COLUMBUS (OH)
WSYX-TV, ABC-6 [Columbus OH]
October 9, 2026
By Brea Spencer
A 49-year-old man is facing multiple felony charges after investigators say he used social media to pursue a sexual relationship with a teenage girl and then tried to hide the evidence.
Scott Hartman, a former Catholic Foundation executive, was indicted Thursday on three counts of pandering sexually oriented material of a minor, disseminating material harmful to a juvenile, tampering with evidence and grooming.
He will be arraigned in Franklin County Common Pleas Court on Oct. 13.
Hartman was arrested last week by the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force after investigators executed a search warrant at his home.
The investigation began in April after a teenage victim reported to school counselors that she had been involved in an online relationship with Hartman, according to the sheriff’s office.
Court documents say Hartman communicated with the girl through Instagram and TikTok from approximately November 2025 through April 2026, when she was 14 and 15 years old. Investigators say Hartman initiated contact and knew she was a juvenile and a freshman in high school and made the relationship “kind of like a hush thing,” according to court documents.
Detectives said the relationship included sexually explicit video calls and the exchange of sexually explicit photographs and videos. Hartman allegedly maintained an album on his cellphone with the girl’s name as the album title and encouraged her to include her face in photographs she sent him.
Investigators also say Hartman attempted to arrange two meetings with the girl for sex.
“I think he wanted to make an arrangement that was more on his terms,” Detective Joe Smith, who is part of the Internet Crimes Against Children task force, said. “One was for him to travel to where she’s at. He was a little apprehensive to do that, hopefully because of what he’s seeing in the news from the work that we are doing here in the ICAC, and the things that are that are popular around the country with people getting caught for being a child predator.”
“We believe that he tried to get a hotel or did get a hotel, but obviously because of her age, she had an inability to travel down to meet him,” Smith said.
The sheriff’s office said one or more of Hartman’s alleged social media accounts were shut down and reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Investigators later extracted data from a cellphone and identified more than 100 pertinent items, including sexually explicit material and screenshots of conversations with an individual saved as “Daddy.” Records from Meta, Google and Verizon also connected the relevant social media accounts, email addresses and phone number to Hartman, according to court documents.
Hartman also allegedly tried to have the girl delete evidence and conceal her age, according to the sheriff’s office.