Rumors had been flying at Freedom High School in South Riding, Virginia that students were distributing nude pictures of each other on their cell phones. It's a phenomenon, known as "sexting," that's become increasingly worrisome to educators across the country, and Ting-Yi Oei, a 60-year-old assistant principal at the school, was tasked with checking it out.
The investigation was inconclusive, but led to a stunning aftermath: Oei himself was charged with possession of child pornography and related crimes -- charges that threatened to brand him a sex offender and land him in prison for up to seven years. Transferred from his school and isolated from colleagues, Oei spent $150,000 and a year of his life defending himself in a Kafkaesque legal nightmare triggered by a determined county prosecutor and nurtured by a growing hysteria over technology-enabled child porn at America's schools.
"The heaviest burden is the [label] of 'child pornographer'," Oei says. "It just hangs so heavy around me. How you ever recover from that I don't know."
On Tuesday, Oei's legal nightmare ended when a Virginia judge threw out the case before it got to trial. But as the educator begins piecing his life back together, similar tragedies are unfolding across the country. Reacting to the phenomenon of underage "sexting," prosecutors in at least a dozen states have resorted to arresting or charging kids for possession of child pornography. In a recent case in Pennsylvania, six teens aged 14 to 17 were charged with creating, distributing and possessing child porn. And this week a judge in a separate case in Pennsylvania temporarily barred a prosecutor from charging three teens for taking photos of themselves in their bras and a towel.
A longtime career completely destroyed and his reputation ruined because of some asshole prosecutor. The principal is just as bad, as she refused to support Oei to save her own useless ass.
But it's par for the course in too many school districts.
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