A Federal Judge Said ‘A Lengthy Sentence Is Warranted.’ A Twice-Convicted Sex Offender Just Got Nine Years.
U.S. District Judge Jamal N. Whitehead sentenced Paydan Georgy Bussey, 27, formerly of Fall City, Washington, to nine years in federal prison on July 16, 2026, plus a lifetime of supervised release. Bussey had pleaded guilty to possessing images of child sexual abuse — a case built from a single CyberTip that led investigators straight back to an address they already had on file.
It is not his first sex offense. Bussey was convicted as a juvenile of molesting a child under 12, registered as a sex offender, and completed treatment — treatment prosecutors now say plainly did not work.
Two more cases against him are still open. A King County rape-of-a-child charge and a Utah sodomy-of-a-child charge, both filed in 2024, have not gone to trial. Bussey is presumed innocent on both.
- 9 years — the federal prison sentence Judge Jamal N. Whitehead imposed on Bussey, July 16, 2026 — USAO-WDWA
- Life — the length of supervised release ordered on top of the prison term — USAO-WDWA
- 15 — suspected CSAM images in the CyberTip that opened the federal case — USAO-WDWA
- 2 — additional child-sex-crime charges against Bussey, one in King County and one in Utah, both still pending and untried — KOMO News
Investigators did not start with Bussey’s name. They started with a CyberTip. In September 2024, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received a report from the messaging app Kik: a user account had shared 15 suspected images of child sexual abuse with another Kik user. Kik turned over the account’s subscriber information, and by December 2024 agents had an address in King County, Washington.
That address was not unfamiliar. Homeland Security Investigations, working the tip alongside its Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, recognized it from a separate matter already open on Bussey — the King County child-rape case that had led to his arrest ten months earlier. Two federal case files, opened months apart by two different tips, had converged on the same man. Agents obtained a warrant for Bussey’s electronic devices and found images of child sexual abuse on his laptop. Federal prosecutors filed a possession charge in May 2025.
“A lengthy sentence is warranted to protect the public.”
Jamal N. Whitehead · U.S. District Judge, Western District of Washington
Bussey was already on the sex-offender registry once. As a juvenile, he was convicted of molesting a child under the age of 12. He registered, and he completed the treatment courts required of him — treatment that ended his registration obligation in 2017, once he reached adulthood and the state considered the matter closed.
Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Harmon — also a Senior King County Deputy Prosecutor specially designated to handle federal child-exploitation cases — argued in her sentencing memo that the treatment had not held. “Mr. Bussey’s conduct in this case is particularly troubling in light of his prior convictions and that he had successfully completed treatment,” Harmon wrote. “This is now his second sex offense, which demonstrates his inability to conform his conduct to the law.”
First Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd, currently leading the Western District of Washington’s U.S. Attorney’s Office in the absence of a Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorney, announced the sentence. No fine or restitution amount was reported in connection with the case; the King County Sheriff’s Office and Homeland Security Investigations are both credited as investigating agencies.
Federal sentences carry no parole. Barring good-time credit for conduct behind bars, Bussey will serve the bulk of his nine-year term before the lifetime supervised-release clock even starts — a stretch of court-ordered oversight that, by definition, does not end. The full timeline from tip to sentence ran just under two years: a September 2024 CyberTip, a December 2024 subscriber address, a May 2025 federal charge, and a July 16, 2026 sentencing.
The federal possession case is not the only one pending against Bussey. King County Sheriff’s deputies arrested him in February 2024 on a charge of rape of a child; that case has not gone to trial. Eight months later, in October 2024, he was booked into the Utah County Jail on a charge of sodomy of a child. Both charges predate the federal indictment described above, and it was the King County case — not the Kik tip alone — that let investigators immediately recognize Bussey’s address once the CyberTip came in. Neither the King County nor the Utah case has been resolved as of this reporting. Bussey is presumed innocent on both — the word “convicted” in this story applies only to the federal image-possession charge above, where he has already pleaded guilty and been sentenced.
A separate civil lawsuit, filed January 30, 2025 in the Western District of Washington — Bussey v. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Case No. 2:25-cv-00197-TSZ — adds context to the pattern, though it is a distinct legal matter with different defendants and no criminal finding attached. The suit alleges Bussey molested a child in 2019 while visiting his father, Phil Bussey, in Madrid, Spain, on a trip the church funded. Phil Bussey held the LDS lay positions of “area authority seventy” and later mission president; the suit alleges he concealed his son’s abuse of the child in order to secure that mission-president post.
FLOODLIT.org, which tracks LDS abuse litigation through court-filing research, has followed the civil docket since it broke the story — background on the same pattern this piece is reporting, not the federal sentencing itself.
Last month, we broke this story: Phil Bussey, a former Mormon area authority seventy and mission president, was accused in a 2025 lawsuit of concealing child sexual abuse perpetrated by his son Paydan Bussey in order to be able to become a mission president.
Paydan Georgy Bussey completed sex-offender treatment once already, after a juvenile molestation conviction, and the state let his registration lapse in 2017. Nine years later, a CyberTip from a messaging app led federal investigators back to him, and a federal judge called this — his second sex offense — cause for “a lengthy sentence to protect the public.” A King County rape charge and a Utah sodomy charge, both filed in 2024, remain pending and untried; Bussey is presumed innocent on those two counts alone.
