A Florida high school student is accused of running a prostitution ring that involved selling underage girls for money and alcohol, authorities said. Alexa Nicole De Armas, a 17-year-old at Sarasota High School, was arrested Friday and faces a felony charge of human trafficking of a person younger than 18, theSarasota Herald-Tribune first reported. A 21-year-old man — identified as John Michael Mosher — was also arrested Friday for allegedly paying $40 and a bottle of liquor in exchange for sex with a 15-year-old, according to the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office. A third person is expected to be charged Tuesday.
Investigators learned about the ring when four students at nearby Venice High School told administrators in October about it, according to the Herald-Tribune. De Armas allegedly set up Mosher to have sex with the juvenile at a community pool, police said in a report. "[The underage girl] stated she told Mosher she did not want to have sexual intercourse with him to which he disregarded and forcefully held her against the wall of the pool shed building, restricting her movement and ability to flee," the report said. Authorities say De Armas and an accomplice had set up at least two other prostitution encounters using Facebook. The ring included other Sarasota County schools as well, police said.
SARASOTA POLICE DEPARTMENT
John Mosher, 21, was arrested in Florida in connection with a high school prostitution ring.
“A billion husbands are about to be replaced.” That is the tag line of a brand of wildly effective vibrators in Chuck Palahniuk’s latest novel, “Beautiful You.” After the release of these innovative pleasure products, female characters start to make stereotypical battle-of-the-sexes proclamations like, “Men are obsolete!” and “Anything a man can do to me, I can do better!” and “This hunk of plastic is more of a man than you’ll ever be!” Women line up for miles and camp out overnight outside “Beautiful You” stores, hoping to get the latest toe-curling product before it sells out. Everywhere, fashionable, metropolitan “Sex and the City” types stomp around town in their stilettos, boldly carrying a bag bearing the brand’s logo, white curlicue lettering on a pink background, the new symbol of female empowerment. It’s the ultimate horror story for wounded little man-boys everywhere.
But then things take a darker turn: Women begin to drop out of public life entirely, locking themselves in their rooms, diddling away the hours. Their voices become sore from endless yelps of pleasure, their eyes sunken from lost sleep and their bodies weak and emaciated from skipped meals. “Missing” posters are pasted around town, as scores of women — mothers, sisters, daughters — disappear from their homes, driven mad by previously unknown pleasure. In a characteristically Palahniuk gotcha, it turns out that Beautiful You products are actually designed to control women’s consumer decisions.
This is what all of Palahniuk’s novels have been building up to, haven’t they? After all of the tales of disaffected men with mommy issues, here we have arrived at the ultimate expression of male disenfranchisement in our supposedly post-feminist age: men being replaced by vibrators.
Palahniuk takes great joy in writing about this fantastical post-apocalyptic world in which women’s sexual liberation is ultimately disempowering. Witness, for example, that the world’s foremost feminist organization is “on the brink of nonexistence.” He writes: “For the first time in its history the National Organization of Women was canceling its annual conference due to lack of participants. Six weeks ago the roster had been almost filled, but in the days since Beautiful You had launched, all of the delegates had canceled their plans to attend. Some cited more personal interests they wanted to pursue. The rest claimed to be exploring alternative avenues to self-fulfillment.” This fantastical allegory is awfully reminiscent of a favorite insult of male, anti-feminist trolls: You just haven’t been fucked right! If you just got a good lay, all that angry activism would disappear!
Technology has made cheating on your spouse, or catching a cheater, easier than ever. How digital tools are aiding the unfaithful and the untrusting—and may be mending some broken marriages.
Jay’s wife, Ann, was supposed to be out of town on business. It was a Tuesday evening in August 2013, and Jay, a 36-year-old IT manager, was at home in Indiana with their 5-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son when he made a jarring discovery. Their daughter had misplaced her iPad, so Jay used the app Find My iPhone to search for it. The app found the missing tablet right away, but it also located all the other devices on the family’s plan. What was Ann’s phone doing at a hotel five miles from their home?
His suspicions raised, Jay, who knew Ann’s passwords, read through her e-mails and Facebook messages. (Like others in this story, Jay asked that his and Ann’s names be changed.) He didn’t find anything incriminating, but neither could he imagine a good reason for Ann to be at that hotel. So Jay started using Find My iPhone for an altogether different purpose: to monitor his wife’s whereabouts.
Two nights later, when Ann said she was working late, Jay tracked her phone to the same spot. This time, he drove to the hotel, called her down to the parking lot, and demanded to know what was going on. Ann told him she was there posing for boudoir photos, with which she planned to surprise him for his upcoming birthday. She said the photographer was up in the room waiting for her.
Jay wanted to believe Ann. They’d been married for 12 years, and she had never given him cause to distrust her. So instead of demanding to meet the photographer or storming up to the room, Jay got in his car and drove home.
