Sheriff Holding Charles Johnson Is Under Indictment for Witness Retaliation, Sexual Harassment, and Aggravated Perjury

A Texas sheriff whose jail is holding Clearview AI co-founder and whistleblower Charles Johnson is himself under felony indictment for sexual harassment, witness retaliation, and aggravated perjury, raising new questions about law enforcement integrity in a case already shot through with concerns over surveillance, civil liberties, and official abuse.

Johnson County Sheriff Adam King was arrested by his own deputies in August and booked into his own jail after a Texas Rangers investigation accused him of harassing multiple female employees and threatening staff who reported him. According to Fox 4 Dallas, a grand jury has now charged King with a third count of aggravated perjury on top of two felony retaliation counts and one sexual harassment charge, alleging he lied under oath to a grand jury about his conduct.

King pleaded not guilty at his arraignment; a judge set trial for Aug. 3, 2026, and ruled he can return to work under tight restrictions while the case proceeds.​

Under that order, King may only be in his office three days a week, between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., must enter and exit through a private entrance, and is barred from contacting seven witnesses, most of them sheriff’s office employees and alleged victims. Court records cited by Fox 4 say King is accused of repeatedly commenting on female subordinates’ weight, appearance, and clothing, suggesting they should wear makeup, offering perks to married women if they would spend time with him, and making explicit sexual remarks—including telling one woman that if she kept losing weight he would “do ungodly things to her” and boasting about what he used to “do to women wearing white pants.”

King also allegedly engaged in persistent leering and staring at female subordinates, such as silently fixating on one employee’s feet after telling her to “back up” so he could look at them, hosting weekly all-female teatime gatherings where he made crude remarks like “Don’t tell people/your husbands, sheriff puts his cream in your tea,” providing married women with perks including lunches, jewelry, and special office access, and holding one-on-one closed-door meetings with women that sometimes lasted for hours.

During a “tea-time” gathering with female staff, King allegedly said, “Don’t tell people/your husbands, [the] sheriff puts his cream in your tea,” and later allegedly threatened women who reported him, including warning one he would have her arrested.​

King’s embattled department is the same Johnson County Sheriff’s Office that took custody of Charles Johnson, who co-founded Clearview AI, the facial-recognition firm now at the center of a high-stakes legal and ethical war over mass biometric surveillance. Recent updates on X confirm that Johnson is back in prison, with reports stating he ‘has been jailed for 18 days as of today’ in the facility run by the indicted sheriff.

As detailed in the Substack report “Going Clearview: Inside Charles Johnson’s Legal Battle with His Former Company,” Johnson helped launch Clearview in 2017 alongside Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, then later sued them in federal court in New York in Johnson v. Clearview AI, et al. over his ownership stake and his ouster from the company.

The piece notes that Johnson has repeatedly warned about Clearview’s alleged “extractive and invasive” business model and opposed providing its facial-recognition tools to foreign governments for targeting civilians, describing the firm as a “criminal enterprise” he no longer wants to be associated with.

The same article recounts how Johnson told Judge Katherine Polk Failla that he had been contacted by federal authorities regarding Clearview, and that he is under court pressure to stop publicly talking about the case or posting about it on social media. A previous update from Johnson’s own Substack describes his ongoing professional and legal battles and frames his dispute with Clearview as part of a broader fight over the weaponization of AI surveillance against ordinary citizens.

The fact that a key figure in these surveillance and corruption scandals is now detained in a jail overseen by an indicted sheriff—charged with perjury and retaliating against whistleblowers—underscores the troubling overlap of government authority, police misconduct, and advanced surveillance tech.

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