Columbus family describes ordeal from sexually explicit social media posts

After the Muscogee County School District notified parents and guardians last week that the Columbus Police Department is investigating reports of “inappropriate postings” on the social media site Instagram, one of the high school students accused of being depicted in the sexually explicit images and her mother agreed to an interview Friday with the Ledger-Enquirer. They said more than 20 local minors are identified in these pornographic videos, photos or comments, and they want to help as many people as possible avoid such an ordeal.

The daughter said she had a good reputation and “no drama before all this.” Here’s a summary of what she and her mother say they have endured:

On Dec. 30, the daughter said, her boyfriend at the time texted her a video of a young woman performing a sexual act on a young man to alert her that links to their Instagram accounts were electronically tagged to the video, indicating that they were supposedly the teens depicted. Neither of them are in the video, she said, but somebody was trying to make it look that way.

Her boyfriend told her the video was posted on a now-deleted Instagram account purporting to expose Columbus ‘hoes,’ she said. After she clicked on the site and read comments posted by visitors, she said, “I just broke down crying. … They were calling me a ‘ho,’ that I was good at my job, and they were wondering if I could do that to them.”

Some of the comments were from classmates, she said.

“She came into my room crying,” the mother said. “… She was hysterical. I mean, absolutely hysterical.”

After her daughter showed her the video, the mother said, “I was livid. I mean, I was through the roof.”

The mother saved the video on her phone to preserve it as evidence, she said. The video depicts only the boy’s genitalia and the girl from mouth to neck, and both of their voices are heard, the mother and daughter said.

“It’s clearly not my daughter,” the mother said, but she emphasized many who saw the electronic tagging and comments seem to believe the allegation. The video attracted more than 5,000 views, she said.

Humiliated, harassed

The next week, when the second semester started in January, the mother called her daughter’s principal. She told the principal that, in addition to the humiliating accusation of being the girl in the video, her daughter continued to be harassed on social media by fellow students commenting on the video as it went viral.

Out of more than 20 students who messaged her, the daughter said, only two expressed support.

“She was texting me and telling me I need to come get her out of school before she has a breakdown because people were making jokes,” the mother said. “She would walk by (in the school’s hallways), and people would do like a hand motion or a mouth motion or say something inappropriate or sexual to her.”

The mother told the principal, she said, “Look, my daughter’s going to end up in an altercation about this. He told me at that time there was nothing he could do about it because I didn’t know who created (the video).”

The Ledger-Enquirer on Monday afternoon asked MCSD communications director Valerie Fuller for the district’s policy about handling such situations but hasn’t received an answer.

The mother said she felt she had to handle the situation by herself and told her daughter, “People are going to be vicious and cruel, and you’ll just have to deal with it.”

Upon reflection, the mother regrets not calling the police immediately. “That’s part of my anger,” she said. “… I felt like the situation was going to die down. I never dealt with this, but had I known in December what I know now, I would have called the police right then.”

Threatened

In February, the daughter said, “the situation was starting to die down,” when a male classmate who had seen the video texted her and threatened to post the video “all over again” if she didn’t text him back. The boy’s text included a photo of her next to a screen shot of the video.

The mother advised her daughter to share this new information with the principal.

“He told me there was nothing he could do,” she said. “He even had (a police) officer in the room, and the officer was like, ‘There’s no way we could track down who’s talking to you and who’s sending you these messages.’ ”

The principal did eventually learn the identity of the boy who was blackmailing her daughter, the mother said, and the threatening messages stopped. Asked how the boy was disciplined, the mother said, “I don’t know what happened with him, but (the principal) apparently handled the situation.”

‘Not just about my daughter’

But then March 26, the daughter said, the boy again harassed her, this time with proof that the video was reposted.

“He messaged me and sent a screen shot of the page,” she said, “and he was like, ‘I told you that if you didn’t text me back, this was going to happen to you again.’”

This time, the mother said, when her daughter notified her, “I asked more questions. I just had it. … She was a complete emotional wreck.”

So the daughter showed the mother the Instagram account where the video was posted, and the mother created a “fake account” and requested to be a member of the private group. The mother discovered three versions of the original Instagram page, each one created after the predecessor was shut down to keep ahead of authorities, and all are deleted by now, she said.

The mother said those pages contained numerous videos of young people engaged in numerous sexual acts, as well as “pictures of girls that contracted STDs and went to have treatment, and they have a split screen with the girls’ pictures and the test results.”

“I was just infuriated,” the mother said, “but I knew what I needed to do.”

The mother took screen shots of these apparent minors in sexually explicit images.

“There were over 5,000 followers on one page,” she said. “… It spread like wildfire.”

With her daughter’s help, they identified more than 20 students attending the daughter’s school, either depicted or named on the Instagram pages. They also identified students who attend six other Muscogee County schools, including one middle school, they said, in sexually explicit videos, photos or comments.

“This is not just about my daughter,” the mother realized. “There are a bunch of kids involved in this.”

‘Those are sex crimes’

On March 28, the mother figured she had more than enough evidence, so she called the Columbus Police Department.

