Teacher hit with maximum sentence after she's found guilty of having sex in classroom with 8th-grade boy on graduation day



A former teacher in California has been hit with a maximum prison sentence after being found guilty of child sex abuse of an eighth-grade student on his graduation day, according to authorities.

The Gridley Police Department arrested Michelle Christine Solis, 46, in November 2023 after a concerned parent claimed "explicit photographs" of a Gridley Unified School District teacher were "circulating among students."

The attorney for the former teacher argued that she should receive probation because the incident was only 'one act.'

Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey said Solis was having an illegal sexual relationship with one of her eighth-grade students at Sycamore Junior High School.

Solis allegedly “friended” the minor on Instagram and later sent the boy explicit photos of herself.

"Evidence showed Solis sent the boy four explicit photos of herself before having sexual intercourse with him in her classroom on the day of the boy’s 8th-grade graduation," the DA's office said.

Investigators allegedly verified the accusations by reviewing messages on the victim's cell phone; the teacher reportedly instructed the boy to delete their communications. Solis also gave the student "special treatment" in school, according to the DA's office.

Solis was charged with one count of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor under the age of 16. After she pleaded no contest, Butte County Superior Court Judge Michael Deems sentenced Solis to the maximum term: four years in state prison. Solis also must register as a sex offender and cannot contact the victim for 10 years.

The attorney for the former teacher argued that she should receive probation because the incident was only "one act." However, the DA's office said the sentence was appropriate due to the 29-year age difference between the minor and Solis, her position as a trusted member of the community, and a pattern of conduct that amounted to "grooming."

Judge Deems said at the sentencing, "The manner in which the crime was carried out demonstrated criminal sophistication in that the defendant groomed the victim in order to get the victim in a situation for sexual contact. The court finds that there is a factual basis for the plea, and it is the judgment of this court that the defendant is guilty of that offense."

Solis had been a teacher with the Gridley Unified School District for 20 years, according to police.

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Jussie Smollett, who staged fake hate crime against himself, gets 150 days in jail, tells judge 'I am not suicidal!' after sentence



Jussie Smollett on Thursday was sentenced to 150 days in jail after a jury in December found him guilty on five of six counts of felony disorderly conduct for staging a hate crime against himself and then lying to police about the hoax.

After his sentence was handed down, Smollett spoke sharply to Cook County Judge James Linn and said, "I am not suicidal, and I am innocent." He added that "I did not do this" and that "if anything happens" to him while in jail that he didn't do it to himself.

The sentence also included 30 months probation, $120,000 of restitution payments, and a $25,000 fine.

'Your very name has become an adverb for lying'

In an address before issuing his sentence, Linn eviscerated Smollett, calling him a "charlatan" and telling him "your hypocrisy is astounding" and "you wanted to make yourself more famous" through the elaborate, "premeditated" caper and then "you threw a national pity party for yourself." But the worst part, the judge said, was that Smollett lied to authorities about it all.

"Your very name has become an adverb for lying," Linn said.

The former "Empire" star — who is black and gay — made national headlines for claiming a pair of supporters of then-President Donald Trump physically attacked him near his apartment in Chicago in the early morning hours of Jan. 29, 2019.

He claimed the two men wearing ski masks confronted him as he was leaving a Subway restaurant around 2 a.m. in below freezing conditions and yelled "aren't you that f***ot 'Empire' n*****?" before beating him up, putting a rope around his neck, pouring bleach on him, and hollering, "This is MAGA country!" — a reference to Trump's red "Make America Great Again" hats.

But once a police investigation began, Smollett's story began to crumble.

What else happened at the sentencing hearing?

Smollett's defense pushed for a new trial, but the mountain of evidence against their client was too high, and Linn — who presided over Smollett's trial late last year in which he was convicted — denied the new trial request.

Prior to sentencing, the prosecution read a victim impact statement from the city of Chicago that blasted Smollett for making it less likely that actual victims of hate crimes will come forward to law enforcement. The city also requested just over $130,000 in restitution for the resources they said Smollett wasted.

Character witnesses for Smollett implored a sentence without prison time, including his brother who declared to the courtroom that the prosecution had no evidence against Smollett. The defense also detailed numerous letters — including ones from the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the president of the NAACP, and a Black Lives Matter representative — that pleaded for mercy in sentencing.

The 39-year-old faced a maximum sentence of up to three years in prison. Legal experts had said the sentencing judge would consider Smollett's otherwise clean criminal record and predicted he'd be sentenced to probation with required community service.

What else happened during the investigation and trial?

Chicago police caught the two suspects in the crime, Nigerian-born brothers Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo — aspiring actors whom Smollett knew from the Chicago set of "Empire" and from the gym. The brothers told police Smollett paid them to stage the attack in an effort to boost his career. In fact, then-Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said Smollett used a check to pay the brothers $3,500 to pull off the staged attack.

Johnson added that the hoax "pissed everybody off."

Detectives said surveillance video and in-car taxi videos corroborated the Osundairo brothers' claims, as did telephone logs, ride-share records, and credit card records, according to a case summary document prosecutors released.

During Smollett's trial, prosecutors alleged the actor even arranged a "dry run" of the hoax with his co-conspirators days prior to it taking place — and that the practice session was captured on surveillance video.

