A former Indiana University Bloomington student, 21-year-old Jackson Ellis, is fighting two felony child exploitation charges after investigators say they traced explicit videos sent through the messaging app Kik back to his dormitory internet connection. Ellis was charged with two counts of child exploitation, a Level 5 felony, on May 8, and pleaded not guilty soon after.
The case, first detailed by the Indiana Daily Student, stems from a probable cause affidavit describing how Kik reported four video files sent on its platform in January 2025 to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. According to the affidavit, those files matched a hash value associated with visually similar files NCMEC has classified as child sex abuse material. IU Police Department detective Christopher Bridge later reviewed the videos himself and confirmed they contained sexual material involving children, the paper reported.
How Investigators Linked the Account to Ellis
Per the affidavit, the Kik user behind the account was seeking people from Bloomington and Carmel, Indiana, to meet for sex, and allegedly requested that other users send pornography. Chat logs cited in the affidavit indicate the user said they were trading “teen” and “tween” content and claimed there were no limits to what they were seeking. The same account allegedly sent discussions, images and videos of bestiality to other users, though Ellis does not face charges related to bestiality.
Bridge identified Ellis as the person behind the Kik account by comparing age, location and physical descriptions shared in online conversations with his driver's license photo, according to the affidavit — details the detective said left him confident that they are the same person. Investigators also noted that the explicit files were sent while connected to an IP address assigned to the IU network, which Ellis could access from his dormitory at the time. The affidavit further states Ellis had a phone number associated with Verizon, and that the Kik user made multiple connections through IP addresses also assigned to Verizon.
Roommate Interview and Denial
During a police search of his residence, Ellis denied having any child sex abuse material on his electronic devices, the affidavit states. Separately, a roommate told Bridge that Ellis had described meeting an older woman and her boyfriend for sex, and said Ellis had expressed wanting to pose as a minor online in order to meet people arranging sex with minors so he could beat them up, according to the affidavit.
Bridge also wrote in May that Verizon was still gathering records from the suspect account's network connections, the Indiana Daily Student reported. IU spokesperson Mark Bode confirmed Ellis is not currently enrolled at the university.
Case Still Awaiting Evidence Review
A pretrial conference took place Oct. 27 at the Charlotte Zietlow Justice Center in Bloomington. After an earlier Aug. 31 conference, the case was still awaiting further discovery, including electronic extractions and analysis from the prosecution, according to the newspaper's reporting. The case awaits that additional material, and another pretrial conference is scheduled for Jan. 19, 2027, according to MyCase.
A Nationwide Surge in Reports
The case arrives amid a sharp rise in reports of online child exploitation tracked nationally. NCMEC's CyberTipline received 1.4 million reports concerning online enticement in 2025, a 158% increase from 2024 that the organization said was affected by the REPORT Act, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Reports related to child sex trafficking rose 323% over the same period, and electronic service provider reports contained 61.8 million images, videos and other files tied to exploitation incidents last year, the organization said.
In Indiana specifically, 14,760 CyberTipline reports were made available to law enforcement in 2023, and NCMEC reviewed 64 submissions of child sexual exploitation material from Indiana law enforcement that year, according to the organization's state data. Nationally, the CyberTipline received 36.2 million reports related to child sexual exploitation in 2023, containing more than 105 million pieces of reported content. Those figures describe broader trends and are not specific to the Bloomington case.