A police officer came to their home, the mother said, and she showed him the screen shots. “He was like, ‘That is child porn, and those are sex crimes,’” she said. “He was like, ‘I’m going to do this police report, and I’m going to send it over to the Sex Crimes Unit.’ He told me to go to the school and talk to (the principal) so that he could identify the kids from his school and he could reach out to some of the parents and let them know what’s going on.”

Later that morning, the mother said, she met with the principal and told him she had filed a police report about what she saw on the Instagram accounts.

“Apparently, he had been dealing with it at school,” she said, “because he told me that on (March 27) it was very chaotic, a lot of physical altercations.”

The daughter added, “There were kids arguing, fighting …”

“All about the Instagram accounts,” the mother said.

“People were accusing people of running the page,” the daughter said, “but no one really knew who it was.”

‘Who’s going to be accountable?’

The policeman assigned to the school as a resource officer, the mother said, told her “he could arrest me because I was in possession of child porn. My case to him was that, when I initially reported this in December, (the principal) told me I didn’t have any proof, so there was nothing he could do. Now I have proof, so now you can do something.”

In fact, the mother and daughter said, one of the Instagram pages showed two incidents of students having sex, behind bleachers and in a dugout, clearly at the daughter’s school.

“These kids in these videos are doing adult things,” the mother said. “Unfortunately, they’re going to have to deal with adult consequences.”

Most alarming, the mother said, was a “picture of a young lady and her boyfriend, and she had an abortion, and the comments were horrible. The girl was on there talking about killing herself, and I, as a parent, I can’t close my eyes and act like I didn’t see that. … If somebody’s going to commit suicide (because of these images and comments), who’s going to be accountable?”

The mother said she left the meeting with the principal and the school resource officer “almost in tears. My last words to them were, ‘I know what I need to do.’ … I was very frustrated. I felt like I hit a brick wall again.”

So she went to the Columbus Police Department headquarters that afternoon and talked with a supervisor in the Sex Crimes Unit, who told her somebody would follow up with her within 48 hours, the mother said. Seven days later, as of midday Tuesday, the mother said, she hasn’t received that promised follow-up.

The mother also called the Muscogee County School District’s student services office March 28, she said. The secretary assured her “this was going to be taken care of and this was going to be investigated,” the mother said.

‘Don’t sweep it under the rug’

That evening, MCSD communications director Valerie Fuller alerted parents and guardians via automated phone calls and emails that “steps have been taken to notify the social media site of the inappropriate postings in an effort to have accounts disabled and pictures removed. However, distribution of these items may continue to be spread through other social media or electronic channels.”

The mother posted a warning on her Facebook page for her friends to check their children’s social media accounts “because some of my friends’ kids were in these videos,” she said. “… Some of them were receptive, and some of them weren’t.”

Asked why she didn’t contact those parents directly, the mother said, “Because I feel like they would have asked me for the images, and if I would have given that to them, then I would have been transmitting porn.”

All of which motivated the mother to urge all parents, “The first time your child brings you something like this, don’t sweep it under the rug. Follow it up. … I know a lot of parents try to be their kids’ friends and don’t want to interrupt or intrude on their privacy. That’s OK. But what you have to do is communicate. You have to let your kids know that you’re watching. … Don’t ever think that your child wouldn’t be involved in this.”

Police respond

Columbus Police Lt. Joyce Dent-Fitzpatrick, who heads the Special Victims Unit, said Friday they have received reports about two incidents of sexually explicit posting, one from a middle school and a second from a high school, but she said police did not see any nude photographs of children.

“We started looking at the site and again we looked at the site before a report was made,” she said Friday. “We did not observe any nudity on the site.”

Police actually checked four sites but didn’t find any nude photos. “Maybe they had taken it down,” she said. “If there is a parent who has anything with some children on it and you captured that image, please contact the Columbus Police Department and let us get those.”

Because it is against the law to email nude photos of children over the Internet, Dent-Fitzpatrick said an officer can come out and get photos from your computer. Police can secure the photos if they are from a screen shot or saved on your computer. “I can tell you with the report we have, no one has said they have seen these photos,” she said.

Police are always investigating reports of children on porn sites, Dent-Fitzpatrick said. “This is not anything new,” she said. “When we start investigating child pornography, children have taken photos of themselves without any clothes on and sent them to another child. You also have to understand a child.”

At this point in the investigation, police don’t have anything to consider. “We don’t have a lot to go on,” she said. “If a parent has seen it, we need the photos. The officer who took the report, there was no mention of photos being captured.”

The mother the Ledger-Enquirer interviewed asserts that “the officer that took the report from me saw the images on my phone and requested for me to email him the photographs.”

She said she did not email the photos “because the Sex Crimes supervisor told me not to. He told me someone would be in touch with me and would download the images off of my phone. I have not emailed, forwarded or sent any of the images to anyone.”

The mother added, “I understand that the police department have tons of cases to work, and when they reach out to me I would be happy to provide them with the images, videos and screen shots that I have.”

Staff writer Ben Wright contributed to this report.

This story was originally published April 1, 2017 at 2:00 PM with the headline "Columbus family describes ordeal from sexually explicit social media posts."