Still, something gnawed at him. According to Ann’s e-mails, the boudoir photo shoot had indeed taken place—but on the previous day, Wednesday. So her being at the hotel on Tuesday and again on Thursday didn’t make sense. Unless …
In an earlier era, a suspicious husband like Jay might have rifled through Ann’s pockets or hired a private investigator. But having stumbled upon Find My iPhone’s utility as a surveillance tool, Jay wondered what other apps might help him keep tabs on his wife. He didn’t have to look far. Spouses now have easy access to an array of sophisticated spy software that would give Edward Snowden night sweats: programs that record every keystroke; that compile detailed logs of our calls, texts, and video chats; that track a phone’s location in real time; that recover deleted messages from all manner of devices (without having to touch said devices); that turn phones into wiretapping equipment; and on and on.
Jay spent a few days researching surveillance tools before buying a program called Dr. Fone, which enabled him to remotely recover text messages from Ann’s phone. Late one night, he downloaded her texts onto his work laptop. He spent the next day reading through them at the office. Turns out, his wife had become involved with a co-worker. There were thousands of text messages between them, many X‑rated—an excruciatingly detailed record of Ann’s betrayal laid out on Jay’s computer screen. “I could literally watch her affair progress,” Jay told me, “and that in itself was painful.”
One might assume that the proliferation of such spyware would have a chilling effect on extramarital activities. Aspiring cheaters, however, need not despair: software developers are also rolling out ever stealthier technology to help people conceal their affairs. Married folk who enjoy a little side action can choose from such specialized tools as Vaulty Stocks, which hides photos and videos inside a virtual vault within one’s phone that’s disguised to look like a stock-market app, and Nosy Trap, which displays a fake iPhone home screen and takes a picture of anyone who tries to snoop on the phone. CATE (the Call and Text Eraser) hides texts and calls from certain contacts and boasts tricky features such as the ability to “quick clean” incriminating evidence by shaking your smartphone. CoverMe does much of the above, plus offers “military-grade encrypted phone calls.” And in the event of an emergency, there’s the nuclear option: apps that let users remotely wipe a phone completely clean, removing all traces of infidelity.
But every new app that promises to make playing around safer and easier just increases the appetite for a cleverer way to expose such deception. Some products even court both sides: a partner at CATE walked me through how a wife could install the app on her husband’s phone to create a secret record of calls and texts to be perused at her leisure. Which may be great from a market-demand standpoint, but is probably not so healthy for the broader culture, as an accelerating spiral of paranoia drives an arms race of infidelity-themed weapons aimed straight at the consumer’s heart.
Every tech trend has its early adopters. Justin, a 30-year-old computer programmer from Ohio, is at the vanguard of this one.
Justin first discovered CATE on the September 21, 2012, episode of Shark Tank, ABC’s venture-capital reality show. The Call and Text Eraser, pitched specifically as a “cheating app,” won $70,000 in seed money on the program. Justin knew he had to have it.
His girlfriend at the time—we’ll call her Scarlett—was “the jealous type,” forever poking through his smartphone and computer. Not that he could blame her, given that she’d already busted him once for having sex with another woman. “It took a lot of talking and a lot of promising that it wouldn’t happen again,” he told me over e-mail. (I found Justin through a user review of CATE.) “So her wanting to check up on me was understandable,” he allowed. “But at the same time, it was my business and if I wanted to share I would have.”
CATE is just one of many tools Justin uses to, as he puts it, “stay one step ahead.” His go-to method for exchanging explicit photos is Snapchat, the popular app that causes pics and videos to self-destruct seconds after they are received. (Of course, as savvy users know, expired “snaps” aren’t really deleted, but merely hidden in the bowels of the recipient’s phone, so Justin periodically goes in and permanently scrubs them.) And for visuals so appealing that he cannot bear to see them vanish into the ether, he has Gallery Lock, which secretes pics and videos inside a private “gallery” within his phone.
Justin wound up cheating on Scarlett “several more times” before they finally broke up—a pattern he’s repeated with other girlfriends. Oh, sure, he enjoys the social and domestic comforts of a relationship (“It’s always nice to have someone to call your girl”). He understands the suffering that infidelity can cause (“I have been cheated on so I know how much it hurts”). He even feels guilty about playing around. But for him, the adrenaline kick is irresistible. “Not to mention,” he adds, “no woman is the same [and] there is always going to be someone out there who can do something sexually that you have never tried.” Then, of course, there’s “the thrill of never knowing if you are going to get caught.”
All of which makes it more than a little troubling that, while laboring to keep one semiserious girlfriend after another in the dark with privacy-enhancing apps, Justin has been equally aggressive about using spy apps to keep a virtual eye on said girlfriends.
