Long shot U.S. Senate candidate Alvin Greene has been indicted on a felony charge of showing pornography to a South Carolina college student.
Court records show that a grand jury in Richland County handed down the indictment Friday for disseminating, procuring or promoting obscenity. The Democratic nominee was also indicted on a misdemeanor charge of communicating obscene materials to a person without consent.
Greene was arrested in November after authorities say he approached a student in a University of South Carolina computer lab, showed her obscene photos online, then talked about going to her dorm room.
Greene has not entered a plea and has refused to talk about the accusations in interviews.
He faces Republican U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint in the fall.
Greene, as NPR political editor Ken Rudin reported in June, is a 32-year-old unemployed Army veteran who defeated former state legislator Vic Rawl in the Democratic primary with about 59 percent of the vote. Though Greene did no campaigning and had no staff, South Carolina political observers say he may have won in large part because the candidates were listed alphabetically and his name was placed above Rawls in the low-interest contest.
Since South Carolina's June primary, Greene has given a series of awkward interviews to reporters clamoring for more information on the unemployed man, who lives in Manning, S.C., with his ailing father. In one interview, he suggested that the state's economy could be improved by making and selling action figures depicting him in his uniform.
Last month, Greene gave his first public speech, a 6 1/2-minute recitation of his previous comments and commitment to jobs and education. He says he has raised less than $1,000. DeMint has raised more than $3 million.
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