Ex-US Marine jailed for 210 years for raping minors in Cambodia

By Riyaz ul Khaliq

ISTANBUL (AA) – A retired US Marine captain was sentenced to 210 years in prison for raping and abusing minors in Cambodia.

Michael Joseph Pepe, 68, has been in US federal custody since 2007 after he was extradited from Cambodia following his arrest there in 2006.

He was sentenced in a Los Angeles court on Monday in a retrial on new charges after his previous conviction in 2007 was overturned in 2018.

During the trial, jurors heard from eight victims who are now adults and were as young as 9 years old when they were sexually abused, according to a statement by the US Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California.

“Each of the victims testified that Pepe sexually abused them, and several explained that Pepe drugged, bound, beat and raped them,” read the statement.

US District Judge Dale Fischer denounced Pepe’s actions as “monstrous” and “horrific,” adding that “what he did to those preteen girls … was torture.”

“There is no justification for a sentence that would ever allow (Pepe) to be released from prison,” the judge was quoted as saying.

Pepe committed the offenses in Cambodia in 2005.

According to the survivors, Pepe abused them at a villa in Tuol Kork, a district in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh.

During his stay at the villa in 2005, Pepe paid families around $30 to take the minors, most of them from the slums of village called Svay Pak, according to an August 2021 report by Cambodian news outlet Khmer Times.

When he was arrested in Cambodia on June 17, 2006, police had found “over 1,000 images Pepe had made of the young girls he abused.”