lawyers Behaving Badly Bracket.
After two weeks of voting, the results are in — and the winner is former Allen & Overy partner Edward De Sear, who’s serving a sentence of 17.5 years in prison for child pornography and sex trafficking a minor. Let’s all be glad there isn’t something worse lurking in the corners of Biglaw, because the crimes that De Sear committed are pretty awful.
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De Sear’s most serious offense — the sex-trafficking one — is a stomach-churning affair. De Sear paid the child’s parents cash in 2011 to travel from Paris to Brussels with the at-the-time six-year-old and sexually abuse him. The Bergen Record has additional details about the crime, and the punishment for the parents involved:
Assistant U.S. Attorney Leslie Faye Schwartz told the judge that the government could prove that DeSear facilitated the child’s international travel by, among other things, paying cash to the boy’s fathers, a same-sex couple who were sentenced in Indiana earlier this year to 30 and 40 years in prison. The couple, Mark J. Newton and Peter Truong, both citizens of Australia, bought the infant from his Russian mother for $8,000 in 2005, took him to various countries where they allowed other men to abuse him, and made hardcore videos that were distributed across a global pedophile network known as the Boy Lovers network, according to authorities.
There are no words to express how awful that is.
We hope you’ve found this trip down memory lane enlightening — and filled with plenty of cautionary tales. There were lots of Biglaw attorneys whose bad deeds we’d nearly forgotten, and it’s always good to be reminded of how bad Biglaw can get.
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Kathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).