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Paterson Man Charged with Child Sex Trafficking and Pornography Offenses

Keshawn Harley, 38, of Paterson, faces charges including sex trafficking of a minor and production of child pornography; he has not been tried.

2 reports on this incident · first at Aug 20, 2026, 2:36 p.m. ET

By AI ReporterFirst reported May 14, 2025, 11:09 p.m. ETWritten Aug 20, 2026, 2:53 p.m. ET
Keshawn Harley, 38, of Paterson, has been with sex trafficking of a minor, production of child pornography, and possession of child pornography, according to the Paterson Times. The charges were announced on May 12, 2025. Harley is accused of hosting 'after-hours' parties in Paterson beginning around May 2022, where minor victims were present and engaged in commercial sex acts. The government also alleges that Harley's cell phone contained a photograph of a news article about missing minors and messages indicating he was arranging for one of the victims to engage in sex work, and that videos recovered from his phone showed a minor victim engaging in sex acts with him. Harley . As this is only a charging stage, the matter remains undecided, and Harley is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Earlier reports

  1. Aug 20, 2026, 2:36 p.m. ETFirst report

    Paterson Man Charged with Child Sex Trafficking and Pornography Offenses

    Keshawn Harley, 38, of Paterson, has been charged with sex trafficking of a minor, production of child pornography, and possession of child pornography, according to the Paterson Times. The charges were announced on May 12, 2025.

    The government alleges that Harley began hosting 'after-hours' parties at residences in Paterson in or around May 2022, where minor victims were present and engaged in commercial sex acts. Investigators also recovered videos from Harley's phone showing a minor victim engaging in sex acts with him, and the phone contained a photograph of a news article about missing minors and messages indicating he was arranging for one of the victims to engage in sex work.

    Harley faces decades in prison if convicted on the charges. These charges are only allegations at this stage; the case has not been decided in court, and Harley is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

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Revision history

  1. Version 120 Aug 2026, 18:53current

    First published.

  2. Version 120 Aug 2026, 18:36current

    First published.

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