The Very Professional Predator Lands On The Sex Offender Registry
Jaswinder Singh Cheema was born on October 20th, 1975. Residing in San Jose at the time of the sting, he worked a good-paying job as the marketing manager of a Silicon Valley technology company. He, however, was apparently not married, and that's where his trouble may have started.
Beginning on August 23rd, 2006, Cheema, using the screenname "xclusivelyinit," began chatting with a Perverted Justice decoy he believed to be a 13-year-old girl named Willow. Willow claimed that her father was 54 and her mother was 31 and that she had had a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old boyfriend, so age was no problem for her. Unfortunately, it wasn't a problem for him, either. His chat was both boring and strange. After asking her is she was a virgin, she replied that she was not and asked if he was. He emphatically replied "no" and said that he had "plenty of experience on hand." The decoy took a jab at the predator, saying, "I bet your hand." Cheema seemed to take offense, saying, "I could get a date easily," and "I'm not desperate." Sounds pretty desperate for a 30-year-old man. When the decoy said she was down for whatever, he said, "I would not pressure you... make you want me... tease you... I'm a good kisser and know how to move my hands and my tongue lol." He mentioned, "I like kissing... like soft sensual kissing" and repeatedly brought up getting in the jacuzzi with the decoy and caressing her. He agreed to bring her Mike's Hard Lemonade and found out the location of the house.
In the dead of night on August 26th, 2006, Jaswinder Cheema pulled his black Nissan into the garage of the Dateline NBC sting house in Petaluma, California. Clad in a striped blue and white shirt and jeans, Cheema casually strode into the backyard, complimenting the decoy by telling her, "Wow, you've got a nice place." As the decoy went behind the room divider to "change," Cheema tried to cut her off by putting his arms out for a hug. When she turned him down and he, apparently in disbelief, cried "Just a hug?" Chris proved that Petaluma had his best entrances by asking, "No hug for me?" as he came out to interview Cheema, telling him to have a seat. At first, Jaswinder Cheema said, "I think I know what this is. You're going to arrest me?" He claimed he wasn't here to have sex and that he thought the girl was 19. When Chris pointed out that she said she was 13 twice, he cried out "Wow. Really?" in a way so obviously fake it could match Michael Wilusz's "What? No way!" His next excuse was just as bad; he tried to claim he was home and really drunk, or, as Chris sarcastically put it, that he "didn't even notice she was 13." He lied to Chris like he did in his chat, saying he was 28 when he was really 30, and asked him to turn off the cameras. That's right; he admitted he had seen Dateline before. He repeatedly begged to be arrested, implying that he could explain his way out of the situation to the police. "Where do you want me to go to be arrested? I mean, do you think I would do something like that?" Pointing to his clothes, he said, "I'm very professional." This was one of two idiotic lines that earned him recognition as one of the dumbest predators in show history. The second came after he walked into the garage and was arrested by the Petaluma Police Department and Sonoma County Sheriff's Office.
After being taken to a temporary booking station in an airport, photographed, and being read his rights, he was brought in for questioning. He repeated his same stories and said, "You can talk to Chris... We talk about [To Catch A Predator] at work all the time." Then came that second line I mentioned. "Why am I being arrested? I mean, I haven't really done anything." The detectives had none of it, pointing out that the only reason he wasn't raping a minor was that they intervened. "So why am I still arrested, though? That part is over. Don't you think I should be let go?" "So you can go find another 13-year-old?" the detective snapped back, "I have a responsibility... to keep my community safe." Jaswinder Cheema paid his bond and was released.
He took a similar approach to many other predators. Because Petaluma is in the Silicon Valley, where the average yearly salary tops $100,000 owing to some of the world's largest technology companies, many hired expensive or even celebrity lawyers to drag out their cases in hopes of an acquittal, a dismissal of charges, or the charges being pled down to a misdemeanor. While Cheema hired an expensive lawyer, none of those things happened. As PJ founder Xavier Von Erck put it, "There's no magic that gets rid of guilt." Cheema's attorney routinely sat at Maurice Wolin's high-profile court appearances and tried to replicate his attorney's tactics. The case dragged into December 2010, when, apparently out of cash, patience, or a mix of both, Cheema pleaded guilty to attempted lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14, a felony. While he was one of the few Petaluma predators to avoid jail, he did gets three years on probation (which ended at the end of 2013) and lifetime registration as a sex offender.
Cheema, now 45, has not reoffended, as far as we know. His felony conviction and lifetime branding as a sex offender put his career in technology on hold, and, after his probation ended, he moved to Southern California. He must still have some money left, however, because he has two addresses: a primary address at 4379 Amanacer Drive in Riverside, California, and a secondary one at 10200 DeSoto Avenue in Chatsworth, just outside of Los Angeles. For now, the years of controversy sewn by the Petaluma sting have subsided and the town has moved on, just as Cheema has moved on from it. Whether he lies dormant forever, however, remains to be seen.
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