The Osundairo brothers testified against Smollett in the trial, each taking the witness stand to repeat their claims that Smollett told them to place a noose around his neck and shout racial and homophobic slurs while roughing him up in view of a street camera.

Smollett testified in his own defense and maintained “there was no hoax" and that the brothers are “liars” who attacked him over homophobia and tried to extort money from him after the fact.

Lead prosecutor Dan Webb wasn't buying it, saying Smollett's lies cost the Chicago Police Department resources and caused racial division.

“Besides being against the law, it’s just plain wrong for Mr. Smollett, a successful black actor, to outright denigrate something as serious, as heinous, as a real hate crime. To denigrate it and then make sure it involved words and symbols that have such horrible historical significance in our country," Webb said according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Anything else?

After Smollett's December conviction, Webb said in his full report regarding State's Attorney Kim Foxx's handling of the case that her office committed several procedural irregularities and ethical missteps — including that the decision to allow Smollett to enter into an "alternative prosecution" agreement constituted an "abuse of prosecutorial discretion."

In addition, former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat, said Smollett "spit in the face of real victims of bigotry" by "lying about being attacked because of his race" and "should be sentenced to the fullest extent of the law to serve as an example and to send a very strong message to anyone who thinks about pulling a hoax like this in the future."

Social media also ripped Smollett after his guilty verdict — but left-wing Hollywood remained more or less silent.

The left, however, had plenty to say immediately after Smollett claimed he was attacked. Vice President Kamala Harris — who at the time was a U.S. senator from California and a week into her presidential campaign — called it "an attempted modern day lynching. No one should have to fear for their life because of their sexuality or color of their skin. We must confront this hate."

Image source: Twitter

Harris' tweet was still active Thursday evening.

This is a breaking new story; updates may be added.

BREAKING: Jury finds all 3 defendants guilty of murder in Ahmaud Arbery trial



The Ahmaud Arbery trial ended Wednesday afternoon with a jury finding all three defendants in the case — Gregory McMichael, 65, and his son, Travis McMichael, 35, and William "Roddie" Bryan Jr., 52 — guilty on multiple counts of felony murder and various other charges for their role in the altercation that led to Arbery's death.

In all, each of the three defendants faced nine charges, including malice murder, four counts of felony murder, two counts of aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and criminal contempt to commit a felony.

Travis McMichael was the only defendant to be convicted of count one, malice murder, in addition to multiple counts of felony murder.

What are the details?

The high-profile case garnered national media attention last year after cellphone video of the shooting recorded by one of the men involved in the incident circulated online. The video captured the fatal shooting itself as well as the moments leading up to it.

In the trial, the prosecution argued that the defendants, all of them white, were guilty of an unjustified and racially-motivated attack against Arbery, a then-25-year-old black man who had been jogging through their neighborhood. Meanwhile, the defendants maintained they were acting in self-defense while conducting a citizen's arrest when the fatal shots were fired.

Under Georgia law at the time, citizen arrests were considered legal if the citizen had observed the suspect committing a serious crime and if the suspect was trying to make an escape. That statute has since been repealed and critics have claimed that the situation in the Arbery case does not legally justify the defendants' actions.

Ultimately, the jury of 12 in Brunswick, Georgia, determined that the father and son duo provoked the violent incident by unjustly pursuing Arbery and were thus unable to claim self-defense.

What's the background?

On Feb. 23, 2020, Gregory McMichael alerted his son, Travis, after he reportedly spotted Arbery in a vacant construction site and inferred that he was the individual responsible for committing a slew of break-ins in their neighborhood in recent weeks.

The pair grabbed their guns, hopped in a pickup truck, and took off in pursuit of Arbery. They also called their neighbor "Roddie" Bryan, who allegedly joined the McMichaels in parts of the pursuit and filmed some of it on his cellphone.

Eventually, the trio caught up to Arbery and confronted him. During an ensuing struggle, Travis McMichael fired three shots at Arbery, killing him. Video of the incident appears to show Arbery attempting to jog around the truck before engaging the younger McMichael in a brief scuffle that ended in gunfire.

Local police seemed content to not file charges against the men for two months before the cellphone video was leaked at the request of Gregory McMichael. The defendant reportedly thought the footage would make him and his son look better, but instead, it sparked nationwide outcry and led to charges being filed against the men by the state of Georgia.

What else?

In her closing arguments to the jury on Tuesday, lead prosecutor Linda Dunikoski stated, "You can't claim self-defense if you are the unjustified aggressor," adding, "Who started this? It wasn't Ahmaud Arbery."

Defense attorneys have argued that Travis McMichael had no choice but to fire his weapon after Arbery attempted to wrestle it away from him.

She also sought to poke a hole in the defense's lawful citizen arrest claim, saying, "You can't make a citizen's arrest because someone's running down the street and you have no idea what they did wrong."

Despite the media narrative branding the Arbery killing as an example of racial violence in the country, the prosecution largely shied away from arguing that issue to the jury during. Though in the final days, Dunikoski did argue that the defendants decided to attack Arbery partly "because he was a Black man running down the street."

The defendants now await sentencing for their crimes, which in the McMichaels' case could result in the death penalty or life in prison without possibility of parole.

This is a breaking news story. There may be updates.