Tennessee Man Pleads Guilty to Cyberstalking

           WASHINGTON - Andrew T. Maliska, 27, of Nashville, Tennessee, pled guilty on Monday, June 17 to cyberstalking in the District of Columbia following an investigation into the creation and circulation of doctored images, related postings, and the personal information of the victim.

           The announcement was made by U.S. Attorney Jessie K. Liu and John P. Selleck, Acting Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office.

           Maliska was indicted by a grand jury on one count of cyberstalking and indicted on two counts of identity theft. The indictment was unsealed on May 24, 2018, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

           According to the government’s evidence, Maliska resided in the District of Columbia from September 2009 until June 2013, where he studied at a local university and met the victim. The indictment alleges that during the course of his friendship with the victim, Maliska without authorization, accessed and obtained non-sexual images from the victim’s social media accounts. According to the indictment, Maliska then doctored those images to sexualize them and posted them on various online forums.

           The indictment alleges that Maliska also posted the victim’s name, phone number, and address on an escort website in May of 2015. This posting resulted in the victim receiving multiple inquiries from individuals seeking escort services from her. The indictment further alleges that the nature of the other postings were pornographic, racist, and defamatory.

           The victim and her family filed a civil suit against Maliska in October of 2015. The following year, the victim and her family obtained a civil settlement in which Maliska acknowledged the postings and content were authored by him, stated he would remove the content, and agreed that he would refrain from engaging in further defamatory postings of the victim.

           As alleged in the indictment, in August 2017, after Maliska entered into the civil settlement, he continued to commission sexual images of the victim, posted about the victim, and reactivated a fake social media account in her name. The indictment alleges that Maliska used the victim’s name, biographical information, and images to create the fake social media account. Maliska used the fake social media account to befriend and communicate with others online.

           The charge of cyberstalking carries a statutory maximum of five years in prison and potential financial penalties.

           This case was investigated by the FBI’s Washington Field Office. It was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Youli Lee and Charles Willoughby, paralegal Diane Brashears, and former Assistant U.S. Attorney Sumit Mallick, of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. Assistance was provided by Assistant U.S. Attorney Byron Jones of the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Middle District of Tennessee and Bianca Evans, formerly of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.