NEW YORK — A Harvard-educated former managing director of Citigroup Inc. who blamed autism for his actions was sentenced Tuesday to 30 years in prison for sex crimes that prosecutors say occurred over a 10-year period.

Edward Gene Smith, 50, was sentenced in Manhattan federal court by Judge Paul A. Engelmayer after he pleaded guilty to sex crimes, receipt of child pornography and obstruction of justice.

His attorneys wrote in a filing before the judge that autism spectrum disorder was the “primary driver” of his crimes.

The lawyers said Smith has been “devastated to learn that his understanding of his relationships with the women he considered his girlfriends was flawed and that they experienced their encounters with him as non-consensual sexual abuse and even rape.”

But prosecutors, who sought a 30-year sentence, wrote that Smith’s “alleged autism” was “inflammatory nonsense.”

“It is an offensive slur on those in the autism community. And it is completely irreconcilable with what the defendant did and how he did it,” they said.

Prosecutors said that in pleading guilty, Smith admitted to drugging one woman with the intent to rape her and to inducing another woman to travel to New York, where he drugged and sexually assaulted her.

Smith “committed these heinous crimes by hiding behind a facade as a well-educated bank executive, using his outward appearance to attract victims and evade detection,” prosecutors said.

They said he also obtained and maintained tens of thousands of files of “horrifying” child sexual abuse material depicting young children and even babies.

Smith used promises of financial security to lure young women from foreign countries or distant U.S. states who were vulnerable and in need of income to his residence in New York’s Central Park, where he used drugs to incapacitate them before raping and sexually abusing them, prosecutors said.

U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement that Smith carried out his crimes from 2015 to 2024, subjecting numerous women to attacks in which he “tortured and punished his victims, and surreptitiously photographed them while they were naked and unconscious.”

Smith, who worked at Citigroup Inc. from 2021 until his arrest in 2024, said in a letter to the judge that it was “obvious to everyone that I have fallen from the pinnacle of success to the abyss of misery and disgrace.”

However, he said he should be seen as someone who “has long put his mistakes behind him” and reconnected with his loving family.

“The man I used to be embarrasses me. I never want to be that again,” he wrote.

Prosecutors also noted that he knew of the harm he inflicted on women because he had written in the Harvard Crimson in 1998, a year after graduating from college, that “there is something particularly traumatic about being raped by someone the victim knows and even likes or trusts. The right to say no to sex is a human right, a basic right of control over one’s body.”

In a statement, Citigroup said: “We took action to terminate Mr. Smith immediately upon learning of authorities’ initial investigation, long before allegations of this depraved behavior came to light. We cooperated with authorities as they sought justice for the victims of these heinous crimes.”