A San Francisco man who admitted to making and trading explicit videos of minors has been sentenced to 20 years in federal prison, closing a case that prosecutors say shows just how quickly child sexual abuse material can move online.
Henry Muller, 33, pleaded guilty in January 2025 and has been locked up since his arrest in 2023. Senior U.S. District Judge Edward M. Chen handed down a 240-month sentence, followed by 15 years of supervised release. Prosecutors say Muller will begin serving that federal term immediately.
According to a press release from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California, Muller was indicted by a federal grand jury in July 2023 and pleaded guilty on Jan. 9, 2025, to two counts of production of child pornography, one count of distribution of child pornography, and one count of receipt of child pornography.
Prosecutors said Muller admitted that on July 12 and July 13, 2022, he persuaded a minor to engage in sexually explicit conduct and recorded that abuse on video. He then distributed one of those videos online on July 17, 2022, according to the plea. The same press release states that on Oct. 17, 2022, Muller received a visual depiction involving a different minor.
Bay City News Service, published via SFGATE, also noted that Muller has been held since his 2023 arrest and underscored that his federal term begins right away, portraying the lengthy sentence as part of prosecutors' broader push to disrupt online distribution.
Investigation and prosecution
The U.S. Attorney's Office said the case was investigated by the FBI and the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office. Assistant U.S. Attorney Roland Chang handled the prosecution, with assistance from Christine Tian, according to the federal summary.
The office’s Feb. 20 release lays out the timeline from the 2022 offenses to the July 2023 indictment and the January 2025 guilty plea, tying Muller's admissions directly to the production and sharing of the videos described in court.
How the case fits locally
Federal prosecutors in the Northern District of California have been steadily pursuing both production and possession cases involving child sexual abuse material. The San Francisco Chronicle reported a separate nine-year federal sentence in 2025 in another child-pornography case, highlighting a string of prosecutions targeting online offenders.
Local and federal officials say these cases increasingly rely on digital forensics and close coordination across agencies, as investigators follow electronic trails from local devices to servers and platforms around the country.
Court listings show Muller's case under docket number 3:23-cr-00210-EMC, and filings are available through the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Prosecutors said the 20-year sentence reflects both the severity of producing sexual-abuse material involving minors and an effort to blunt its spread online.
