NEW YORK (1010 WINS) – A Manhattan financier pleaded guilty for scheming to target teenage girls for sex by offering them money and gifts on social media platforms before drugging, raping and filming at least, prosecutors announced on Tuesday.
Michael Olson, 56, pleaded guilty to behavior including for targeting a 14-year-old girl on Instagram and giving her drugs and raped her in hotel rooms on a weekly basis. He also pleaded guilty pursuant to a superseding indictment for conduct including creating child sexual abuse material, drugging a second child, soliciting multiple other children, and continuing to engage in a course of conduct against some of these children.
“Michael Olson schemed to target, recruit, manipulate, and sexually assault young girls, and raped at least one child in Manhattan on a weekly basis,” Bragg said. “His horrendous conduct was the very definition of predatory, and I thank my office’s Human Trafficking Unit for putting a stop to it.”
According to the initial indictment, Olson in December 2022, found the 14-year-old girl’s Instagram profile and responded to a post that she made about clothes being too expensive. He then sent her a gift card first and then began to pay her to spend time with him. For the next six month, Olson repeatedly raped the child and paid about $700 a week to engage in sexual conduct in hotel rooms in Queens and Manhattan.
He also took her to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Miami by purchasing plane tickets with her first name and his last name in order to portray her as his daughter.
On May 26, 2023, EMS responded after the child began overdosing in a Manhattan hotel room. She was taken to the hospital for treatment and Olson was arrested.
Olson, who worked for Dwight Mortgage Trust, a financial firm in New York focused on real estate investment, was fired the day he was indicted.
According to a superseding indictment, after his arrest, the DA’s Human Trafficking Unit continued their investigation and found four additional victims all of whom were 15 or younger.
He was charged with creating eighteen distinct pieces of child sexual abuse material in Manhattan, as well as possessing a total of thirty-two different child sexual abuse materials. The conduct included an additional drug sale to a different child, soliciting multiple other children, and continuing to engage in a course of conduct against some of these children even after Olson was arraigned in criminal court and placed on electronic monitoring, prosecutors said.
Olson pleaded guilty to criminal sale of a controlled substance to a child, rape, criminal sexual act, facilitating a sex offense with a controlled substance, aggravated patronizing a minor of prostitution, use of a child in a sexual performance as a sexually motivated felony, and multiple counts of endangering the welfare of a child.
He was scheduled to be sentenced on Feb. 5, 2025, to 16 years in state prison, as promised by the court.