Damages | EP 4 | Jenifer's Story

This podcast discusses sexual assault. Please take care while listening.

He wanted us to think he was cool. He wanted to be one of the kids. He wanted to fit in.

And it worked.

We were like, Oh, this guy is letting us get away with pretending we're in this club and getting credit for it.

That's awesome. Let's all do it. We're all president, let's go.

And we all thought it was super funny and it was just kind of like.

A running joke.

So the idea of that carrying on for other reasons is terrifying.

I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, Episode four Damages. In the summer of twenty twenty one, Jennifer texted our show's production team there was news about Spencer's parole. Jennifer was a car on location at work.

Well, you know, when I emailed Spence the other day, he said that he was having his parole hearing today. So I don't know. It's just really affected my whole nervous system. Knowing that I may find out today that he's getting out soon.

Oh my god.

And I'm not really prepared.

For that yet.

What went through your mind?

I feel like he was just put in prison, and now he's already getting out. It's hard because with him in there, I felt safer. With him coming out, not so much.

I'm sorry, Jack.

He got some time off of his sentence for good behavior. He's been a teacher's aid and I'm sure he's been leading Bible studies, and so he's already gotten several months knocked off of his sentence and he was in front of the parole board today. I don't know how it works, but I mean, what if he gets out tomorrow?

You know, do you know if anybody gets to write a letter to submit against the parole because I imagine the victim of the sexual assault must be made.

Aware that he's up for a parole, right well, I mean I think the victim has to be told when he gets released.

How were you.

Approaching parole or was it just something that you get to kind of kept at arm's length.

I kind of have been keeping it at arm's length. I just don't want to think about it. I just hate being this person on set. You know a couple of people are like, you're kind of quiet today, Jennifer, And you know, I don't want to be that mopey person.

I just I can't help it right now.

You know.

It's like when you get past heartache, you usually get to move on, and I just feel like I'm going to be starting.

Back over again for a little bit with him out and knowing that he's out, getting.

Past the heartache and starting over. It's something that Jennifer and the sexual assault victim had to do. Both described shame as a big hurdle, even when you know you aren't the guilty party. Jennifer would feel it when she was out in public.

People are looking at me and kind of, oh, that's her.

I've gotten a lot of those looks before.

Oh your husband was the one, Oh you're her.

The sexual assault victim had her anonymity that didn't protect her from shame. Just turning on the television after Spencer's arrat revealed how some community members viewed her.

You don't always know what the truth is.

I mean, someone can say something about somebody just to hurt their reputation, You don't know.

I would always want to know the history of this person, make him complain as well.

You know, what kind of history do they have? Could they provoke something like that?

Perhaps it's the reason the victim was fearful to come forward sooner. After Spencer Heron was arrested, the victim never heard from any school official. Not one person reached out to ask how she was doing. Even with Spencer behind bars, The victim had an uphill battle. Eventually, Jennifer would learn how he abused his role as a teacher and mentor and became a predator in the halls of Kill High School.

My name is Mike Rathie. I'm a lawyer in Atlanta and I help people.

Mike's a civil attorney. The sexual assaul victim's parents reached out to him because they wanted to pursue a case against Kill High School.

Most of our cases are people who are critically or seriously injured, and a small percentage of our cases areeople who, like this client, are victims of sexual assault in places like hospitals, apartment complexes, hotels, and schools.

Mike and one of his colleagues went to meet the victim and her parents at their home.

When we left my client's house, we started reading a text message log that had been given to the police, and there was a lot it was straight out of to catch a predator reading this chat history as a thirty something year old. I felt like I was Chris Hansen. I can see the manipulation. I can see the terms that are being used, the words that are being twisted, and so on. This is one of those cases that we left that house and said this is really fucked

As the sexual saw victim from Kel High School sought therapy and support for what happened to her, she began to fully grasp how she had been manipulated abused. She was angry, angry that Kell High School had never addressed it in a meaningful way. Mike Graevey spent a lot of time piecing together how it happened. It took him down a path of investigating Kell High School's after school clubs. The clubs were key to Spenser getting the victim alone without raising suspicion.

The way it's supposed to work is that students are supposed to get together and say we'd like to have a club. We're really interested in this. They would then go to a faculty member who probably has an interest in the club or at least helped spur that interest, and say, we really like you to be our leader for this club. Would you please do that. There has to be a certain number of signatures showing student involvement. Parents have to agree that if this club was created, then my.

Child would be allowed to participate in the club.

There's a budgeting component to it, and then there's administrator approval and the faculty advisor has to submit a plan of what is the goal the purpose of this plan, how will we execute it? Then the administration is supposed to formally approve or disapprove it.

