A two-time failed Maine gubernatorial candidate and child-porno fiend has been arrested for violating his probation for the third time.
Disbarred lawyer Eliot Cutler, 79, a convicted child pornographer, was nabbed Monday at a South Portland hotel, authorities said.
Maine State Police say their Special Victim’s Unit encountered Cutler at the hotel and found that he was violating his bail conditions.
He was taken to Cumberland County Jail where he was being held on a probation hold.
Cutler has been accused of violating probation multiple times after he was convicted of possessing child pornography in 2023.
In May 2023, Cutler pleaded guilty to four counts of possession of sexually explicit materials of children as part of a plea deal.
Prosecutors said investigators had found tens of thousands of images and videos of child sexual abuse material on Cutler’s electronic devices.
As part of his plea deal, Cutler was sentenced to nine months in prison by Judge Robert Murray.
He was released six weeks early for good behavior.
Since then he’s now been charged three times with violating probation, including using his computer to try to set up a meeting with an “escort” in California.
After that violation a judge said his bail at $1,000.
“Any violation, I think you’re at the end of the runway now,” Judge Harold Stewart told Cutler last month during a hearing on his second alleged probation violation for allegedly looking up sexual images online.
But Stewart denied Hancock County District Attorney Robert Granger’s request to hold Cutler in jail, instead setting bail at $10,000.
Stewart told him then he’d face six months in jail and a $1,000 fine if found guilty of violating the terms of his release.
Cutler was not to have any access to the internet or to electronic devices that can connect to the internet.
He was also not to possess or access any pornography at all, regardless of whether it depicts sexual acts or just shows either full or even partial nudity.
The change in his bail conditions imposed tighter restrictions on Cutler.
Up until then, he had been allowed to use devices to look up non-sexually explicit material online, but the devices had to be registered and monitored in by a third-party agency tasked with reporting as quickly as possible to Cutler’s probation officer any violations.
Walter McKee, Cutler’s defense attorney, told the judge then that his client would be willing to abide by a supervision requirement, in which he can only access the Internet in the presence of someone approved by the state who essentially would be “looking over his shoulder.”
Cutler’s excuse for his most recent internet searches was that he was looking for information about stripping labels off wooden boxes when he stumbled into search results for the term “strip tease.”
Stewart wasn’t buying that feeble claim, telling Cutler it didn’t pass “the straight-face test.”
But nonetheless the judge took a second chance on the porn king, letting him off on cash bail yet again.
Cutler, a Harvard and Georgetown grad, has gone from the heights of political possibilities to now being an alleged four-time criminal.
He came within a whisker of being Maine’s top elected officer – governor – in 2010. He ran again in 2014, losing by a wider margin.
Cutler was an aide in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget under President Carter and was the principal White House official for energy.
He began in politics as a legislative assistant to U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie, D-Maine, helping craft the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act.
Cutler shed the Democrat label as a gubernatorial candidate, running instead as an “independent.”
He previously resided in Cape Elizabeth, a wealthy community in southern Maine but now lives in Brooklin, a tiny town in Hancock County along the state’s northeastern shore known as the “boat building capital of the world.”
