Casey Anthony Prosecutor Jeff Ashton Another Ashley Madison Client

After Jacob Engels of the East Orlando Post revealed that Orange and Osceola County State Attorney Jeff Ashton appeared on the Ashley Madison dating website for people looking for an extramarital affair, Ashton lit up Twitter by hustling together a quick press conference Sunday to make a tearful public confession.

Jeff Ashton

"I hope the public will judge me on my 35 years of service and not a bad mistake," he told a roomful of reporters gathered at the Wyndham Orlando Resort.

Ashton, 58, who gained notoriety as the lead prosecutor in the Casey Anthony murder trial, said he "did something incredibly stupid," but never met anybody on the site. "It never went beyond curiosity," he said.

The state attorney is married and has six children.

He said during the press conference he used his personal computer, broke no laws and in spite of the embarrassment to himself and his family, has no intention of stepping down.

Engels reported that Ashton had two accounts. "The database revealed that both Jeff Ashton Ashley Madison accounts were accessed from IP address '66.193.236.254', Engels wrote.
"Research by our technical expert using publicly available Reverse DNS services has revealed that this IP address tracks back to 'host-204.ocnjcc.org' and the Ninth Judicial Circuit internal network. 

"In other words," said Engels, "it appears Jeff Ashton was using the cheating website on taxpayers' time, on a state-owned machine and computer network at the Ninth Judicial Circuit State Attorney’s Office."

Engels stops short of calling for Ashton's resignation. But he does ask, "Is this really the man who should be enforcing our laws and prosecuting criminals? It would seem he can't even uphold his marriage vows, so how can we trust him to operate properly within the elected office he holds?"

Hackers who stole sensitive customer information from the cheating site AshleyMadison.com appear to have posted a data dump, 9.7 gigabytes in size Tuesday to the dark web, using an Onion address accessible only through the Tor browser. 

The files include account details and log-ins for some 32 million users of the social networking site, touted as the premier site for married individuals seeking partners for affairs. Seven years worth of credit card and other payment transaction details are also part of the dump, going back to 2008. 

The data, which amounts to millions of payment transactions, includes names, street address, email address and amount paid, but not credit card numbers; instead it includes four digits for each transaction that may be the last four digits of the credit card or simply a transaction ID unique to each charge. AshleyMadison.com claimed to have nearly 40 million users at the time of the breach about a month ago, all apparently in the market for clandestine hookups.

State Attorney Ashton is up for reelection in 2016.