A Utah mom allegedly doctored a pornographic photo of a woman having sex with a dog, superimposing into the picture the face of a 13-year-old girl who attends middle school with her daughter.
Danette Stark, 37, appeared in court Monday to face 18 counts of sexual exploitation of a minor. Prosecutors said she created the image, put it into fliers and distributed them at Northwest Middle School in Salt Lake City.
Authorities said surveillance video showed Stark entering the seventh-grade bathroom at the school on the second to the last day of classes. A custodian found the fliers in the bathroom and contacted local authorities, Salt Lake County District Attorney Lohra Miller told FoxNews.com.
She said Stark admitted to making 30 fliers, but police recovered only 18 of them.
“If anyone sees copies of these they need to turn them over to police immediately,” Miller said. “If they distribute it, make copies or put on the Internet, they are committing a crime of distributing pornography under Utah law. “
Stark allegedly told police that she believed the unidentified girl “wronged” her in some way.
Stark has a daughter who is the same age as the girl. Attorney Steve Russell, who was standing in for her attorney, said he wouldn’t explain the relationship between the two teens, but he told the Deseret News, “I’m sure they know each other.”
Police say Stark found the photos on the Internet and placed the fliers, which included derogatory comments directed toward the girl, into several students’ lockers in addition to the bathroom.
Miller told FoxNews.com that this is the district's first case of social networking bullying, and they are trying to keep the 13-year-old girl’s identity as private as possible.
“She is traumatized by the event,” Miller said. “We are trying to keep her privacy protected as much as possible to help keep her life as normal as possible.”
Phone messages left for Stark and the Salt Lake City School District were not immediately returned. Stark’s attorney did not have an immediate comment.
FoxNews.com’s Michelle Maskaly contributed to this report.
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