Johnny Lee Gibson, a 58-year-old resident of Florence, South Carolina, has been sentenced to 90 months in federal prison for sex trafficking. The sentencing took place in U.S. District Court and was announced by U.S. Attorney Edward R. Martin Jr., Special Agent in Charge Sean Ryan of the FBI Washington Field Office Criminal and Cyber Division, and Chief Pamela Smith of the Metropolitan Police Department.
Gibson, also known as "Preach," entered a guilty plea on December 11, 2024, to charges of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion. In addition to his prison sentence, Judge Amy Berman Jackson ordered him to serve ten years of supervised release and mandated that he register as a sex offender.
Court documents reveal that Gibson recruited women with drug addictions to work as prostitutes for his commercial sex operation across multiple states including Washington D.C., Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida. This operation continued from 1994 until his arrest at a motel in Brooklawn, New Jersey on July 25, 2024.
Gibson advertised the women's services online through various websites targeting areas such as the DMV. In one advertisement from 2019 in the District area he described a woman’s services as “100% Real and always discreet, always on time...”
Upon his arrest in July 2024, Gibson admitted in a recorded statement to trafficking five women. He confessed to acting as their pimp and maintaining control over them by supplying drugs.
The investigation was conducted by the FBI Washington Field Office’s Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force which includes FBI agents along with other federal agents and detectives from northern Virginia and the District of Columbia. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Karen Ditzler Shinskie and Rachel Forman are prosecuting the case.