Spencer had a history of sponsoring clubs, but some of them were fake.

My name is Julia and co Charin was my high school video productions teacher. I graduated from cal High School in twenty ten. I had him for my junior year and my senior year.

A lot of my.

Best friends had him freshman and sophomore too, so I always knew of him and I wanted to be in his class because it was a sought after program. It was a cool class to be a part of. Even when I didn't have him We would hang on his classroom and in the edit rooms.

Everyone who had him loved him.

He was the fun class, the fun teacher, the fund program. You got to be on the announcements, You got to work on these cool projects and like kind of roam the hallways and get some b roll while other kids are, you know, sitting in their classes learning about history or math.

It didn't feel like a class.

When I was a junior coach, heron started a fake club and we all put it on our It wasn't your resume, but we put you know, president of movie club. It was called movie club, you know, on the chair of movie club, which it was all a fake club. I think we took like a picture together for it, maybe in the yearbook.

I don't know.

I have to like it, but it wasn't really we never met. It was like it was really fake, Like it was pretend.

Why would a teacher make up a school club because he wanted us to think he was cool.

He wanted to be one of the kids. He wanted to fit in.

And it worked.

We were like, oh, this guy is letting us get away with pretending we're in this club and getting credit for it.

That's awesome, let's all do it.

We're all president, let's go, and we all thought it was super.

Funny and it was just kind of like a running joke.

So the idea of that carrying on for other reasons is terrifying.

In twenty fifteen, Spencer's sponsor a drone club. It began as a real club with real members and real meetings. Students even had fundraisers, but they would sell T shirts and videos so they could purchase a real drone. The problem was the club never went through official channels. I was never authorized.

If you have a club that doesn't go through this process, then you don't have that oversight and you don't have any of that guidance. You don't have the faculty member answering or reporting to their administration. Instead, you have the faculty member being able to do whatever it is that he wants whenever he wants to, and that's what happened here.

Eventually, the drone club died out and stopped having meetings, but Spencer continued to see one member of the club.

It continued to be a time and a place in a school where a teacher had full access to some place to take a student without the student having to leave school grounds because typically when you leave school grounds, you got to tell your parents where you're going. So this teacher has a perfect opportunity to lure a student into a place where they won't be caught and where they can do whatever he wants to do. It wasn't what she wanted to do, it was what he wanted to.

Do, and what he wanted to do was take advantage of Mike's client.

If you remember when you were a kid, every once in a while, an administrat would come in your classroom and watch your teacher. That's the administration taking active role to make sure that the teachers are doing their jobs, that they're effectively conveying their message to students, that they're disciplining students properly, that everything that's going on in the

Hell High School's administrators deny all knowledge of the drone club. There was nothing to oversee because it didn't officially exist as a school club.

He's flying a drone over the school at football games to get drone shots for the drone club, which isn't supposed to exist. So the skeptic in me says, the school did know there was a club, they just didn't give a crap. They knew there was a club, they actively participated in the club, they benefited from the club, they allowed the club, but they just didn't feel or didn't care enough to go through the process of properly authenticating it and then properly monitoring.

It and making sure that students weren't in danger.

Was it because Spencer Heron was a department head or trusted faculty member. No one knows. Mike points out that there's an administrator whose job it is to supervise after school clubs, the.

Vice principal, Student Stoddard.

It's her job to authenticate clubs and to monitor them. And when she's sitting in her office listening to the PA system and it says there's a drone club meeting today, or the drone club meeting is canceled, or if you'd like to join the drone club, isn't she saying, what the fuck is this drone club.

What is going on? We don't have a drone club.

Yeah, Mike gets heated.

Think about all those students that had text message conversations through the years with him. Think about all the parents who probably knew, Oh, Spencer Heron's so nice. He texts my daughter. He's talking to my daughter when they go to college. You think those text messages stayed completely appropriate.

When Mike mentioned this to me, I felt a pit in my stomach. Felt too similar to my conversation with Julia.

Him and I used to play Words with Friends together, which seemed super innocent.

But you would message on the sidebar things like you should come check out my new house.

There wasn't anything that I evertook as him hitting on me until further down the road when the allegations came out. As an eighteen year old somebody in their forties saying, come check out my new house. You're like, no, lame, but I don't care about your house like I want to go out. He was kind of just old and I had no interest in that.

But looking back, if I had.

Said, sure, I would love to see your house, there's no doubt in my mind that there was potentially an ulterior motive. There ry else would he want somebody eighteen years old to come check out his new house.

