She was accused of faking incriminating video of cheerleaders. Nothing was fake
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
1 The mother of the child telling about what the other kids did - instead of talking to the other parents found it right to send anonymous messages.
2 The other parents found it right to go into full-denial + legal mode.
3 Police and prosecutor instead of talking sense into the adults, went into misinterpretation of evidence for re-election gain.
4 Global media who just repeated and sensationalized the claims without further investigation.
5 A global social media audience amplifying the outrage.
6 Cameras everywhere and a society which doesn’t allow teenagers to be teenagers and try themselves out - and therefore can be blackmailed.
Edit: In hindsight, I probably overreacted due to the many instances of this exact comment I've seen on a whole range of topics that were more egregious than this one, but I'll leave it as-is to reflect on.
"These would be the last public comments Reiss made about the case. On 26 May 2021 he was arrested on suspicion of possessing images of child sexual abuse. Two images had been uploaded to his Gmail account, and detectives had traced them to his IP address. When they raided his home and seized his electronic devices, they found more than 1,700 images and videos depicting children, including 84 of toddlers and infants. Reiss pleaded guilty in March 2022, and was later sentenced to 11 and a half to 23 months in jail. To use Weintraub’s language, if anyone was “preying on juveniles”, it was the police officer who led the investigation."
Damn! It's usually the case that the most mentally insane people are the ones who try to hold others to unreasonable high standards of made-up "morality". Anyone who has been given a prison sentence where this officer was involved should have their case reviewed, whether they request it or not. The odds of this asshole ruining people's live throughout his career are very high.
While I respect our justice system, as imperfect as it is, extreme outlier failures are heartbreaking. Reminds me of reading Bryan Stevenson's book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
> “She was convicted of sending five text messages,” Birch sighs. “There wasn’t one threat in any of them. All the messages said was, ‘You should be aware of what your daughters are posting.’” He claims that a fair trial was impossible, after all the publicity his client had received, saying,“Any jury would be poisoned.”
And at the end, it all felt like pretty girl's desirable (and obviously not virgin pure), perp is fat and ugly, cops are really evil pedos who abuse their information access, and all America really gives a ** about is watching the whole thing tailspin. And like @floydnoel noted below, it seems like all anybody did was maximize torture for everyone involved all around. Sims watching sims, and we still just wanna watch people get tortured on TV.
Scratchy: [to Bart and Lisa] Why are you laughing?
Itchy: [to Scratchy] Hey, they're laughing at your pain.
Scratchy: [reattaches his head to his body] That's mean.
Itchy: Let's teach'em a lesson. [shaking Scratchy's hand]What, the porn? No she didn't. Where on Earth did you get that from???
> And then sent it to everyone in town?
No. She sent videos of kids vaping -- presumably fully clothed and not engaging in sex at the same time, or that would probably have been mentioned -- and nothing else, to their parents and nobody else.
> And at the end, it all felt like pretty girl's desirable (and obviously not virgin pure), perp is fat and ugly...
Yadda yadda yadda... The "perp's" cheerleader daughter was/is presumably about as "cute" as her (ex-)teammates, so fuck knows what you are on about. Were you drunk when you read the article, or WTF?
Correction: Should be "to their parents and the coach(es?)."
But still, coaches are in loco parentis, so pretty much the same thing.
It was coined initially during Barack Obama's administration, shortly after Wikileaks released the Podesta emails. The first public use of the term was by Obama himself, warning people to be wary of non-mainstream or non-state-endorsed media outlets.
Within weeks, Donald Trump had begun using the term with almost the exact opposite definition, successfully twisting the meaning to be yet another name for MSM outlets, to the point that society at large now credits the term with the Republican/MAGA political machine.
Since then, we've seen many terms lose their original meaning and intent. "Woke" was once a term championed amongst the far-left until it too was co-opted into derogation.
Are we seeing the begining of a similar trend for "deepfake"?
Spone may not manipulate videos and images, but she definitely collects them. Still, she says she never sent them. “The charges were that she directly sent messages to the minors,” Birch adds. “That never happened. That’s the point.”
But did she send messages to the gym and the parents? There is a long pause. “No,” Spone eventually says.
I’m surprised to hear her say this, given Birch told the Washington Post Spone messaged the parents out of concern for what their daughters had put online. When I point this out, there’s another long pause. “If I said that, I said it,” Birch says, with a shrug. “It is what it is.”
Even if Spone is guilty of sending the five messages, she is innocent of the claims that made her notorious. Sending anonymous and unwelcome text messages is not the same as digitally manipulating images of minors.
in my read of the article a nasty busybody harasses people, happens in this kind of communities all the time, but this time the whole thing gets caught in a national witch hunt. the witch hunt is awful, but it lets the nasty busybody play victim across the board.
Nothing that transpired was anything other than a giant CF based upon the girls in question lying (and getting away with it) and ruining another persons life.
Nothing she did deserves what happened. Nothing.
she was convicted of harrasment of minors by a jury in a court of law. presumably there was supporting evidence of the harrasment charges, and that's not something that the article disputes.
Yeah, the media shitshow...
There were no DeepFakes, a few text messages raising concerns about some young girls' behavior and a DA running around during an election year slandering this woman to get votes. Oh, and a lying teenager capitalizing on the drama to get movie and book deals.
The result: a woman who's life was forever turned upside down and found guilty by an "impartial" jury.
OK, I read it, and I can't see that it does. Explain how. (And no, her doing it anonymously doesn't contradict her being genuinely concerned. Why would it?)
Yeah, she was. Mostly because the jury bought the kids' lies, it seems.
The anymore texts weren’t threatening in my opinion. Literally trying to make parents aware of what their children were doing. Not sure why she sent it anonymously though, but that’s not a crime in of itself.
that's not what the jury decided, nor what the lady was convicted over, this also not something that the lady is attempting to dispute in court. she can't even keep her story straight between herself and her lawyer about which texts she actually did sent.
If you're bright and critical, you will be weeded-out early by prosecutors, and you'll see the type of people the prosecutors want deciding a case.
If you're coy enough to play dumb and get selected, you'll get to see the shallow reasons other jurors choose to declare someone guilty.
I was so personally disturbed by my experience as a juror that I pledged to never accept a jury trial if I was wrongfully indicted; I'd rather take my chances on appeal after letting a judge decide my guilt.
but also like consider, there's appeals court's opinion (i missed that there was an appeal on my first reading) https://casetext.com/case/commonwealth-v-spone, i read it, if the details presented in the opinion are not substantially different from the facts presented during original trial, i would've also convicted spone of harrasment. so literally if i were on jury duty in this case, i would've had to disagree with you.
They did appeal.
As I understand it an appeal is granted if they can show misconduct during the initial trial and not because they disagree with the verdict. Could me wrong, not a lawyer.
A) "Unhinged busybody"? [Citation needed] (Yeah, sure, not super-sympathetic. But a far cry from your vicious characterization.)
B) The national spotlight is a lot bigger than minor community business, and it that much bigger issue she definitely was a victim. No pretending needed.
What happens if the 1TB "Insurance" folder on Anthony Weiner's laptop, the one that allegedly made seasoned NYPD officers vomit when they viewed the contents, is inevitably released? Would we all be told "Ignore this, it's a Deepfake"?