Therapists say they’re seeing more spouses casually tracking each other, and lawyers are starting to recommend digital-privacy clauses for prenup and postnup agreements.
Justin has tried it all: keystroke loggers, phone trackers, software enabling him to “see text messages, pictures, and all the juicy stuff … even the folder to where your deleted stuff would go.” He figures he’s tried nearly every spy and cheater app on the market, and estimates that since 2007, he has “kept tabs,” serially, on at least half a dozen girlfriends. “The monitoring is really just for my peace of mind,” he says. Plus, if he catches a girlfriend straying, “it kind of balances it out and makes it fair.” That way, he explains, if she ever busts him, “I have proof she was cheating so therefore she would have no reason to be mad.”
Not that Justin is immune to the occasional flash of jealousy. More than once, he has gone out to confront a girlfriend whose phone revealed her to be somewhere other than where she’d claimed to be. One relationship ended with particularly dramatic flair: “The phone went to the location off of a country road in the middle of nowhere and there she was having sex in the backseat of the car with another man.” A fistfight ensued (with the guy, not the girlfriend), followed later by “breakup sex” (vice versa). One year on, Justin says, “I still don’t believe that she has figured out how I found out.”
Justin knows that many folks may find his playing both sides of the cheating-apps divide “twisted.” But, he reasons, “I am doing it for my safety to make sure I don’t get hurt. So doesn’t that make it right??”
Right or wrong, cheating apps tap into a potentially lucrative market: While the national infidelity rate is hard to pin down (because, well, people lie), reputable research puts the proportion of unfaithful spouses at about 15 percent of women and 20 percent of men—with the gender gap closing fast. And while the roots of infidelity remain more or less constant (the desire for novelty, attention, affirmation, a lover with tighter glutes … ), technology is radically altering how we enter into, conduct, and even define it. (The affairs in this piece all involved old-school, off-line sex, but there is a growing body of research on the devastation wrought by the proliferation of online-only betrayal.) Researchers regard the Internet as fertile ground for female infidelity in particular. “Men tend to cheat for physical reasons and women for emotional reasons,” says Katherine Hertlein, who studies the impact of technology on relationships as the director of the Marriage and Therapy Program at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. “The Internet facilitates a lot of emotional disclosure and connections with someone else.”
At the same time, privacy has become a rare commodity. Forget the National Security Agency and Russian mobsters: in a recent survey conducted in the United Kingdom, 62 percent of men in relationships admitted to poking around in a current or ex-partner’s mobile phone. (Interestingly, among women, the proportion was only 34 percent. So much for the stereotype of straying guys versus prying gals.) On the flip side, according to the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, 14 percent of adults have taken steps to hide their online activity from a family member or romantic partner. Therapists say they’re seeing more spouses casually tracking each other as well as more clashes over online spying, and lawyers are starting to recommend digital-privacy clauses for prenup and postnup agreements. Such clauses aim to prevent spouses from using personal texts, e‑mails, or photos against each other should they wind up in divorce court.
Tech developers by and large didn’t set out looking to get involved. As is so often the case with infidelity, it just sort of happened. Take Find My iPhone. Apple did not create the app with suspicious lovers in mind, but users pretty quickly realized its potential. Dr. Fone is marketed primarily as a way to recover lost data. Likewise, messaging apps such as Snapchat have many more uses than concealing naughty talk or naked photos, but the apps are a hit with cheaters.
The multipurpose nature and off-label use of many tools make it difficult to gauge the size of this vast and varied market. The company mSpy offers one of the top-rated programs for monitoring smartphones and computers; 2 million subscribers pay between $20 and $70 a month for the ability to do everything from review browsing history to listen in on phone calls to track a device’s whereabouts. Some 40 percent of customers are parents looking to monitor their kids, according to Andrew Lobanoff, the head of sales at mSpy, who says the company does basic consumer research to see who its customers are and what features they want added. Another 10 to 15 percent are small businesses monitoring employees’ use of company devices (another growing trend). The remaining 45 to 50 percent? They could be up to anything.
Apps marketed specifically as tools for cheaters and jealous spouses for the most part aren’t seeing the download numbers of a heavy hitter like, say, Grindr, the hookup app for gay men (10 million downloads and more than 5 million monthly users). But plenty have piqued consumer interest: The private-texting-and-calling app CoverMe has more than 2 million users. TigerText, which (among other features) causes messages to self-destruct after a set amount of time, has been downloaded 3.5 million times since its introduction in February 2010. (It hit the market a couple of months after the Tiger Woods sexting scandal, though the company maintains that the app is not named for Woods.)
