BLM Pulitzer Winner Makes History Again By Being Arrested For AI-Generated Child Porn

A cartoonist famous for calling attention to racism and criticizing Republicans was arrested on suspicion of possessing child pornography, the Sacramento County Sheriff said Thursday.

The Sacramento Bee said Darrin Bell, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, made history as “the first Black cartoonist to have two nationally syndicated strips,” including Candorville, “which features three childhood friends of color and their daily lives in the inner city.”  Now he has made history again with his arrest for alleged possession of artificial intelligence-generated child abuse material, just days after a California law banning AI porn went into effect.

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For years, the Washington Post Writers Group syndicated Bell’s cartoons in the Post and other papers. He also published cartoons in the New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019 “For beautiful and daring editorial cartoons that took on issues affecting disenfranchised communities, calling out lies, hypocrisy and fraud in the political turmoil surrounding the Trump administration.”

After winning the prize, Bell said he had retired from cartooning, but returned in 2012 because he was outraged over the acquittal of the man who shot Trayvon Martin and was inspired by the “national conversation about race and criminal justice,” ABC reported at the time.

Bell said that respect for human dignity is the “common thread I try to weave through every cartoon that I draw — whether it’s about police brutality or immigrants being separated from their children, or whether it’s about Donald Trump. It’s a big moment of validation.” One of his cartoons showed Trump attempting to molest the Statue of Liberty.

The NAACP gave him its Image Award in 2024 for his comic book “The Talk,” about parents telling their children that they are victims of racism.

The sheriff said in a statement that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children tipped it off that a resident had uploaded 18 files containing Child Sex Abuse Material to an online service. Sacramento Valley Internet Crimes Against Children detectives soon found 134 child abuse videos linked to the same account, which they said was owned by Darrin Bell. On Wednesday, they served a search warrant at Bell’s house. He is currently being held in jail on $1 million bail, they said.

Detectives said some material they recovered was “computer-generated/AI CSAM,” making him “the first arrest by Sacramento Valley ICAC where possession of computer-generated/AI CSAM was charged against a suspect (the law changed on January 1, 2025, to include AI-generated material as a criminal offense.”