Former English teacher Julie Rizzitello has been sentenced to 10 years in prison after grooming and sexually abusing two of her students.
The married 37-year-old New Jersey woman became pregnant by one of the boys and court heard she shattered his heart by getting an abortion.
A teacher at Wall Township High School on the Jersey Shore , she got pregnant after convincing one of her teen victims to have unprotected sex on his birthday. The boy was later devastated when the teacher revealed she had aborted the pregnancy.
She pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual assault.
“Not only does he have to deal with the fact that he’s groomed throughout his entire high school years, that he was preyed upon by his teacher who he loved and trusted … that he was sexually abused by this teacher,” Monmouth County Judge Jill Grace O’Malley told the hearing of the young victim.
Dreamed of wild sex
The judge added: “But now he’s struggling to come to terms with the fact that this individual had an abortion and [he] wasn’t comfortable with it. This is the psychological impact — the devastation.”
Court heard that Rizzitello abused each of her two known victims for months at a time.
The first victim was a freshman when the torrid teacher began grooming him in 2017. Rizzitello told the teen she dreamed of having wild sex with him. Eventually, later in 2017 and 2018, they engaged in sex numerous times.
And then, the boy got her pregnant as his “birthday present.”
‘Standard sexual predator’
“This is grooming. It is traditional grooming that I see every week here in this courthouse. This is the behaviour of a standard sexual predator. You’re no different,” the judge told the teacher, according to Jersey Shore Online.
In addition, she also targeted another boy in early 2024, an 18-year-old student at her school. Soon, she was having frequent sex with the boy at her house, parks, parking lots and at her family-owned bagel shop where the two victims worked.
The Asbury Park Press reported that Rizzitello kept interrupting trying to deny that she was a groomer and a predator.
The judge snapped: “Stop shaking your head … These are the facts.”
Rizzitello was arrested in July 2024, and prosecutors said that she contacted both victims and begged the two victims to scrub their phones and devices of the lurid evidence.
Sex affair with girl?
“These crimes were not isolated incidents constituting moments of poor judgment; they were textbook cases of grooming, involving a defendant who repeatedly leveraged tactics of isolation, manipulation, and control for the sake of her own selfish purposes,” Monmouth County Prosecutor Raymond S. Santiago said in a statement.
“The egregious nature of the conduct was further compounded by the plain fact that the emotional and psychological harm she inflicted came at the expense of two of the very same young minds she had been entrusted to develop and nurture.”
Meanwhile, for one female teacher at an all girls Catholic private school in New Orleans, it was the Big Easy indeed. Cops say Teddi Page, 29, was arrested for allegedly having a lesbian sexual relationship with a student at the Academy of Sacred Heart in New Orleans.
Full-blown sex
Cops say the biology teacher was allegedly caught out by the teen girl’s mom after she discovered raunchy conversations between Page and the 17-year-old girl. Investigation revealed that the flirty missives then escalated into full-blown sex.
Page allegedly kissed and had sex with the teenager. Concerned about her daughter’s disturbing behavior, the mom scoured her social media accounts.
She discovered the steamy texts along with images of them kissing, having sex and posing nude together.
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