Once the marketplace identifies a revenue stream, of course, the water has been chummed and everyone rushes in for a taste. By now, new offerings are constantly popping up from purveyors large and small. Ashley Madison, the online-dating giant for married people (company slogan: “Life is short. Have an affair.”), has a mobile app that provides some 30 million members “on the go” access to its services. Last year, the company introduced an add-on app called BlackBook, which allows users to purchase disposable phone numbers with which to conduct their illicit business. Calls and texts are placed through the app much as they are through Skype, explains the company’s chief operating officer, Rizwan Jiwan. “One of the leading ways people get caught in affairs is by their cellphone bill,” he observes. But with the disposable numbers, all calls are routed through a user’s Ashley Madison account, which appears on his or her credit-card statements under a series of business aliases. “The phone number isn’t tied to you in any way.”
Both sides of the arms race have ego invested in not getting outgunned. Stressing Ashley Madison’s obsession with customer privacy, Jiwan boasts that the shift from computers to mobile devices makes it harder for members to get busted. “It’s much more difficult to get spyware on phones,” he told me. But mSpy’s Lobanoff pushed back: “All applications can be monitored. Let me make it clear for you. If you provide us what application you would like to track, within two weeks we can develop a feature to do that.” It all boils down to demand. For instance, he notes, after receiving some 300 calls from customers looking to monitor Snapchat, the company rolled out just such a feature.
Lobanoff admits that iPhones are tougher to monitor than phones from other brands, because Apple is strict about what runs on its operating system (although many Apple users “jailbreak” their devices, removing such limits). Which raises the question: Is an iPhone a good investment for cheaters worried about being monitored—or would it too tightly restrict their access to cheating apps? Such are the complexities of modern infidelity.
Of course, no app can remove all risk of getting caught. Technology can, in fact, generate a false sense of security that leads people to push limits or get sloppy. Justin has had several close calls, using CATE to conceal indiscreet texts and voicemails but forgetting to hide explicit photos. When a girlfriend found a naked picture of him that he’d failed to delete after sexting another woman, Justin had to think fast. “The way I talk my way out of it is that I say I was going to send it to her.” Then, of course, there is the peril of creeping obsolescence: after several months, regular upgrades to the operating system on Justin’s phone outpaced CATE’s, and more and more private messages began to slip through the cracks. (A scan of user reviews suggests this is a common problem.)
Virtual surveillance has its risks as well. Stumbling across an incriminating e‑mail your partner left open is one thing; premeditated spying can land you in court—or worse. Sometime in 2008 or 2009, a Minnesota man named Danny Lee Hormann, suspecting his wife of infidelity, installed a GPS tracker on her car and allegedly downloaded spyware onto her phone and the family computer. His now-ex-wife, Michele Mathias (who denied having an affair), began wondering how her husband always knew what she was up to. In March 2010, Mathias had a mechanic search her car. The tracker was found. Mathias called the police, and Hormann spent a month in jail on stalking charges. (It’s worth noting that a second conviction, specifically for illegally tracking her car, was overturned on appeal when the judge ruled that joint ownership gave Hormann the right to install the GPS tracker.)
Staying on the right side of the law is trickier than one might imagine. There are a few absolute no-nos. At the top of the list: never install software on a device that you do not own without first obtaining the user’s consent. Software sellers are careful to shift the legal burden onto consumers. On its site, mSpy warns that misuse of the software “may result in severe monetary and criminal penalties.” Similarly, SpyBubble, which offers cellphone-tracking software, reminds its customers of their duty to “notify users of the device that they are being monitored.” Even so, questions of ownership and privacy get messy between married partners, and the landscape remains in flux as courts struggle to apply old laws to new technology.
In 2010, a Texas man named Larry Bagley was acquitted of charges that he violated federal wiretapping laws by installing audio-recording devices around his house and keystroke-monitoring software on his then-wife’s computer. In his ruling, the district judge pointed to a split opinion among U.S. circuit courts as to whether the federal law applies to “interspousal wiretaps.” (The Fourth, Sixth, Eighth, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuit Courts said it does, he noted; the Second and Fifth said it doesn’t.) Similarly, in California, Virginia, Texas, Minnesota, and as of this summer New York, it is a misdemeanor to install a GPS tracker on someone’s vehicle without their consent. But when a vehicle is jointly owned, things get fuzzy.
“I always tell people two things: (1) do it legally, and (2) do it right,” says John Paul Lucich, a computer-forensics expert and the author of Cyber Lies, a do-it-yourself guide for spouses looking to become virtual sleuths. Lucich has worked his share of ugly divorces, and he stresses that even the most damning digital evidence of infidelity will prove worthless in court—and potentially land you in trouble—if improperly gathered. His blanket advice: Get a really good lawyer. Stat.
Such apps clearly have the potential to blow up relationships, but the question now may be whether they can be used to salvage them as well. Many of the betrayed partners I spoke with believe they can.
