A year-long federal probe into prostitution rings allegedly revealed that the prosecutor, 63-year-old Stuart Dunnings III, solicited prostitutes from websites and paid a woman who asked him to help her get custody of her child. Dunning paid the woman $200 every other week for a year for sex. It’s Dunnings’s alleged payments to that woman that are the basis of a pandering charge that exposes him to the risk of prison time; the other counts against Dunnings are misdemeanors.
With an annual salary of more than $132,000, Dunnings was the highest paid elected official in the Michigan county where he worked. Ironically, he once headed up a campaign to crack down on prostitution himself.