Her whole friend group from his class, well, all of them were contacted by Spencer after they graduated.

All of those girls, every single one of them.

He would message them, you know, let's get coffee, let's get drinks.

Her one friend, Nicole, had a boyfriend and he didn't like it at all.

Nicole's boyfriend actually told her to stop texting him because he was like, this is your high school teacher. Why is he asking you to go get drinks? You're eighteen. We were all like, oh, it's just Coach Aaron.

All that being said, Julia was completely blindsided. The day he was arrested, I was on.

The treadmill at the gym and his mugshot popped up on the TV in front of me, and I almost fell off of the treadmill, stopped breathing.

I had to stop the treadmill, and I was just like in shock. It was terrible.

And then my phone was like ding ding ding ding ding. You know, everyone from the class of twenty ten, all these group messages, Oh my god, did you see this about Coach Aron?

And everyone was in just such disbelief, you know, he would send these texts.

It just two people potentially trying to meet at None of my friends ever acted on it, so no one really knew. So we knew it got a little bit weird, but we weren't sure what to believe. Maybe some girl had just potentially taken it too far, you know, no one wanted to believe that he really did that.

I'm really pessimistic about what would have happened if my client reported this without the proof that she had, would people.

Have believed her?

Would they have said, she's just a slut, She's just somebody that went out and sought out her teacher and slept with him, which is what people said anyway on Facebook boards and messaging.

I mean, she had to deal with.

That victim blaming. There was plenty of it. The defendants the administrators in this case, argue that the victim's claims were barred by the doctrine of comparative negligence. It's a legal term that means assigned blame to two or more parties based on the degree of negligence each contributed to the incident. According to that logic, the student shared in the blame when the teacher sexually assaulted her.

When you have a teacher that treats you like an adult, makes you feel special, breaks a rule for you, and expects you to keep that in confidence, you're trusting each other with secrets. He has to take a risk, and to me, that was a small risk that he was taking by saying, I'll do something bad. If you're willing to let me do something bad, that's step one. Now I'm going to do something worse. Are you still okay with that? Now I'm going to do something really bad?

After Spencer was charged criminally, I left a lot of students and parents of kel High School wondering she was.

A developmental stage in her life where you are still growing and learning, and she was supposed to be able to trust him, and it's unfair for any of this to fall back on her.

She was only a girl.

She was manipulated, and he took advantage of a young girl who was vulnerable and believed in somebody that she was supposed to believe in. My parents were so thankful that, you know, it wasn't me, but they almost felt a little scared for themselves. It's like, you know, we trusted this man around our daughter. You know, that's scary.

And one is also scary is how little information was given to the community itself.

As far as I know, there hasn't been any investigative report accessible to the public. There hasn't been any disclosures made, there hasn't been anything.

It's almost like this just didn't happen.

And that's really really scary, because this certainly isn't the only time.

I was curious about why the victims sued three school administrators instead of the school itself.

So in Georgia, you can't sue the school. A weird rule we have. You can't sue the school board. I have to sue on behalf of my client administrator. So I have to sue people. I have to sue the supervisors or the authority in those positions. And I have to prove that those individual people did things wrong. We don't want to sue them, We want to sue the entity because it's the entity that's protecting them. On the legal side, this isn't a dispute about what happened in

Answer has been no.

Basically, the lost in court, but they are appealing.

Lawyers say this all the time about their cases. I'm proud to have represented so and so when lose draw I don't care. I'm just glad that she knows that someone will stick up for her, because that's part of the problem here.

In Georgia. To hold a.

Public servant, which includes teachers, responsible for something in their job capacity, you have to show that there was a rule, a capital R rule, and a capital R rule is a rule that requires no discretion, thought or judgment. The public servant must follow it, and if they don't follow the rule, then they can be held accountable. And we were able to show that. We were able to show that there was a rule in terms of how these clubs must be authorized and how they must be monitored.

Here's the problem.

What the judge said was, even though the rule was violated, it's not a negligent violation of the rule. I am still trying to figure out exactly what that means. The way I interpret that is that the rule was violated, but it's not a big deal. So the administrators poorly performed, they didn't do what they were supposed to do, but it doesn't rise to a breach of their duties. I interpret that to mean they're the worst employees in the school, but they.

Still aren't going to get fired.

I guess you know you have that really poor performer in your office who barely gets by.

The court seem to agree with the school district's argument that because some of the sexual conduct occurred outside the school, they couldn't be held accountable.

We acknowledge the fact that there were physical acts done outside of school grounds, but every single instance where there was physical sexual conduct at school I believe is a separate instance of harm.