A couple of years ago, Ginger discovered that her husband, Tim, was having an affair with a woman he’d met through a nonprofit on whose board he sat. (As Ginger tells it, this was a classic case of a middle-aged man having his head turned by a much younger woman.) The affair lasted less than a year, but it took another eight months before Tim’s lover stopped sending him gifts and showing up in awkward places (even church!).
Ginger and Tim decided to tough it out—they’ve been married for 35 years and have two adult children—but that took some doing. For the first year and a half, certain things Tim did or said would trigger Ginger’s anxiety. He would announce that he was going to the store; Ginger would fire up her tracking software to ensure he did just that. Business travel called for even more elaborate reassurances. “When he was away, I would be like, ‘I want you to FaceTime the whole room—the bathroom, the closet; open the hallway door.’ ”
Ginger’s anxiety has dimmed, but not vanished. She still occasionally uses Find My iPhone to make sure Tim is, in fact, staying late at the office. “And we use FaceTime all the time. He knows that if I try to FaceTime him, he’d better answer right then or have a very, very good reason why he didn’t.”
Jay and Ann, of the boudoir photo shoot, also decided to try to repair their marriage. When he first confronted her with a record of her texts, Ann denied that the sex talk was ever more than fantasy. But when Jay scheduled a polygraph, she confessed to a full-blown, physical affair.
As hard as it has been for Jay, one year later he reports that tech tools are helping. Ann’s affair grew out of her sense of neglect, Jay told me: “She wasn’t getting the attention she wanted from me, so she found someone else to give it to her.” To strengthen their bond, Jay and Ann have started using Couple, a relationship app geared toward promoting intimacy by setting up a private line of communication for texts, pics, video clips, and, of course, updates on each person’s whereabouts. Every now and again, Jay sneaks a peek at Find My iPhone. He also has set his iPad to receive copies of Ann’s texts. “I don’t know if she realizes I’m doing that,” he told me. But in general, she understands his desire for extra oversight. “She’s like, ‘Whatever you want.’ ”
In fact, post-affair surveillance seems to be an increasingly popular counseling prescription. Even as marriage and family therapists take a dim view of unprovoked snooping, once the scent of infidelity is in the air, many become enthusiastically pro-snooping—initially to help uncover the truth about a partner’s behavior but then to help couples reconcile by reestablishing accountability and trust. The psychotherapist and syndicated columnist Barton Goldsmith says he often advocates virtual monitoring in the aftermath of an affair. Even if a spouse never exercises the option of checking up, having it makes him or her feel more secure. “It’s like a digital leash.”
And that can be a powerful deterrent, says Frank, whose wife of 37 years learned of his fondness for hookers last February, after he forgot to close an e‑mail exchange with an escort. “He had set up a Gmail account I had no idea he had,” Carol, his wife, told me. Frank tried to convince her that the e-mails were just spam, even after she pointed out that the exchange included his cell number and photos of him.
Frank agreed to marriage counseling and enrolled in a 12-step program for sexual addiction. Carol now tracks his phone and regularly checks messages on both his phone and his computer. Still, she told me sadly, “I don’t think that I’m ever going to get the whole story. I believe he thinks that if I know everything, the marriage will come to an end.”
For his part, Frank—who comes across as a gruff, traditional sort of guy, uneasy sharing his feelings even with his wife—calls Carol’s discovery of his betrayal “excruciating,” but he mostly seems angry at the oversexed culture that he feels landed him in this mess. He grumbles about how “the ease and the accessibility and the anonymity of the Internet” made it “entirely too easy” for him to feed his addiction.
Frank has clearly absorbed some of the language and lessons of therapy. “As well as it is a learned behavior to act out, it is a learned behavior not to,” he told me. He doesn’t much like his wife’s having total access to his phone, but he claims that his sole concern is for the privacy of others in his 12-step group, who text one another for support. Frank himself clearly feels the tug of his digital leash. “Now that she checks my phone and computer, I have a deterrent.”
Even as he calls virtual surveillance “a powerful tool,” though, Frank also declares it a limited one. No matter how clever the technology becomes, there will always be work-arounds. For someone looking to stray, “absolutely nothing is going to stop it,” says Frank, emphatically. “Nothing.”
Lauren Cooper was an English teacher at Wyoming Valley West High School in Plymouth, Pennsylvania. She seemed to have it all.
But instead of a classroom, the 32-year-old is currently serving 9 to 23 months at the Luzerne County Correctional Facility for having inappropriate relationships with four of her students.
“I’m glad I got caught,” she told ABC News’ “20/20” exclusively. “I went against what I know is right, and I did wrong. And there is no way to explain that away. I have no defense of myself. I was wrong, plain and simple.”
Her forbidden affairs began after she opened a dance studio in her town with her husband, Raphael Cooper. The new side-business was time-consuming and took a toll on their marriage.
