A 59-year-old white male in Ohio who is well-known for impersonating Mark Hamil’s Luke Skywalker character from “Star Wars” at local charity events was arrested this week on more than half a dozen criminal charges for trafficking child sexual abuse material online. John Stevens was taken into custody on Wednesday and charged with eight counts of pandering sexually oriented material involving a minor, court records reviewed by Law&Crime show.
According to a report from Cincinnati, Ohio, NBC affiliate WLWT, deputies with the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office earlier this month received a tip from a watchdog organization regarding suspicious material being uploaded to the cloud. The case was taken over by the office’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.
Investigators with the task force were reportedly able to trace the IP address back to the pedophile, who was later placed under arrest and booked into the Hamilton County Justice Center
Stevens appeared before a judge at the Hamilton County Courthouse on Thursday morning where Assistant Prosecuting Attorney David R. Wood asked the court to set a high bond amount for Stevens, citing the repugnant nature of the diabolical material he uploaded.
“The psychologists state that the fantasy fuels the behavior in this case, the defendant has pornographic images involving adult men and very young female children on his phone,” Wood said, according to a report from Cincinnati CBS affiliate WKRC-TV.
The material recovered from the pedophile’s cellphone reportedly depicted young girls being sexually abused by different adult males.
Wood continued, reportedly claiming that he would not go into much detail about the kinds of material found on the monster’s cellphone because it was “too graphic and fantasy fueled” and “too profane to state out loud in front of the media,” per WLWT. However, he reportedly clarified that the charges were based on three videos and five photographs found on Stevens’ device.
While Stevens has worked with multiple charitable organizations, authorities reportedly said that he previously only had some minor misdemeanor charges on his record and would have passed most background checks prior to this week’s arrest.
Stevens, who refers to himself as a “volunteer cosplayer for charity” on his website, goes by the name “Fluke Skywalker” and says he got into impersonating the famous character because of his “fluke resemblance” to actor Mark Hamill.
In fact, Hamill in October of 2022 actually gave Stevens a shoutout on Twitter.
“To the guy who looks more like me than me: I truly admire your work for charity & for being in parades in Cincinnati on my behalf! Wishing you continued success, Mar,” Hamill wrote on Twitter in response to a video of Stevens appearing in the Cincinnati Blink Parade.
The pedophile was still in detention as of Thursday afternoon and is being held on $200,000 bond. Should he post bond, Stevens will be required to wear an electronic GPS monitor and will be prohibited from accessing the internet.
