Therese Gunn, a 54-year-old orchestra teacher in Georgia, admitted in court that she had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old student.
Gunn, the 54-year-old former teacher at South Gwinnett High School, told the court that she was sorry but that the student was “like a used car salesman.”
According to reports, Gunn, who worked as a teacher for 25 years, engaged in sexual relations with the student on school property. Gunn was caught after the unidentified student’s mother found her son’s diary.
via Fox News:
Gunn entered the guilty plea and was sentenced to 90 days in prison, despite her lawyer’s push for house arrest. She will be on probation for 10 years.
“I don’t find that you’re the kind of person that needs to be warehoused for years,” Gwinnett County Superior Court Judge Warren Davis reportedly said. “We get those cases and we get them out of society as long as we can. You’re not one of those. But you clearly betrayed the trust that you had of parents, this parent, putting this child in your care.”
Under Georgia law, any sexual contact between someone with a supervisory role is illegal, even if the encounter is consensual, the report said. The student in this case told the court that Gunn “made [his] adolescence a living hell.”
Gunn, who resigned from her position in 2016, is the fourth teacher from Gwinnett who has been arrested on sex-related charges since 2015.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Consitution, Gunn initially blamed her victim, stating the 17-year-old boy had coerced her into the relationship, calling him a “used car salesman” in front of Judge Warren Davis.
Davis didn’t care for that argument, nor did prosecutor Karen West. And after Gunn entered her guilty plea to a single count of sexual assault by a person with supervisory authority, the judge sentenced her to serve just 90 days in prison.
The remainder of her 10-year sentence will be spent on probation.
Although Gunn was originally charged with multiple counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, she was eventually not indicted on those charges.
She was sentenced her to serve 90 days in prison.
