Law&Crime Sidebar - Teacher Exchanged 35,000 Texts with 11-Year-Old She Made Out With: Court Docs

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

A judge decided that there’s enough evidence against Wisconsin teacher Madison Bergmann to proceed to trial. The former elementary school teacher allegedly had sexual contact with one of her 5th grade students. Law&Crime’s Jesse Weber digs deeper into the criminal complaint against Bergmann with attorney David Ring.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW:Download the FREE Upside App at https://upside.app.link/sidebar to get an extra 25 cents back for every gallon on your first tank of gas.HOST:Jesse Weber: https://twitter.com/jessecordweberLAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokeVideo Editing - Michael Deininger and Christina FalconeScript Writing & Producing - Savannah WilliamsonGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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will keep you on the edge of your seat. Don't let your fears take hold of you as you dive into this addictive series. Love thrillers with a paranormal twist? The entire Oracle trilogy is available on Audible. Listen now on Audible. A judge says there's enough evidence to take a Wisconsin teacher to trial after she was accused of making out with an 11-year-old boy. We got our hands on the criminal complaint against her, and we learned why her defense. defense team says at least one of the serious charges should be thrown out. The problem is she allegedly traded over 33,000 text messages with this child. We're discussing it all with an attorney who specializes in sexual abuse cases. Welcome to Sideball, presented by law and crime. Jesse Weber.

We have quite the follow-up on a story that we did of a former teacher accused of making out with an 11-year-old. what a statement that is. So when we first brought the story to you, we're talking about when Madison Bergman was first charged back in May. She faced one charge, sexual contact with a child under the age of 13. But after an amended complaint was submitted in August, Bergman's preliminary hearing this week featured 10 charges, sexual contact with a child under age 13, use of a computer to facilitate a child sex crime, two counts of child enticement, five counts of sexual misconduct by school staff and exposing children to harmful conditions. By the way, to give you an idea, the sexual assault charge, the sexual contact charge, carries up to 60 years in prison.

I want to bring in attorney David Ring, who specializes in abuse cases to talk more about this. David, good to see you. First, you're not surprised, I'd imagine, to see upgraded charges. Does that usually happen in these kinds of cases? I'm not surprised at all. I think what happens is, You know, the investigators want to get her charged quickly, and they have one count or a couple counts so they can get her arrest and charge. And then as they continue on with their investigation, they're going to obviously come up with more and more charges. I mean, they are obviously, and they should, taking this case extremely seriously, this teacher, this fifth grade teacher deserves to go to prison for what she did. The boy was 11 years old. It's outrageous.

It really is. It's disturbing to think about, and it's also disturbing to think about what impact that had on the 11-year-old boy. Taking the allegations is true. She is innocent until proven guilty. I want to ask you this real quick before we move on, facing a number of different charges. If she's convicted across the board, and you have right now only with respect to one victim, is this a situation where she could get 60 years? Are all the sentences run concurrently, consecutively?

what would somebody in her position likely be facing if she's ultimately convicted across the board? Well, if she's convicted across the board, ultimately they'll come down to the judge presiding over the case to decide what kind of sentence he wants to give her. He has the discretion to have these counts that she serves these counts consecutively, which means she might be in prison 60 years. I think what typically will happen on a case like this, assuming, you know, that she's proven to be guilty. She's going to get a substantial prison time, you know, in excess of 10, 10 years or so, and well-deserved. And we will get into, how should I say this, more of the specifics of this abuse in a second, because it is an interesting legal argument of whether it's a legal defense making out, allegedly making out within 11-year-old.

We'll get back to that in a second. So authorities say that Bergman was a teacher in St. Croix County, Wisconsin, overseeing a classroom of fifth graders at an elementary school. On May 1st, school resource officer Tracy Hall of the Hudson Police Department was called to Rivercrest Elementary School to help the principal with an investigation into a teacher. Well, Officer Hall says that she was given screenshots of messages between the victim and an 11-year-old boy and his teacher, Madison Bergman. Now, some of those exchanges were included in the criminal complaint, and I'm not going to lie to you, they will make your skin crawl. Here's an example. from the victim.

Ha, ha, ha, bro, I just want to make out with you. Bergman, I do too, like all the time. Also today, when you said, I know you're mad, but I want to kiss you. Oh, my gosh, I wanted to grab your face and just push you to the floor and make out with you. The 11-year-old says, ha, ha, ha, for real, I love to kiss you on the ground, too. Ha-ha. Bergman responds, I almost kissed you when you were on the ground today, but I got distracted by your stomach. You know, David, talking about stomach, I'm kind of sick to my stomach.

You've been reading this, but you know, it stands out to me. The effort to normalize this, right? Absolutely. I mean, this is what these predators do. It doesn't matter if it's a male teacher or a female teacher. They all have this predatory instinct, and what they do, it's called grooming. It's classic grooming of a young child in order to gain, you know, sexual conduct with that kid. And so this teacher, clearly, what they do is they befriend the kid.

