photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Tyrone Gipson Jr. appears Thursday, May 29, 2025, in Douglas County District Court.

The cellphone of a man charged in Douglas County with raping a 9-year-old contained explicit videos of the child and more than 175 internet searches related to pornography of grown men abusing children, according to the recently released arrest affidavit in the case.

The man, Tyrone Gipson Jr., 42, was arrested in Topeka on Feb. 21 on charges of rape and aggravated criminal sodomy for incidents that allegedly occurred in Lawrence between August and November 2024.

According to allegations in the sworn affidavit, which have not been proved in court, the child’s mother contacted police after the child told her of inappropriate nudity and behavior by Gipson. The mother said she reviewed images in Gipson’s work cellphone and found numerous videos of the child unclothed.

Lawrence police officers then told Gipson that he was the subject of an investigation, collected two cellphones from him and sent a request to the search engine Google to preserve Gipson’s account.

Gipson told police that he took the videos not for sexual reasons but to record a child’s bad behavior, according to the affidavit.

When an investigator spoke to the child, the girl described multiple incidents of being sexually abused by Gipson, including rape. Two days later, a detective began extracting content from Gipson’s two cellphones — a red one and a black one — and reviewing Gipson’s Google account.

One whole paragraph of the arrest affidavit is redacted immediately after the cellphones are mentioned, along with various words elsewhere in the document. According to a court order accompanying the affidavit, the redactions were made by the Douglas County District Attorney’s Office.

The detective described the red cellphone as containing 21 videos “of evidentiary value,” including images of the unclothed child in “various positions.” The last of the videos was allegedly recorded the night before the reported rape. The internet history on the phone contained 176 entries related to a specific type of child abuse that was “explicitly typed and searched by” Gipson, according to the affidavit.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Tyrone Gipson Jr. appears Thursday, May 29, 2025, with his attorney, Jessica Glendening, in Douglas County District Court.

Gipson is being held in the Douglas County Jail on a $250,000 bond. He was supposed to have a preliminary hearing on May 29, but that hearing was first delayed and then continued to July 14 at the request of his appointed attorney, Jessica Glendening, to allow for a discovery issue to be resolved.

At the May hearing, Glendening asked Judge Amy Hanley to reduce Gipson’s bond to $75,000, indicating that he had been incarcerated for four months and had lost his job. She told Hanley that he had a college degree, a supportive family and job prospects. She said his “criminal history is not recent.”

It’s unclear from available court records what convictions Glendening may have been referring to.

The state, represented by Senior Assistant District Attorney Ricardo Leal, opposed the bond request, and Hanley denied it, primarily based on Gipson’s not having a solid address that he could provide to the court.

Hanley also ordered, at the request of the parties, what’s known as a pre-plea PSI, or pre-sentence investigation. A PSI, which is confidential, is usually ordered after a trial or a plea to help the parties and the court understand the defendant’s criminal history for purposes of sentencing. Sometimes, as here, the PSI is ordered before a plea or trial to clarify a potential sentencing range, which could affect a defendant’s decision to negotiate a plea or go to trial.