“It turned into more of a business relationship than a marriage,” she said. “With us deteriorating in our marriage and having less and less of a relationship, I didn’t feel attractive. I didn’t feel wanted.”
“It was falling apart. It was coming apart. I wasn’t realizing it, possibly,” Raphael Cooper, 32, told “20/20.” “She was obviously not feeling loved.”
Needing to feel desired and accepted, Mrs. Cooper said she sought attention from an inappropriate source: an 18-year-old high school senior boy at her school.
Mrs. Cooper said the 18-year-old sent her text messages after getting her cell phone number from his sister in December 2013. Many students had her contact information because she directed several school plays, she said.
"He was very, very ... convincing, in terms of making me feel good about myself,” Mrs. Cooper recalled.
But the flirty chatter quickly turned physical, and she met the student in her car around the corner from his house and drove off. According to the senior, the couple had numerous sexual encounters.
“It wasn’t so much that I even needed a physical connection. It was just being able to interact with someone who made me feel valued and worthwhile,” Mrs. Cooper said. “As crazy as this might sound to some people, he’s very intelligent. I could have real conversations with him about real life issues.”
The six-day romance came to a halt when the boy’s parents found sexually explicit messages between the student and the teacher and immediate went to the high school.
“I wasn’t worried about him saying something. I was worried because I knew that it was wrong,” Cooper said. “I trusted him.”
Mrs. Cooper was arrested on Dec. 19, 2013 for her relationship with the senior and charged with having institutional sex. In Pennsylvania, it's illegal for a teacher to have sex with her student regardless of age or consent.
The following month, on Jan. 9, 2014, she was arrested again after a police investigation uncovered another accusation - that she allegedly had oral sex with another student, a 17-year-old boy.
Police say that the boy claims Mrs. Cooper was inappropriate inside the school as well, openly flirting and sexting with him. She reportedly whispered to him in the hallway, “All the candy you need is right here."
The boy told police that when he tried to end the relationship, she texted him saying, “What 17-year-old doesn’t want to have sex with his 31-year-old teacher.” ABC News was not given access to this text.
“My impression is that, from talking to the victims and [Mrs.] Cooper, was that she was strictly just looking for affection,” Luzerne County Detective Chaz Balogh told “20/20.” “She was very aggressive, very straight to the point.”
After the second arrest, Mrs. Cooper spent several days in jail before posting bond. “I thought my life was over, and I did make an attempt on my life,” she said.
“I just thought, ‘What is going on? What’s going on here? What is this? What are the implications going to be?’” Raphael Cooper said.
Three weeks later on Jan. 28, 2014, Mrs. Cooper was arrested a third time after two more underage male students came forward alleging that the teacher had previously had inappropriate contact with them. She was charged with corrupting minors, a misdemeanor, for reportedly showing a 16-year-old the tattoo on her breast and kissing and petting with a 17-year-old.
“I think what happened was the initial boy was getting a lot of attention, positive attention from his buddies at school. And some other people wanted to be cool as well and get the metaphorical high fives in the hallways. And so I think it was like a bandwagoning type thing,” said Mrs. Cooper.
But according to authorities, some of her other actions where even more brazen.
“She not only was victimizing the students,” said Balogh. “She [was] using other students to hook her up with others she finds attractive.”
Her attorney Joseph D'Andrea says his client is not a predator or a deviant.
"Lauren is a really, really troubled emotional person who had an insatiable need for attention," D'Andrea told "20/20."
It's a problem that Cooper said she is working out with her husband. In the months since her arrest, the couple has turned to church and a spiritual rebirth, which they say is helping them heal and rebuild their relationship.
“I don't want anybody else. I don't want to go anywhere else. I’ve had too many years built up with her, and too many good memories and too many ahead,” Raphael Cooper said. “I'm staying.”
“There are no words for it. I mean, he’s absolutely remarkable. I wish we never got away from the marriage part of our relationship,” Cooper said.
On Sept. 25, Cooper pleaded guilty to two counts of felony sexual contact and two counts of corrupting minors. Once she is released for jail, Cooper will have to register as a sex offender for 25 years. The state also revoked her teaching license for life.
“There are days that I hate myself, but I'm learning to forgive myself. I'm learning to forgive others,” said Mrs. Cooper.
“I did do wrong, but I’m not a monster. I am human, and like every other human, I made mistakes."
I write about law, foreign relations and politics.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
Times have changed, and it is hard convincing our children and grandchildren that it wasn’t always this way. Although child pornography continues to be the proper subject of criminal prosecution, there is now little legal activity in art censorship. We just don’t see the obscenity cases we used to see. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice dissolved in 1950. The Catholic Legion of Decency and its rating system for books and movies have all but disappeared. Contemporary community standards of what is obscene have become porous, perhaps because of the freewheeling nature of the Internet, which is now into publishing photos of nude celebrities hacked from a Cloud. Indeed, the Internet has made effective censorship virtually impossible. Only dull repetitiveness and superfluous specificity differentiates hard-core pornography from the literature of sex in books or the modern cinema. What once was X has become R; R has become PG-13; the really dirty films have become NR—not even rated at all. There is a new normal.
