OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
4:01 PM – Friday, June 19, 2026

Stacie Marie Laughton, a former New Hampshire state Democrat representative, has been sentenced to 33 years in federal prison following a child exploitation case that involved a Massachusetts daycare center. The sentence follows Laughton’s guilty plea to three counts of sexual exploitation of children.

Laughton is a biological male who identifies as a transgender woman.

Federal prosecutors outlined a deeply depraved operation where Laughton conspired with a former intimate partner to abuse a position of trust for the production and distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

The investigation initially centered around his biological female partner, Lindsay Groves, of Hudson, New Hampshire, who was employed at the Creative Minds Early Learning Center in Tyngsborough, Massachusetts. According to federal court documents, between May 2022 and June 2023, Groves abused her access to the facility by taking illicit, perverse photographs of prepubescent children, aged 3-to-5 years old, during routine bathroom and diaper-changing breaks before naptime.

Groves then sent these photographs to Laughton via text message, so he could compile a collection of CSAM.

Law enforcement officials recovered more than 10,000 text messages exchanged between Laughton and Groves over a single one-month period in 2023. These messages contained detailed explicit discussions regarding the photos and explicit coordination for the ongoing exploitation of the children under Groves’ care.

Groves was previously sentenced to 22 years in prison for her primary role in generating the material.

Laughton, a Nashua Democrat who made history in 2012 as the first openly transgender person elected to a U.S. state legislature, has a highly tumultuous legal and political history. Laughton resigned from the New Hampshire House of Representatives multiple times across separate tenures due to legal issues, including past convictions for credit card fraud, falsifying evidence, and a 2015 incident involving a bomb threat. His final resignation from the legislature came in December 2022, just months before his federal arrest in connection to the Tyngsborough daycare operation.

The case was prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide Department of Justice (DOJ) initiative designed to target child exploitation and rescue victims.

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