Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist arrested on child pornography charges

Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Darrin Lawrence Bell is facing child pornography charges over a batch of graphic videos — some of them AI-generated — that investigators say the 49-year-old uploaded to an online account.

Bell, a Northern California resident, was arrested Wednesday and is being held in the Sacramento County Main Jail on $1 million bail, according to booking records.

The married father of four is the first person charged with possession of AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) since it became a felony under state law on Jan. 1, the Sacramento Sheriff’s Office announced Thursday.

Bell’s alleged activities came to the attention of the Sacramento Valley Internet crimes against children (ICAC) investigators after they were contacted by officials at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who are tracking CSAM shared online. ICAC is a national network of 61 coordinated task forces representing over 5,400 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.

Detectives say the investigation started with a tip related to 18 files containing CSAM, but a deeper look turned up a total of 134 offending videos, including a cache allegedly produced using AI.

Bell is the creator of a strip called Candorvillewhich was launched in 2003 and is syndicated through The Washington Post Writers Groupappearing in newspapers across the country. His cartoons are also distributed through King Features Syndicate, which handles such iconic names as Popeye, Dennis the Menace and Beetle Bailey.

He won a Pulitzer in 2019 for editorial cartooning, the first African-American in history to do so.

Bell also received the Berryman Award for Editorial Cartooning (2016), the RFK Award for Editorial Cartooning (2015), and UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian The award for Alumni of the Year (2015). He does not yet have an attorney listed in the charging documents, and he could not be reached for comment.

Bell is scheduled to appear in court on Friday at 3 p.m. local time.