By Olivia Wynkoop. Bay City News.
A Redwood City driving instructor at a driving school in San Mateo County faces federal charges related to child pornography after he allegedly coerced and enticed teenage girls, some of his students, to produce explicit content, U.S. Attorney Stephanie Hinds said last Thursday.
According to the indictment, Jonnatan Zelaya Izaguirre, 39, of Redwood City, allegedly offered monetary rewards to teenage girls and bought them sex toys to encourage them to film child pornography, both for their own use and for sale. He also offered to manage their sales of explicit content, the indictment reads.
The alleged offender faces two counts of coercion and enticement of a minor, one count of receiving child pornography and one count of possession of child pornography.
Zelaya graduated from a local police academy and owns a driving school in San Mateo County. Prosecutors allege that he persuaded the girls to create explicit videos by posing as a "position of authority" on social media and falsely claiming to be in law enforcement, even though he never joined a police department.
Court documents allege that Zelaya groomed his victims and developed "sexualized friendships" with them. He allegedly listed the amounts of money the victims could earn from the videos based on how explicit the content was.
He also threatened to leak videos of a victim to everyone he knew if he stopped making videos, court documents allege.
He was arrested on January 4 after an undercover police officer posed as a 17-year-old student driver.
"Government court records describe multiple communications between the undercover officer, who had posed as a student driver, and Zelaya that included highly sexualized conversations with instructions on how to masturbate, discussions about future interactions in which he would orally copulate and have sex with her, and a request for the officer to conduct a photo shoot with him," read a press release from Hinds' office.
Zelaya is being held pending further proceedings, as ordered by U.S. Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero. He is scheduled to appear in district court on October 6.
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