Finance Executive Accused of Drugging and Raping Teen in Midtown Hotel

A 54-year-old finance executive targeted a 14-year-old girl through her Instagram account, passed her off as his daughter on trips around the country, gave her drugs and raped her in New York City hotel rooms, prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office said Thursday.

Prosecutors said that the executive, Michael Olson, had texted multiple other girls and that its investigation would continue. The 17 charges against him thus far stem from the experience of a single victim, who prosecutors said was found last month in a Midtown Manhattan hotel room with Mr. Olson, overdosing on cocaine and ketamine.

A prosecutor, John Fuller, said that the drugs were given to the girl before and after Mr. Olson had sex with her. The overdose was not fatal.

“A search of an iPad that the defendant had with him that day revealed numerous other victims,” Mr. Fuller said at Mr. Olson’s arraignment on Thursday in New York State Supreme Court. “There were hundreds of screenshots of various Instagram accounts of young, Asian teenage girls that the defendant messaged.”

Mr. Fuller said that the defendant kept screenshots of the Instagram accounts of teenage girls on the iPad, and that he targeted children whose posts mentioned that they did not have money or that pictured them harming themselves.

A lawyer for Mr. Olson, Jeffrey Lichtman, declined to comment. The district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, called for any other victims to come forward.

The 17 charges against Mr. Olson include five counts of rape in the second degree, seven counts of patronizing a minor for prostitution and one count of facilitating a sex offense with a controlled substance. He will be held in jail as his case proceeds, and faces a maximum prison sentence of 44 years on the charges that have already been brought.

Prosecutors said that Mr. Olson originally found the 14-year-old when she posted on Instagram about clothes being too expensive, sending her a gift card and paying to spend time with her. He ended up paying her $700 a week for sex acts in hotel rooms and took her to Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Miami.

Mr. Olson told authorities that he was employed at Dwight Mortgage Trust, a financial firm in New York focused on real estate investment.

Experts said that the behavior of which Mr. Olson is accused is typical of sexual predators, who can more easily target their victims using social media.

“Predators seek out vulnerable victims,” said Jane Manning, a former sex crimes prosecutor with the Queens District Attorney’s office and the director of Women’s Equal Justice, a nonprofit that helps survivors of sexual assault.

“That is their standard operating procedure,” she said. “And digital technology has given them a whole new way to do it.”

Mr. Fuller said that the age of Mr. Olson’s targets was obvious from their profiles, which referred to their middle and high schools. He told his targets how much he would pay them to meet and have sex, and talked to them about their schools, and about taking vacation during school holidays.

The iPad also included nude pictures of minors and photos of girls performing sexual acts; Mr. Fuller said that Mr. Olson was expected to face further charges for those pictures.

Mr. Olson posted a $1 million bond after he was first arrested and charged last month and — despite being electronically monitored and on home confinement — continued to try to contact young girls, Mr. Fuller said.

The evidence in the case includes spreadsheets that prosecutors said Mr. Olson created that detailed the drugs he administered to children and the amount of money he paid them. On his phone, he had screenshots of the public-school calendar as well as Uber pickups from elementary and middle schools.

“It has to be the responsibility of society to keep our kids safe. It can’t be left to each individual parent to confront by themselves,” Ms. Manning said. “In the case of social media companies like Instagram, this generation of teenagers has been conditioned to surrender their privacy and to open up their inner lives to the world in ways that previous generations never imagined.”

An Instagram spokeswoman said in a statement that the company worked aggressively to fight child exploitation and supported law enforcement “in its efforts to arrest and prosecute the criminals behind it. We’re reaching out to local officials regarding this case.”