Gainesville man arrested for sending explicit videos and engaging in inappropriate chats with minors

Staff report

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Aaron Ross Robison Eliot-Gaines, 33, was arrested yesterday for sending multiple nude videos of himself to minors, engaging in multiple inappropriate chats with minors, and requesting nude pictures from minors.

On August 6, 2025, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received a CyberTip from Snapchat about a user account that had transmitted harmful material to a minor. The tip included a video of a nude man masturbating in the shower, and the man’s face was visible in the video.

A subpoena for the login IP address used by the Snapchat account showed that the subscriber lived at Eliot-Gaines’s home in Green Leaf, and a Gainesville Police Department detective reported that Eliot-Gaines’s driver’s license photograph matched the man in the video.

A subpoena was issued for the suspect’s Snapchat account between August 4 and August 7, 2025, and the response, received on January 16, included several chats with accounts that claimed to be minors. The account also reportedly included 20 videos or images of Eliot-Gaines, most of which showed him masturbating.

In chats with users who claimed to be between 11 and 16 years old, the suspect’s account, which gave ages between 16 and 28, reportedly sent multiple masturbation videos and received images and videos of nude juvenile females.

In one chat, the suspect’s account offered to send money to an account that initially claimed to be a 12-year-old girl but later said she was really 11 years old; the minor’s account provided her address in Birmingham, Alabama, and the two users talked about meeting in a park. That chat ended with a message that said, “Stop talking to my daughter, you are a grown man she is a little child. She will not be speaking to you anymore.”

On February 18, a search warrant was executed at Eliot-Gaines’s address, and officers made contact with him and his female roommate.

Post Miranda, Eliot-Gaines reportedly admitted to ownership of the suspect’s Snapchat account and said he had been chatting sexually with minors since he created the account in 2023. He reportedly admitted to engaging in the specific chats provided by Snapchat and identified himself in the images and videos, including explicit material, in the suspect’s Snapchat account.

Eliot-Gaines reportedly said he knew that what he had done was wrong and he was sorry; he said he did it because he was in a “bad place” and was bored and lonely.

Eliot-Gaines has been charged with directing a minor to produce sexual content, two counts of solicitation of child pornography, two counts of possession of child pornography, three counts of harmful communication to a minor, and 11 counts of transmission of material harmful to minors. He has no local criminal history, and Judge Jonathan Ramsey set bail at $285,000.

Eliot-Gaines’s LinkedIn profile claims that he has worked for the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) as a Child Welfare Specialist for the past 4.5 years, up to the present day; DCF is looking into our question about whether that is true, and this article will be updated when we receive a response.

Articles about arrests are based on reports from law enforcement agencies. The charges listed are taken from the arrest report and/or court records and are only accusations. All suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.