Teacher cleared of molestation: ‘Nobody wins’

Now that a jury has said “not guilty,” now that she is finally free of allegations of child abuse that have hung over her for two years, a former kindergarten teacher from Georgia can reveal that one of the three children who testified against her was her own daughter.

“My own daughter,” Tonya Craft confirmed to TODAY’s Meredith Vieira Wednesday in New York.

“The only thing she had ever said was that I had put medicine on her,” Craft added. But taken along with the testimony of two other young girls, it seemed momentous to prosecutors.

And watching her own daughter presented as a witness against her was devastating.

“That was the absolute hardest thing I’ve ever experienced, because my job as a mother is to protect her,” Craft told Vieira, fighting to control her emotions. “There obviously was no anger toward her. It absolutely broke my heart to see that my daughter had been pretty much indoctrinated to believe things that weren’t true.”

‘Nobody wins’
That’s why Craft, though relieved to be exonerated, wasn’t reveling in her freedom. It’s been nearly two years since she’s been allowed to visit her daughter, Aiden, and she’s seen her son, Cole, only occasionally on supervised visits. She’s lost her job and her home, and she and her family are out the $500,000 it cost to defend her.

“It wasn’t a victory,” Craft told Vieira. “There’s nobody that wins in this situation. My whole heart has been taken, and I got half of it back. Until I get my children, I won’t have my entire heart back.”

Late Tuesday afternoon, the 37-year-old Craft had nearly collapsed in a Ringgold, Ga., courtroom as the jury that had listened to five weeks of testimony declared her not guilty on all 22 counts of molestation and abuse lodged against her two years ago when she was a kindergarten teacher at Chickamauga Elementary School.

The charges had torn the small town apart. Craft’s attorney, Demosthenes Lorandos, who joined his client on TODAY, told Vieira that he had rushed her out of the courtroom after the verdict because of death threats that had been made against her.

‘A perfect storm’
As she went through her two-year ordeal, Craft researched similar cases in the past, of which perhaps the most famous occurred nearly 30 years ago in Bakersfield, Calif. In that case, 36 innocent people went to jail after being convicted of ritually abusing some 60 children in Satanic rituals. They were convicted on the basis of testimony from children who had been told what had happened to them and coached what to say. All were exonerated, but only after years in jail.

“You hope the truth comes out, but you’re scared to death it won’t,” Craft said.

In Chickamauga, it all began when two little girls were caught touching each other. The parents were upset and punished the girls. Under questioning, the girls eventually said that Craft had molested them at her home.

Craft had recently fallen out with the parents. In addition, there was talk in the small town because she had mowed her lawn wearing a thong. Stories spread about her drinking. Her ex-husband suggested she had a lesbian episode.

“I believe I was possibly the victim of a perfect storm, as the children were as well,” Craft told Vieira. “One, there already were some friendships that were no longer friendships. Whenever there were certain situations between normal childhood behavior, pointing and touching, then my name immediately came up and got put into the mix. And then it turned into parental phone calls back and forth and even my name being brought up, ‘Did Miss Tonya do this?’ ”

In court, the children, whose stories were inconsistent, would admit that their parents had told them what had happened and they had repeated it.

Expecting the worst
Vieira asked if Craft wondered how she could be caught in a web of gossamer allegations.

“That is a very good question,” she said. “That’s what kept me awake at 3 o’clock in the morning thinking how can this happen? How can you go from doing absolutely nothing to it being twisted into something so heinous?”

And yet she had done her research and learned that others had been unfairly imprisoned on similar charges, backed up by testimony from children who had been coached to believe that they actually had been abused. She even talked to some of those children, now adults in their 30s, in the course of her research.

“I knew the amount of people that are convicted that are later exonerated on false allegations,” she said. “I almost could not let myself think there was going to be a ‘not guilty,’ because I never thought I could be arrested for something I didn’t do, so I absolutely had to expect the worst and pray and hope for the best and for the truth to come out.”

Lorandos, her attorney, commended his client for the amount of research she did. “As a lawyer I know these are the hardest cases to win. I’d much rather take a white-collar crime case,” he said.

“When Tonya did her research into this, she determined that she had no chance at all unless she gave the jury the tools — the tools from science, the tools from all the research — to make a good decision,” he went on. “When we treated the jury like people that could really understand this stuff, they rose to the occasion, listened carefully, took those tools back to the jury room and made a decision on behalf of those little girls, on behalf of Tonya and her family.”

Risky strategy
Craft and Lorandos defied common wisdom that says defendants should not take the stand and testify on their own behalf, because they felt that if she didn’t, the jurors would wonder what she was hiding.

“Tonya and I determined from the time we met each other, that no matter what the Constitution says about not having to take the stand, when the charges are this horrible, they must hear from you,” Lorandos explained. “So Tonya sucked it up, got up there and told the entire truth that she was allowed to tell, and stood up to a tremendously vicious attack on her. I’m really proud of her.”

Her husband, David Craft, seconded Lorandos’ emotion.

“I’m very proud of her. She never quit fighting. She did whatever she could to stand by her innocence and prove her innocence. I’m extremely proud of her and very relieved today,” David Craft told Vieira.

Saying that she will “probably never teach in a classroom again,” Tonya Craft is now considering going to law school. She told Vieira this case has taught her about the importance of getting things right.

“I want to make people aware that this can happen anytime, anywhere, to anyone, and just to get it right; to have qualified individuals interviewing the children,” she said. “To parents, if there is a situation that you wonder about, take them to the proper people. Just get it right for the children, because children that are a part of false allegations are just as devastated as children that truly are molested.”

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