Convicted sex offender rakes in thousands after suing conservative groups over robocalls

A man who was convicted of sexual assault on a child in 2006 has sued multiple conservative groups over the past two years over their texts and robocalls, claiming it's illegal to contact him since his phone number is on the National Do Not Call Registry.

The total of William J. Hunsaker Jr.'s suits amounted to $100,000 over two years.

Hunsaker Jr., a registered sex offender and registered Democrat, sued Turning Point USA for $1,500 in damages back in 2022 before he voluntarily dropped the lawsuit. It's not known if a settlement was reached. Speaking to Forbes, Hunsaker said he was greatly annoyed at fundraising groups blowing up his phone.

“It gets annoying, where your entire first page and even second page on your cell phone, all your text messages are a bunch of friggin’ political messages where they’re running people down and begging for money,” Hunsaker said.

Months later he filed two more similar lawsuits, one targeting the Denver Gazette for $9,000 in damages and another targeting Save America and two other Donald Trump fundraising groups for the same amount. According to Forbes, Save America ended up paying Hunsaker $3,900. Again, little information about the details of the lawsuit were provided.

Last year, Hunsaker filed seven lawsuits targeting 12 groups over alleged violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Among those he sued were the campaigns for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Harriet Hageman (R-WY) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY), along with the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and again, Save America, as well as others.

In each of these lawsuit, he asked for $10,500. He also sued Nikki Haley’s Stand for America PAC for $21,000 over two texts he claimed to have received, and sued one of her fundraising committees for an additional $10,500.

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Forbes reported, "While political calls are exempt from complying with the National Do Not Call registry, FCC rules prohibit autodialed or prerecorded calls and texts going to a mobile device without the called party’s prior express consent. Entities that illegally call numbers in the registry can be fined up to $50,000 per call. Meanwhile, recipients can sue the caller for $500 per each alleged violation, or $1,500 if they also claim the caller 'willfully or knowingly' violated the regulations."

A person looking through Trump’s filings with the Federal Election Commission discovered payments to Hunsaker and dug into his background and found that in 2003, when he was working as a personal attorney, he was charged with two counts of sexual assault on a child, two counts of sexual assault on a child with a pattern of abuse and two counts of conspiracy to commit sexual assault.

After failing to appear at a pre-trial court appearance, Hunsaker was found six months later in Costa Rica and extradited back to Colorado. He was acquitted of four charges in his first trial. At his second trial in 2006, he was convicted of one count each of sexual assault on a child and sexual assault with a pattern of abuse and was sentenced to 16 years-to-life. He was paroled in 2019 — the same year he added his number to the National Do Not Call registry.

According to Forbes, Hunsaker didn't think any of the groups he sued knew about his sexual offender status.

“I don't know if they would have said, ‘Well, we're not going to pay you because you’ve got a felony conviction for sexual assault 20 years ago,” Hunsaker said. “I guess they might have said that. It’s not relevant to the claim. They violated the law in my opinion. And so I filed a lawsuit against them.”

Hunsaker has met resistance to his suits. “We have not reached a settlement, nor do we plan to,” NRSC spokesperson Tate Mitchell told Forbes. “The NRSC does not settle Telephone Consumer Protection Act lawsuits.”