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A Hancock County judge ordered Eliot Cutler to be released on a $10,000 bail on Friday, continuing a probation revocation hearing to June 1.
Cutler, who was convicted in 2023 for possessing child sex abuse materials, has been accused of violating his probation conditions five times since September.
Cutler, who appeared in person in Hancock County court for the first time since his last arrest, will be released from Hancock County jail today. He will return to court for his probation revocation hearing on June 1.
The judge accepted Cutler’s admission of guilt on three of the probation violation motions and the state’s dismissal of one violation. Friday’s hearing addressed the fifth — and most recent — motion to revoke Cutler’s probation.
The former two-time gubernatorial candidate, who lives in Brooklin, has been held in jail since early February, when Maine State Police allegedly found him in a South Portland hotel with pornographic DVDs, violating the terms of his release.
Cutler testified Friday that his “pornography addiction” began at 12 or 13 years old. Since then, until he began counseling, he said, he was viewing pornography 2 to 3 times a week and sometimes for a duration of multiple hours at a time.
“I was habituated by the time I was 15 or 16,” Cutler said. “I was addicted, I would say, by the time I was 20. Over time I migrated from magazines to video tapes to DVDs and then the internet.”
Cutler, 79, became emotional when he said he had kept his addiction a secret for 60 years, calling it a “tragic mistake.”
After his first arrest, Cutler went to Paradise Creek, an Idaho-based pornography addiction treatment center. Cutler spent 30 days at the residential program, which costs about $32,790 for a six-week session, according to the program’s website.
Cutler said he had been struggling at the time of his February arrest because — after a previous probation violation — he was barred from accessing the internet. He said he and his wife lived a very “digitized life,” and the new condition was limiting him from accessing any online services— including remote therapy, banking information and medical records.
On a February trip to Portland, Cutler said he found himself parked in front of a pornography shop, where he purchased the DVDs he would later be arrested over. He claimed that he would not have entered the shop, if he hadn’t been in such “bad shape” over his lack of internet access.
Cutler said he didn’t initially participate in a 12 step sex addicts anonymous meeting – which he was recommended to join after his Paradise Creek treatment — because of his “notoriety.” He has since attended the group, he said.
District Attorney Robert Granger called to the stand Jason Bosco, the Maine State Police special agent that arrested Cutler in February, who said the defendant became very emotional when he was allegedly caught with pornography and pleaded for Bosco to not notify his probation officer, Sam Payson.
Walter McKee, Cutler’s attorney, did not question Bosco.
Payson also spoke during Friday’s hearing, testifying that Cutler was previously found with sexually explicit videos and images, including content depicting a young-aged naked woman and videos from “Girls Gone Wild”, a controversial pornography franchise.
“It is extremely difficult to supervise someone who spends most of the time trying to circumvent the conditions,” Payson said.
Payson said Cutler had previously told him that he had started looking at child sex abuse materials because adult content wasn’t “satisfying his emotional needs.”
McKee argued against a full probation revocation, insisting his client had no problem with his probation conditions for the first 18 months after his release.
Dawn Ego, a digital forensic examiner with the Maine State Police, said she was unable to access multiple of Cutler’s electronic devices, including a laptop Macbook Air, because she was provided inaccurate passwords.
Of the electronic devices she did access, Ego discovered various images of adults engaged in sexual activity, as well as searches for sexually explicit content of “Asian petite teens,” she said.
The state introduced a 192 page document that Ego discovered on Cutler’s device, which she said included links to child sex abuse materials. The document had no date, and the state was unable to determine when the document was accessed, McKee said.
Cutler was on probation after serving less than 8 months in jail. After pleading guilty to four counts of possessing child sex abuse materials in May 2023, he was sentenced to four years in prison with all but nine months suspended. He was let out early because of the state’s “Good Time” law.
He was first arrested after police executed a search warrant of his Brooklin home in March 2022 and discovered 142,000 images and videos of child sex abuse materials, 84,000 of which involved children under the age of 12, according to court documents.
