ARCHBALD, Pa. — Note: The above video is from October, 2022.
A former high school student's civil rights lawsuit against a Lackawanna County school district can proceed on a claim that officials knew a teacher, and now convicted child predator, behaved questionably but did nothing about it, a federal judge ruled Friday.
The student, now in her 20s, brought the suit against Valley View School District and former gym teacher Jaime Chorba last year. That came months after a federal judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison for sexually exploiting children, including by altering photographs of his female students into depicting them in sexually explicit situations.
U.S. District Court Judge Malachy E. Mannion ruled that the former student's attorneys, Jason Mattioli and Michael Ossont, may move forward on a claim that holds the district liable for failing to adequately train and supervise Chorba.
"Any one report of Chorba's blatantly predatory behavior would have been enough to put District Defendants on notice that their continued employment of Chorba posed a risk to the emotional and even physical wellbeing of female students including Plaintiff," Mannion wrote.
However, should the discovery process fail to turn up evidence showing the district knew for years that Chorba acted as the student alleged, the claim will fail, Mannion wrote.
The lawsuit stated Chorba manipulated the then-teenage girl's photos to make her appear as if she was engaged in sexual acts. It also accused the district of failing to protect her from Chorba.
The woman alleged the district had received complaints since at least 2013 that Chorba walked through female locker rooms while girls changed, walked to his car bare-chested, and photographed his students.
In legal filings, the school district's attorneys said the allegation they willfully kept him employed as a teacher is a "hollow" attempt at reframing passive conduct.
A message left with an attorney representing the district and its former high school principal, Christopher Mendicino, was not immediately returned Saturday.
Chorba, 48, worked in the district until 2020, when charges he sexually exploited children — and morphed the faces of students into pornographic images — surfaced. Chorba was sentenced in October 2022.
The prevalence and realism of such altered photos — called "deep fakes" — can push the borders of a person’s right to bodily integrity, according to a memorandum filed Friday in a lawsuit brought by a student who graduated in 2017.
"In our digital age where new technologies have increasingly blurred the line between physical and virtual reality, courts must consider constitutional violations on screen as seriously as those off," Mannion wrote in the ruling. "In the specific context of teachers sexually abusing their students, the virtual nature of a student's abuse does not negate the trauma the student may experience from it."
Chorba is due for release from the federal prison in Fort Dix, New Jersey, in November 2034, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.