Texas man convicted of running child sex abuse subscription website, feds say

A Texas man was convicted of running a website with writings about sexual abuse of children, authorities say.

Thomas Arthur, 64, was found guilty during a three-day trial into content on his subscription website Mr. Double, according to the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas.

He’s convicted of trafficking in obscene visual representations and text stories about child sex abuse and engaging in the business of selling obscene matters involving the sexual abuse of children.

In November 2019, the FBI executed a search warrant Arthur’s property in a desolate area of South Texas near Big Bend National Park. The raid on the “remote compound” shook the community near Terlingua, KWES reported.

“A lot of people think that because this is isolated it’s a good place to just get away from it all,” a neighbor told the news outlet. “But there’s a lot of unsavory characters that know that as well.”

Arthur operated the website from the property, publishing writings that included “rape, torture, and murder of infants and toddlers,” authorities say. It launched in 1996 and two years later began charging members for access to what it claimed were 25,000 stories by over 2,200 authors, according to court documents.

Users could access for free or a reduced price if they submitted content, the documents say.

“Arthur publishes almost all of the stories he receives from his subscribers,” an FBI agent wrote in a 2019 court document. “The only circumstances under which he would not publish a story...would be if the content of the story did not relate to child erotica, the story did not make sense or the story contained too many grammatical or punctuation errors.”

The website was Arthur’s only source of income for more than two decades, authorities say.

The FBI shut down the website when agents executed the search warrant. Investigators obtained evidence from a server where the site was hosted in the Netherlands, authorities say.

Arthur is scheduled to be sentenced in April.

This story was originally published January 22, 2021 at 1:27 PM with the headline "Texas man convicted of running child sex abuse subscription website, feds say."