One thing I couldn't wrap my head around was how to calculate the damage.

The law in Georgia is that it's up to the impartial conscience of the jury. Basically, twelve people are going to sit around and.

Figure it out.

What do I think that the pain and suffering, the physical violation, the embarrassment for my client who still lives in the community. You know, those damages don't just stop. That's got to be devastating. Her feelings weren't manipulated, and her sense of reality and worth has drastically, drastically deteriorated. And I don't know how anyone could possibly blame her.

But Mike will only be able to ask the jury if the court grants their appeal. And, as it turns out, in an interesting twist, the defendants also appealed on the one point Mike's client prevailed.

They are fighting that violating a rule written in their own.

Policy and procedures and manuals. They're saying, we don't always have to follow those rules.

Imagine if you're a parent in cop County and you have the administration saying we have these rules, but we're going to go to the Supreme Court of Georgia and say we don't really have to follow them.

It can't be easy for parents. Just a few weeks before, we spoke with Mike Gravy, a teacher at another Cobb County high school, Osborne High School, was arrested for having sexual intercourse with a student in his office. That teacher is in jail. I wanted us to get together because I was just really curious, what were your thoughts after hearing all of that.

My biggest thing is if we don't educate people, students, teachers, administrators, if we don't educate them on what signs to look for, then it's going to keep happening over and over and over. There is so much trust put into teachers. Instead of sweeping it under the rug and acting like it didn't happen and just moving on, we need to somehow bring in that education into the schools and make people more aware of what happens and how it happens.

I think that a lot of people have preconceived notions about relationships between high school students and their teachers, and they make assumptions. People really don't think about what it's actually like. Your ex husband, Spencer, he's obviously well versed in sex and relationships, and this girl, she had no idea what she was doing.

Yeah, I think back to when I was in high school. You're at school, you're with someone that everybody is looking up to and admiring, and then all of a sudden, that person starts making you feel really good.

Meanwhile, she is in the halls of high school wanting to scream at the top of her alongs what she's experiencing.

She is so.

Alone in this because she can tell nobody.

It's so sad that this happens.

We all did research leading up to this interview, and there was one study published by the Department of Education that I think all of us were impacted by and I kind of want to read it here. It says that ten percent of school students will be victims of some form of teacher sexual misconduct that can range from sexual assault to inappropriate comments, exposure to pornography. Ten percent. J that's millions of kids. It's insane.

I don't think you can just hold one person responsible. I think it's got to be a big effort.

What did you think of the lawyer, Mike Rafie.

I understand that when it comes to lawsuits and all of that, it's very tough. I appreciate what he's doing because what happened here is so much bigger than people realize.

I was pretty taken it back that one of the school administrator's offenses was comparative negligence, meaning that this student was partially responsible.

For the administration. To use that term. Think about the victim hearing that and how that feels that she's supposed to take some of that responsibility on. That's not fair and I think that sends an awful message out to the community, to the victim, to everybody else. How dare they try to victim blame and victim blame a child.

Earlier in this episode of Betrayal, we heard about the possibility of Spencer being released on parole. Jennifer wrote to Spencer and asked him to let her know what happened at the parole hearing. A few weeks later, he emailed, I.

Have some disappointing news that I wanted to share with you. I recently received a letter from the parole board stating that my tentative parole month date has been rescinded. The decision was made quote due to the welfare of society. This was very disturbing and upsetting.

To say the least.

The kids are doing okay with the news. Thank god they are so strong. The parole Board does not have to tell anyone anything, and they certainly don't have to tell anyone why an inmate was denied.

Or delayed parole.

In the letter, he expressed frustration he had served sixty five percent of his time and that's what his lawyer, the judge and prosecutor agreed on, but he wasn't getting out and know the reason. Maybe the truth was too hard for him to consider. Turns out, the sexual assaul victim wrote a letter to the prole board and hand delivered it for self. She urged the board not to release Spencer, saying that it wouldn't be good for the

I don't even remember what the initial start of the conversation was, but then a comment was made about well you're beautiful something to that extent, and that's kind of where it started. Here's an attractive guy telling me I'm gritty or feeling like, oh my god, what's happening. But then at the same time, I didn't do anything to stop.

It, and the shocking behavior that she shares with Jennifer.

There was a very dominating side to him. I remember a couple of times where you know, he would kind of put his hands around my throat and push down.

If you'd like to reach out to the Betrayal team, email us at Betrayal Pod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal Pod at gmail dot com. Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group, in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show was executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason, hosted and produced by me Andrea Gunning, written and produced by Kerry Hartman, also produced by Ben Fetterman. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and