HSI Agent Indicted on Child Sex Abuse Charges Despite Child Exploitation Investigation Role

There is a particular wound that opens when those entrusted to protect the vulnerable are revealed as predators themselves. In Alabama, a federal agent whose professional life was devoted to investigating child exploitation now faces nine counts of rape, sodomy, and sexual abuse against a juvenile girl — charges that invert his sworn purpose entirely. Kent Blacklidge, 43, was indicted by a Baldwin County grand jury after an investigation that began in January, and the case has been assumed by the state attorney general's office, a quiet signal of how deeply the ordinary structures of justice w