Photo: Stock Image
The proliferation of social media platforms and their widespread use by school-age females apparently makes life a lot easier for those men who—artful in the ways of Instagram, TikTok, Tinder, “X” and their ilk—would seek to take advantage of their girlish innocence and sexual curiosity.
That may have been the situation leading 21-year-old Santa Barbara resident William James Trautwein Jr. to invest the time on his laptop that led to his early morning arrest on Thursday, February 1st. According to Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department Public Information Officer Raquel Zick, Trautwein Jr. had been busy on social media recruiting young girls to send him “selfies” of a sexually explicit nature since 2022, and to then meet him for the purposes of illicit sexual contact.
It was at 7:00 a.m. on February 1st when detectives from the SBSD Criminal Investigations Bureau showed up on Trautwein’s front porch with an arrest warrant issued pursuant to “a lengthy investigation” into his online activities which may have involved multiple “survivors of sexual assault who have not yet been identified.” Trautwein was taken into custody “without incident” and transported to Santa Barbara County Jail, where he was booked on charges of sexual assault, assault with great bodily injury, unlawful sex with a minor, and possession of child pornography.
Trautwein remains in custody and is currently held without bail.
