Former State Sen. Ray Holmberg outside Quentin Burdick US District Courthouse in Fargo (KFGO News file photo)
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — A longtime, powerful former North Dakota lawmaker, who is scheduled to be sentenced Wednesday for traveling to Europe with the intent to pay for sex with minors, exploited vulnerable boys and young men for decades, a federal prosecutor said last week in court documents.
The new details emerged as prosecutors outlined their reasons for the judge to impose a roughly three-year prison sentence and lifetime supervised release for former state senator Ray Holmberg, 81. He pleaded guilty last year to travel with the intent to engage in illicit sexual activity. He faces up to 30 years in prison, a $250,000 fine and lifetime supervised release.
The new court documents say Holmberg used his positions as a high school guidance counselor and state lawmaker to exploit vulnerable youth and young men for decades, and cite numerous messages the prosecutor said show some of his countless arrangements to pay for sex with young men while traveling, often while on state business trips.
Holmberg also manipulated a Canadian teenager, who later took his own life, into sending him sexually explicit images, and used an alias to email certain colleagues and friends about “his sexual interest in adolescent-age boys, among other things,” acting U.S. Attorney Jennifer Klemetsrud Puhl wrote.
Holmberg has not been charged with any new crimes. He has been jailed in Minnesota since about early November awaiting sentencing.
His attorney, Mark Friese, asked in a separate filing for a lighter sentence of time served plus an unspecified period of home detention, citing Holmberg’s age and multiple physical ailments. Friese wrote that Holmberg had already spent nearly a year under house arrest and would have served 145 days in custody as of Wednesday’s sentencing.
The case mainly focuses on Holmberg traveling to Prague at least 14 times from 2011 to 2021 where he visited an alleged brothel for commercial sex with adolescent, often homeless boys, prosecutors said.
In a plea agreement last year, Holmberg acknowledged that he had “repeatedly traveled from Grand Forks, North Dakota, to Prague, Czech Republic with a motivating purpose of engaging in commercial sex with adolescent-age individuals under the age of 18 years.”
In his court filing asking for a lighter sentence, Holmberg’s attorney wrote that while his client admits he violated federal law when he traveled to Prague with the intent to have commercial sex with a minor, the government failed to confirm any instance of him actually having sex for money with anyone under age 18.
Records previously obtained by The Associated Press show that Holmberg made dozens of trips throughout the U.S. and to other countries since 1999. Destinations included cities in more than 30 states as well as Canada, Puerto Rico and Norway. At least one of Holmberg’s trips to Prague was state-funded through a teacher exchange program, the prosecutor wrote.
“Holmberg’s offending conduct over the course of decades … can only be described as corruption,” Klemetsrud Puhl wrote. “That is, he used his position to serve his own ends.”
In one example the prosecutor described, Holmberg brought a University of North Dakota student to the university president’s suite for hockey games, representing “a right to access some of the most influential people in the state” — including the UND president, governor and congressmembers — with the expectation of him engaging in sexual activity with Holmberg, she wrote.
In 2012 and 2013, Holmberg posed as a teenage boy in an online chatroom for teens who had undergone circumcision, and misled and manipulated a 16-year-old Canadian boy into sending him explicit photos, the new filing said.
The full story of the relationship is unclear because the boy later took his own life in 2021, “but no doubt Holmberg’s conduct contributed to his struggles,” Klemetsrud Puhl said.
Former U.S. Attorney Tim Purdon said the acts described in the prosecutor’s filing paints a picture for the judge of Holmberg’s overall character.
“What we see here is a defendant who has a decades-long track record of identifying extremely vulnerable young men, grooming them and eventually using them for sex,” Purdon said.
He said the filing raises the question of who in Holmberg’s circle were aware of his behavior and “approved of it or countenanced it by their silence.” Investigators know who those people are, Purdon said.
Holmberg served in the North Dakota Senate from 1976 to 2022. He resigned in the wake of The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead reporting on a number of text messages he exchanged with a man in jail in connection with child sexual abuse material.
Holmberg chaired the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee for many years. He also had stints leading a panel that handles the Legislature’s interim business between biennial sessions, a position that let him approve his own travel.
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