We are all fascinated by sex. Justice William J. Brennan, writing for the Court in Roth v. United States, saw sex as a “great and mysterious motive force in human life…indisputably…a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages. ” Jefferson thought it the “strongest of human passions.” Benjamin Franklin considered it essential to health. Sex caused Henry VIII to renounce Catholicism; Edward VIII to renounce the throne, causing his mother to say “to think he gave up this for that”; sullied the reputations of
John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton (who saw sex as a “mystery”), and paused the promising careers of Eliot Spitzer and General Petraeus. Americans are obsessed with sex, and it’s not necessarily our own intimate relationships. We hunger to know what astonishing sex acts others may perform, particularly our public officials, with whom, in what position, and even with what toys and props. Not content with our interpersonal experience, which is generally conducted in private behind drawn shades or on deserted beaches, we gorge on commercially published erotica from which we derive vicarious gratification. Forbes has estimated that porn in the United States is a multi-billion dollar industry. Let’s face it, sex sells. Ask any of the Mad Men. Erotic ideas find expression in books, movies, television, tabloid newspapers, supermarket magazines, and on Internet videos. King Farouk of Egypt was said to have a multi-million dollar collection of erotica. Sex abides in museums, and is not necessarily limited to painting and sculpture. The Museum of Modern Art in New York recently featured a show by performance artist Marina Abramovic where the viewer could enter the exhibit by squeezing between two facing nude models (usually, but not always, a man and a woman). Interest in erotica pervades the ages. Cavemen depicted sexual imagery on the walls of caverns. The two thousand year old Indian temples at Khajuraho, which have been called the “apogee of erotic art,” are festooned with pornographic carvings showing tantric sex in all the permutations of the Kama Sutra. In the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, one can visit secret cabinets and see on the walls every kind of sexual coupling, including a satyr copulating with a goat. Yet, we are totally ambivalent, and even hypocritical, about our urges. Many think of this interest in the prurient as a bad thing—degrading or even a sin against God, who gave us our libidinal urges in the first place. Churches, synagogues and even our laws condemn the very erotic material we are so eager to consume. Clerics denounced Whitman’s Leaves of Grass from the pulpit as pornographic and obscene. One critic pounced on Whitman’s supposed homosexuality, saying that the great poet was guilty of “that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians.” Ultra orthodox Jews in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shearim tear down billboard advertisements depicting images of attractive women who invite the viewer to use a certain credit card. Cole Porter’s haunting “Love for Sale,” written from the point of view of a streetwalker, was considered shameful and scandalous when first published in 1930, and was even banned from the airwaves as being too raw for radio audiences. In spite of the ban, or perhaps because of it, “Love for Sale” became a timeless hit. English: Official portrait of Justice Potter S... Justice Potter Stewart. He knew it when he saw it. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Since much erotica came from Europe, where attitudes tend to be less prudish, Americans made laws proscribing the importation of obscene books. Novels, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer or Anais Nin’sDelta of Venus that are tame by today’s standards were deemed contraband, like opium, to be confiscated by the authorities. When I was in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the late 1960s, government lawyers congregated on Friday afternoons in a basement screening room to review for prosecution the latest cache of dirty films seized by Customs at the border. I can report that their attitude was not entirely judicious. If Americans were ambivalent about sex, the courts have been even more dodgy as they groped for workable definitions as to what constituted obscenity and what was protected by constitutional values of free expression. Supreme Court Justices particularly were all over the lot, formulating such unworkable tests as “whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme as a whole appeals to the prurient interest.” Some judges thought that material couldn’t be obscene if it had “redeeming social value,” as though a line from the Bible might redeem a book of hardcore erotica. This test soon morphed into the “utterly without” standard that, leaving prurience and community offensiveness aside, whether the publication is “found to be utterly without redeeming social value.” In 1966 a commentator observed that, the Supreme Court had elaborated at least five separate and contradictory tests. One justice, Potter Stewart, would have outlawed only hardcore pornography, which he could only define this way: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.” Stewart was astonished that he became better known for this statement than any other he had written in his 23 years on the Supreme Court. In 1922, James Joyce first published in Paris hismagnum opus, Ulysses. In one episode, the protagonist, Leopold Bloom, surreptitiously watches Gerty, a young woman on the street, and contemplates love, marriage and sexuality. As she exposes her legs and underwear to him, Bloom’s sexual fantasies escalate and reach a masturbatory climax