NEW YORK (AP) – An Us Weekly gossip writer has been arrested on a charge that he tried to seduce an FBI agent posing on the Internet as a 13-year-old girl.

Timothy McDarrah, editor of the “Hot Stuff” column, responded in June to a posting on the craigslist.com Web site offering introductions to the “freshest, youngest” girls in New York, an FBI affidavit said. The gossip writer told an undercover FBI agent, who had posted the advertisement to lure pedophiles, that he would pay $200 for sex with a 13-year-old girl, the affidavit said.

But McDarrah failed to show up for a meeting, and the FBI agent began sending instant messages in his guise as a 13-year-old girl. McDarrah offered to buy the agent clothes, compact discs and an iPod in exchange for a variety of sexual favors, the agent wrote in the complaint.

On Wednesday, the agent wrote, McDarrah e-mailed that he was waiting at a building the agent had described as the 13-year-old girl’s address. FBI agents went there and arrested McDarrah.

who is charged with one count of using the Internet to entice a minor into sex, which carries a five-year minimum sentence.

McDarrah was arraigned in Manhattan federal court on $50,000 bond and was barred from using the Internet or having unsupervised contact with children. He did not enter a plea.

Us Weekly suspended McDarrah without pay, a magazine spokesman said.