On Wednesday, Brendan DuBois was arrested at his home in Exeter, New Hampshire following an investigation into reports of child pornography being stored on a Google Drive connected to him. The New York Times best-selling author, who co-wrote a number of books with James Patterson, was subsequently charged with six felony counts of possession of child abuse materials.
DuBois, 64, pleaded not guilty during his arraignment on Thursday, and has since been held in the Rockingham County Jail. The ensuing criminal complaint said that DuBois “did knowingly possess at least 35 visual representations of children engaging in sexually explicit conduct.” The images included infants to 12-year-olds, per the New York Post.
Members of the Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce launched an investigation in March after Google reported that one of its users had stored “apparent child pornography” on the cloud. Authorities managed to connect the account to an IP address in DuBois’ home and executed a search warrant on May 7, seizing a hard drive and MacBook. A search of the devices flagged more than 5,600 images as “possible child abuse content.”
His wife said that they had separate computers and WiFi that was private, and password protected. When investigators looked through the author’s search history, they discovered that he had asked Google, “I accidentally saved child pornography to my main Google Drive,” as well as “How to tell if Google has reported me to the police.”