A former MTV reality show contestant has been sentenced to 30 months in prison after attempting to meet a child for sexual purposes in Lake County, Illinois, and subsequently fleeing from law enforcement.
The Lake & McHenry County Scanner reports that Connor N. Smith, 34, who appeared on MTV’s “Are You the One?” in 2015, was arrested in March 2024 in Clearwater, Florida, on a warrant issued more than a year earlier. According to Lake County Sheriff’s Office records, Smith had been communicating online with an undercover detective posing as a girl under 15 years old.
Prosecutors alleged that Smith engaged in a deeply troubling pattern of behavior, including sending sexually explicit images and videos of himself and arranging a meeting for a sexual encounter. On February 9, 2023, Smith drove to meet the purported minor. When detectives moved to arrest him, he escaped in his pickup truck, driving at high speed and disregarding stop signs, which prompted a nationwide arrest warrant with a $1 million bond.
The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office eventually arrested Smith on March 28, 2024. A Lake County judge described him as “inherently dangerous” and ordered him held in custody. As part of a negotiated plea deal with the Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office on October 30, Smith pleaded guilty to one count of traveling to meet a minor, a Class 3 felony, with the remaining charges being dismissed.
This was not Smith’s first encounter with law enforcement. Fox News reports that in December 2021, he was arrested on charges of sexually assaulting and kidnapping a 16-year-old girl in northwest Indiana after meeting her on a dating app, though those charges were later dismissed.
The current case was investigated through a collaboration between the Lake County Sheriff’s Office Criminal Investigations Division and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS).
Smith was sentenced to 30 months in the Illinois Department of Corrections, with 190 days of credit for time served. He is projected to be paroled from Taylorville Correctional Center in June.
