‘Extremity of depravity’: Toronto man sentenced for exploiting, sextorting over 100 U.S. children

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“In almost all the video chats with his minor victims, Pathmanathan sent the children images of adults engaged in sexual acts to show them how to do what he was requesting,” U.S. officials said.

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In one instance, he coerced a girl between 14 and 15 to engage in sexual acts with a 10-year-old boy. In another, the girl was between 16 and 17 and the boy was just six.

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When the victims told him they no longer wanted to take part he would threaten to share all the videos with their family and friends unless they continued to comply with his demands. If he blocked them, he would use different accounts to continue his threats.

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If the child cried, Pathmanathan would become “very angry.”

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At the time of his Canadian sentencing, police had identified 5,600 images and 200 videos on his computer that met the Canadian Criminal Code definition for child pornography, and over 400,000 images and 4,800 videos were awaiting categorization.

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Some of them included “children who appear to be toddlers and children between the ages of three to four years old.”

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“A short representative sample of the child pornography was viewed by the court in the sentence hearing,” Porter wrote. “It demonstrated that the pornography was at the extremity of depravity.”

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A judge overseeing Pathmanathan’s 2022 bail review said the collection was “meticulously labelled and organized.”

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Four folders on his desktop were labelled as “2020,” “Active,” “NEW,” and “WINS,” all of which contained graphic content. The latter contained 120 subfolders with a victim’s name and age, some of which included “dogs” or “incest” after the name.

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During a psychological evaluation ahead of his sentencing, Pathmanathan insisted that he was not attracted to teenagers and chose them as his targets because “his goal was to ‘win’ and he had more success winning with younger adults.”

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“He felt like he was in a video game, that the people that he was online with were not real people,” the psychiatrist wrote. “He stated that the victims were placed in the folders marked ‘win’, ‘lose’, or ‘fail’, based on the extent to which his extortion was, or was not, successful.”

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Asked if he was aroused by exerting control over people, Pathmanathan “responded that his motivation was to put individuals in the ‘win column.’”

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Pathmanathan, who immigrated to Canada from Sri Lanka when he was 11, was living with his parents at the time of his arrest and supported himself by playing online poker for nine to 10 hours daily.

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He attended Brock University after high school, but dropped out before completing a degree.

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In a written statement he read aloud in court at his Canadian sentencing, Pathmanathan expressed regret and remorse to his victims and their families.

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“I know it sounds difficult to believe because of what I have done, but hearing their victim impact statements genuinely broke my heart, and I’m extremely sorry for the pain and trauma I caused you guys. I really wish I can undo the suffering I have caused, and for wronging you guys in a terrible way.”

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