A transgender pedophile in Virginia has been sentenced to 25 years in federal prison for the production of child sexual abuse material. Joseph Downing Barnes Jr., also known as Junior or Jada Barnes, coerced young boys to perform sexual acts on webcam in order to record the sessions and save the screen recordings as child pornography.
According to court records filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, Barnes first came to the attention of authorities last year after Google became aware that he had been uploading what its system flagged as child sexual abuse material to his cloud storage. Gathering his account details, Google submitted a report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who then forwarded the information to the Virginia Beach Police Department (VBPD) based on the account details Google had identified.
In October of 2025, the VBPD obtained a search warrant for Barnes’ Google account, enabling them to search through the files he had uploaded using his Google email. Within the accounts, they found numerous files containing screen recordings of Barnes engaged in online sexual discussions with boys aged approximately 10-15 years old.
Investigators found Barnes would chat with young boys over a webcam-based platform, and expose his breasts to the children. He would then coerce the boys, who believed him to be a woman, to expose their genitals to him and masturbate for him. Barnes would record the sick sessions and save the files to his Google account.
During the course of the investigation, police learned that Barnes was already a registered sex offender, having been convicted of distributing child sexual abuse material in 2016.
Reduxx obtained the court filings from that conviction, which reveal Barnes had been active in sharing child sexual abuse material with other pedophiles. Some of the videos included prepubescent girls as young as 5 years of age being anally raped by adult men.
Barnes was ultimately sentenced to 108 months in prison in that case, and was subjected to the sex offender registry.
For the latest charges, Barnes entered a plea of guilty, waving his right to a trial.
On September 8, his lawyer submitted a position statement offering potential mitigating factors to be considered in the determination of his sentence. Among those factors was a claim that Barnes had been sexually abused as a child, grew up in poverty, had disordered sexual development, and had an IQ of 73. The position statement refers to him using feminine pronouns.
On October 23, the court handed down a sentence of 25 years, with a requirement that Barnes be subject to lifetime monitoring and registration after his release.
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