Jalen Kitna is being accused of some absolutely horrifying crimes. (Photo credit: Mark J. Rebilas, USA Today)
WARNING: the contents of this article reveal information that is likely to be highly disturbing to many.
UPDATE: Jalen Kitna has been released on an $80,000 bond and will be placed under the supervision of his parents back in their home in Texas. Kitna is ordered to not access the internet or have any unsupervised contact with minors.
And to the surprise of nobody, he has been dismissed from the Florida Gators football team.
(Original story begins below.)
Florida QB Jalen Kitna, who was booked yesterday on several counts of child pornography, appeared via closed-circuit TV today at the Alachua County Courthouse to have the charges against him read to him. This has resulted in more details coming out about what, exactly, he did. And those details are downright nauseating.
Per the Gainesville Police Department, Jalen Kitna possessed five images of child pornography. The worst of these images featured a prepubescent girl actively engaging in a sexual act with an adult man. The report states that it was this image that Kitna shared, plus another one of a pubescent girl.
The pictures apparently had text written on them that read, along with other things: “teen pussy so young junior.” When interviewed by police, Kitna claimed that since he found them online, he had assumed that they were legal. Needless to say, this is not true.
When police seized his phone, they found three more images of bare pubescent juveniles in the shower. These three images seem to be self-produced, per the Tampa Bay Times, and the dates of the photos were December of 2021.
The investigation into Jalen Kitna started this past June, when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children sent in a tip relating to images of child pornography being shared through Discord, a social networking site. The image was shared from Kitna onto Discord, and yesterday, after tracking the location of where the image was sent, police raided Kitna’s house. When Kitna noticed another user’s reaction to the picture, he admitted to police that he then realized he should not have shared the image.
It gets worse. From the Tampa Bay Times’ Matt Baker: “Kitna told police that he was in servers that discuss, solicit and distribute child sexual abuse material, but he ‘tries to stay away from it,’ the report said. Kitna also said he had been in groups on the message system Kik that distributed similar material and that he ‘might have accidentally downloaded’ those types of items but would delete them.
Now, the matter is in the hands of the judicial system. Per the Orlando Sentinel, Kitna has hired Gainesville attorney Ron Kozlowski.