heightened by the fireworks at the nearby bazaar. The Little Review serialized the novel in America over a three-year period. In 1920, after the Little Review got to the particularly dirty chapter, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice was successful in getting the state court to ban the book. The basis of the action was the masturbation scene, and the court declared the work obscene. In 1933, publisher Bennett Cerf of Random House, represented by renowned literary property lawyer Morris Ernst, decided to launch a test case aboutUlysses. One copy of the book would be imported and then seized by customs at the pier. The case came before federal district judge John Woolsey who didn’t have at hand–and didn’t need–the divergent definitions of obscenity that perplexed Supreme Court Justices in later years. What Woolsey added to the fledgling obscenity jurisprudence was that a work must be taken as a whole, and not just judged on the dirty parts taken in isolation. He then dismissed the case and vacated the seizure. But the story doesn’t end there. By 1968, obscenity had reached the silver screen. The Swedish film, I Am Curious-Yellow, was far more explicit than anything ever shown before in the United States. It was about a young Swedish girl named Lena and her search for identity. Lena wants to know all she can about life and reality. The film turns to Lena’s interpersonal relationships, including those with her lover. Judge Murphy, after a jury trial in the Southern District, backed the government in its confiscation of the film as “obscene or immoral.” The Court of Appeals reversed and found error in Judge Murphy’s putting the issue of obscenity to the jury. “[T]he question whether a particular work is [obscene] involves not really an issue of fact but a question of constitutional judgment of the most delicate and sensitive kind.” Second Circuit Judge Henry Friendly was annoyedthat I Am Curious Yellow even came before the courts. Concurring in the result, he noted that, as an inferior court judge, he was not writing on a blank slate and was bound by the Supreme Court precedents, which were difficult to harmonize. He concluded that, “When all this has been said, I am no happier than Chief Judge Lumbard about allowing Grove Press to bring this film into the United States. But our individual happiness or unhappiness is unimportant, and that result is dictated by Supreme Court decisions…. With these reservations and with no little distaste, I concur for reversal.” Chief Judge Lumbard, however, wrote a stinging dissent, “While the sex is heterosexual, the participants indulge in acts of fellatio and cunnilingus. Needless to say these acts bear no conceivable relevance to any social value, except that of box office appeal.” The Second Circuit opinion in I am Curious-Yellow spawned a succession of hardcore films as though spat out of a pornographic cornucopia. We had arrived at the “Golden Age of Porn.” The origins of the Golden Age are typically associated with the 1970 film Mona the Virgin Nymph, the first adult film to obtain a wide theatrical release in America. Following this was the massive success of the 1971 gay film Boys in the Sand and of the notoriousDeep Throat and Behind the Green Door, which were both released in 1972. These three were the first hardcore films to reach a mass mixed-sex audience, and all received positive reviews in mainstream media. Other key films from the period include The Devil in Miss Jones and Score, which appeared in mainstream movie houses for the first time. It seems we just couldn’t get enough of it. Deep Throat was a 1972 American pornographic film written and directed by Gerard Damiano and starring Linda Lovelace. The title did not refer to FBI man W. Mark Felt, the Watergate informant for Woodward and Bernstein. The film offered a cascading continuum of streaming fellatio on a scale never before seen on the screen. What I am Curious-Yellow was for the literati and the cognoscenti, Deep Throat was for lowbrow moviegoers seeking sheer titillation. Judicial acceptance of Deep Throat was long in coming. There was a criminal trial in the New York state Supreme Court, Manhattan. Despite expert testimony that the practices depicted in the film were well within the bounds of “normal” sexual behavior, state court Judge Joel Tyler thundered against the film. On March 1, 1973, he wrote of Deep Throat with overblown judicial invective. “this feast of carrion and squalor,” “a nadir of decadence” and “a Sodom and Gomorrah gone wild before the fire.” Tyler fined the producers $100,000, later reduced on appeal. But the ruling gave the film must-see cachet in many quarters. It was not long before Deep Throat was widely shown, although with some scenes cut in some states. It became the most popular X-rated film of all time. Silent partners in the film were Anthony Peraino Sr. and his son Louis, members of the Colombo crime family, who raked in millions from the venture. In 1983, Deep Throat reached the federal court. In United States v. Various Articles of Obscene Merchandise, Judge Sweet held that various “hard-core” pornographic articles of merchandise (video cassettes and magazines), including Deep Throat were not “patently offensive” under contemporary community standards in the Southern District, and hence not “obscene.”Deep Throat was good to go. And the floodgates were henceforth wide open. Tell your grandchildren that we totally failed in our quest to define the boundaries of obscenity. After all, it’s all in the eyes of the beholder. —- James D. Zirin is the author of the book, The Mother Court—Tales of Cases That Mattered in America’s Greatest Trial Court from which this article is an excerpt.
SARASOTA POLICE DEPARTMENT
