A former Coronation Street director has been sentenced after being found guilty of four child sex offences.
Tim Dowd, who directed over 200 episodes of the ITV soap, attempted to groom what he thought was a 13-year-old girl during a police sting.
The 66-year-old asked the ‘girl’ for explicit images during an online chat that had been set up by police as part of an undercover investigation last year.
Dowd asked the undercover officer, who was pretending to be a girl named ‘Chantelle’, to engage in phone sex. He also asked whether she had ever had sex with an older man.
He was sentenced to a two-year community order this week. He will not serve prison time.
BBC News reports that Dowd was found guilty of three counts of attempting to incite a child to engage in sexual activity, and one count of attempting to engage in sexual communication with a child.
The director, who also worked on episodes of Emmerdale and Heartbeat, denied all charges against him claiming that he thought he was speaking to an adult.
Prosecutors told the court that the undercover officer repeatedly told Dowd that Chantelle was 13. The director had said that he “didn’t have a problem” with her age.
Dowd was sentenced to a two-year community order and a five-year sexual harm prevention order.
He was fired from his Coronation Street job following his arrest last year.
