LAGUNA HILLS, CA — A Laguna Hills church is embroiled in a federal child pornography case against a former employee.
Court documents accuse the former employee, Jacob Melvin Hart, of giving two juvenile congregants computers equipped with software that allowed him to secretly record them in their bathrooms, The Orange County Register reported.
According to the report, the lawsuit alleges that members of Crossline Community Church, who employed Hart, were aware that Hart had been convicted in Oregon for a similar offense when he was hired in 2012 to manage the church’s audiovisual and computer technology operations.
The San Juan Capistrano man was arrested in June 2025 in South Florida at Miami International Airport, according to Local10 News.
Hart was apparently caught with child sexual abuse videos, with authorities claiming they found 33 illicit videos in a “hidden, password protected folder” of his iPhone showing girls as young as 10, according to the report.