A former Newport Beach gynecologist pleaded guilty on Wednesday to federal criminal charges for possessing hundreds of photos of children engaged in sexual acts, officials announced.
The Department of Justice said that Mark Albert Rettenmaier, 72, of Laguna Hills pleaded guilty to two counts of possessing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) across multiple personally owned devices.
This plead comes about eight years after a federal judge dismissed child pornography charges against the doctor after throwing out much of the evidence, according to the Orange County Register.
In January 2017, the O.C. Register reported that employees at Geek Squad, a Best Buy repair facility, in Kentucky alerted the FBI after finding alleged child porn on Rettenmaier’s computer while conducting a data-recovery process on the doctor’s drive.
Later that same year, the O.C. Register reported that a federal judge dismissed the charges after throwing out evidence because of “false and misleading statements” made by an FBI agent.
According to the report, the FBI agent wrote an affidavit that served as the basis for a warrant to search the doctor’s home, where law enforcement allegedly found over 800 electronic photos of naked or partially undressed “underage girls.”
One of the “false and misleading statements” allegedly made by the FBI agent, however, had to do with a single photo of a possible underage girl that the agent claimed was child porn. It was this photo that was found by the Geek Squad, and that the agent used to request the search warrant.
The O.C. Register reported that the judge said “The … image, although distasteful and disturbing, was not child pornography,” the judge said. “It was child erotica, the possession and viewing of which is not unlawful.”
However, three years after these charges were dropped, the DOJ said that Rettenmaier uploaded 15 images of CSAM to an Adobe cloud-based storage system on June 7, 2020.
“At least four of the images Rettenmaier uploaded depicted two minors, one under the age of 12, engaging in sexually explicit conduct,” the DOJ said in a release.
When law enforcement executed a search warrant a month later and seized the doctor’s phone and laptop, they found at least one video and 209 photos of minors engaged in sexual activity.
“Rettenmaier admitted that he knowingly downloaded the images and video of CSAM from the internet and stored them on his personal devices,” said the DOJ.
The doctor is now scheduled for a sentencing hearing in August 2025, and the DOJ said he faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison for each count.
However, prosecutors agreed to recommend that Rettenmaier be sentenced to no more than five years.
The DOJ noted that the doctor will also be required to pay a mandatory minimum of $3,000 restitution to each of the six victims named in this case, for a total of at least $18,000.
Rettenmaier is currently free on a $600,000 bond, according to the DOJ.
