He Tried to Blame His Sex Crimes on Autism, Gets 30 Years

A Harvard-educated ex-managing director at Citigroup Inc. who blamed autism for his actions was sentenced Tuesday to 30 years in prison for sex crimes that prosecutors say occurred over a decade. Edward Gene Smith, 50, was sentenced in Manhattan federal court by Judge Paul A. Engelmayer after pleading guilty to sex crimes, receiving child pornography, and obstructing justice, per the AP. His lawyers wrote to the judge that autism spectrum disorder was the "primary driver" of his crimes. The lawyers said Smith had been "devastated to learn that his understanding of his relationships with the women he thought of as his girlfriends was wrong and that they experienced their encounters with him as nonconsensual sexual abuse and even rape."

But prosecutors, who requested a 30-year sentence, wrote that Smith's "purported autism" was "inflammatory nonsense." "It is an offensive smear to those in the autistic community. And it is utterly irreconcilable with what the defendant did, and how he did it," they said. Prosecutors said that, in pleading guilty, Smith admitted drugging a woman with the intent to rape her and enticing another woman to travel to New York, where he drugged and sexually assaulted her. They said he also obtained and maintained tens of thousands of files of "horrifying" child sexual abuse material depicting toddlers and even infants.

Smith used promises of financial security to lure young women from foreign countries or faraway US states who were vulnerable and needed income to his New York Central Park residence, where he used drugs to incapacitate them before raping and sexually abusing them, prosecutors said. US Attorney Jay Clayton said in a release that Smith carried out his crimes from 2015 to 2024. Prosecutors also noted that he knew the harms he inflicted on women, citing his writings in the Harvard Crimson in 1998, a year after his college graduation, in which he wrote that "there is something particularly traumatic about being raped by someone a victim knows and had even liked or trusted. The right to say no to sex is a human right, a basic right of control over one's body."

Smith, who worked at Citigroup from 2021 until his 2024 arrest, said in a letter to the judge that it was "obvious to all that I have fallen from the pinnacle of success to the pit of destitution and disgrace." In a statement, Citigroup said, "We moved to terminate Mr. Smith immediately upon learning about law enforcement's initial investigation, well before the allegations of this depraved behavior came to light. We cooperated with law enforcement as they sought justice for the victims of these heinous crimes."