New York
A Harvard-educated former managing director at Citigroup Inc. who blamed autism for his actions was sentenced Tuesday to 30 years in prison for sex crimes that prosecutors say occurred over a 10-year interval.
Edward Gene Smith, 50, was sentenced in Manhattan federal courtroom by Judge Paul A. Engelmayer after he pleaded responsible to sex crimes, receiving baby pornography and obstructing justice.
His attorneys wrote in a presentencing submission to the decide that autism spectrum dysfunction was the “primary driver” of his crimes.
The attorneys stated Smith has been “devastated to learn that his understanding of his relationships with the women he thought of as his girlfriends was wrong and that they experienced their encounters with him as non-consensual sexual abuse and even rape.”
But prosecutors, who requested a 30-year sentence, wrote that Smith’s “purported autism” was “inflammatory nonsense.”
“It is an offensive smear to those in the autistic community. And it is utterly irreconcilable with what the defendant did, and how he did it,” they stated.
Prosecutors stated that in pleading responsible, Smith admitted drugging a girl with the intent to rape her and engaging one other girl to journey to New York the place he drugged and sexually assaulted her.
Smith “committed these heinous crimes hiding behind a facade of a well-educated bank executive, using his outward appearance to draw in victims and evade detection,” prosecutors stated.
They stated he additionally obtained and maintained tens of hundreds of information of “horrifying” baby sexual abuse materials depicting toddlers and even infants.
Smith used guarantees of economic safety to lure younger girls from overseas international locations or faraway US states who had been weak and wanted revenue to his New York Central Park residence, the place he used medicine to incapacitate them earlier than raping and sexually abusing them, prosecutors stated.
US Attorney Jay Clayton stated in a launch that Smith carried out his crimes from 2015 to 2024, subjecting quite a few girls to assaults in which “he would torture and punish his victims, and surreptitiously photograph them, while they were nude and unconscious.”
Smith, who labored at Citigroup Inc. from 2021 till his 2024 arrest, stated in a letter to the decide that it was “obvious to all that I have fallen from the pinnacle of success to the pit of destitution and disgrace.”
He stated, although, that he must be seen as somebody who has “long put his errors behind him” and reconnected together with his loving household.
“The man I used to be embarrasses me. I don’t want to be him ever again,” he wrote.
Prosecutors additionally famous that he knew the harms he inflicted on girls as a result of he had written in the Harvard Crimson in 1998, a 12 months after his faculty commencement, that “there is something particularly traumatic about being raped by someone a victim knows and had even liked or trusted. The right to say no to sex is a human right, a basic right of control over one’s body.”
In a press release, Citigroup stated: “We moved to terminate Mr. Smith immediately upon learning about law enforcement’s initial investigation, well before the allegations of this depraved behavior came to light. We cooperated with law enforcement as they sought justice for the victims of these heinous crimes.”