I mean, he's in her class. So she already has a position of authority over him. But then it starts with the special favors and the privileges and the attention. You know, this boy was coming into her classroom at lunchtime as just the two of them. And then the text messages start. I'll bet anything they started out as pretty vanilla, you know, pretty innocuous. And then the teacher takes it to the next level. and then starts introducing sexual talk into it.

And that's how these teachers victimize these kids. They rope them in. And the next thing, you know, the kid has stepped into quicksand and has no idea how to get out of it because he's a kid. And so that's exactly what this teacher did. She's a predator, pure and simple. What a case. What a case.

Look, it's important, though. It's important to talk about. It's important to expose what's going on. Maybe people can step up if they see something like this happening. And for us, look, it's a privilege to be able to bring you these stories and to break them down. And the truth is we're able to continually do this in large part because of the support that we get from our sponsors. And I want to call out one right now, our sponsor of today's episode, Upside. So Upside's awesome, by the way.

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How do you even defend a text message like this? You say it was taken out of context? It's not what you don't believe what you're reading? Yeah, look, her attorneys went in and made a very technical argument saying, well, gee, okay, these text messages are bad, but they don't show sexual misconduct. There's nothing in there that says we're going to have sex or intercourse or oral copulation or anything like that. That argument, I mean, that's the only argument they could make, you know, to try.

try to say these are innocuous text messages and but the judge shot that down the judge said no there's sexual misconduct in these text messages for sure i will get to that in the second the specifics of it normally we wouldn't discuss it but as a legal matter it's important i'll get to that defense in a second but going back to the story according to officer hall the victim's father explained that his mother had recently caught the boy talking on the phone with bergman and she says she took his phone away and told him that talking with teachers outside of school was cross a boundary. She also reportedly emailed Bergman, asked her to stop talking to her son outside of school. So the next morning, the victim's father went through the phone and found all of these

concerning messages. And we learned during Bergman's preliminary hearing that the two had sent more than 35,000 messages to one another. So how do you explain that, right? How do you explain that? Well, here's what the criminal complaint had to say about the interview that the school resource officer did with Bergman alongside several other people, including the principal, the head of HR, Bergman's union rep. Quote, as the interview started, I asked her if she knew why we were talking, and she stated she assumed since the victim's, she saw the victim's dad at the school, as I asked her to explain further, she stated that she was having phone contact with victim.

She explained that during winter break, she was invited to go snowboarding at Afton Alps with the victim and his family, which she did. While at Afton, she exchanged phone numbers with victim in case they were separated at the snow park. Bergman went on to say that since then, victim has called her four to five times for no particular reason. When I asked her if she had called him, she stated she did not recall. When I asked Bergman if there had been any text messages exchanged between her and victim, she requested a lawyer. I stopped all questioning at that time and all of us left the room except for Bergman. So David seems to me, based on that, she was putting the blame on this child. And as soon as they mentioned the messages, she knew she was in trouble.

She sure was. I mean, again, despicable. You're going to blame the 11-year-old for responding to your text messages. And Jesse, think about this. You know, 33 or 35,000 text messages. I did the math on this. If you, for 365 days, let's say this went on for a year, every single day. That is 90 text messages a day. And we know this probably didn't even go on for a year. It's probably a shorter period of time. That is an unbelievable amount of text messages. And so she's just obsessed with this boy.

She's completely taken over his life with these text messages. And then when she's caught red-handed, she tries to blame him. I mean, that's another reason why she's going to go to prison because her conduct is absolutely despicable. It's crazy when you break it down that number. Wow, that is frightening and incredible to think about. Now, authorities, they say that among the messages that the victim's father printed out was a photo of Bergman in shorts and a t-shirt that the principal said appeared that it was taken in one of the elementary school's bathrooms.

Now, the school resource officer also did an interview with the victim. And the victim apparently agreed to talk and tell this person what it happened. Now, David, before I even get into this, these interviews, I imagine, are incredibly sensitive. They must be difficult to conduct as well when you're talking to an 11-year-old about this subject matter. How do they work? Well, there are incredibly important,

and it's amazing, you know, law enforcement and a lot of jurisdictions now have specialized units to interview these kids. And it's got to be done the right way. Look, the wrong way is that the kid gets interviewed four different times. by four different people, and he's, you know, go over here and talk to them. Go over here and talk to them. That is not how it should be done. It should be one interview in a very comfortable environment with someone who's a professional forensic interviewer of children who doesn't suggest answers, who knows how to gain the trust of the child so they're comfortable and they give the interview and they give the facts. And they're almost always recorded so that, you know, the defense can't come in and argue that there's been play on the interview. So these interviews are incredibly important. And most law enforcement

do a really fantastic job with them, especially if they have a particular unit set up for this type of thing. So what did this 11-year-old reportedly say? Well, he allegedly admitted to communicating with Bergman almost every day, like you said, David. He also said that she would rub his thigh and calves during independent reading time and sometimes had him stay after class. Complaint reads, when the other kids left the classroom, she approached him and kissed him on the mouth. Described himself as sitting on the ground immediately after the kiss as he couldn't believe that it happened and the fact that it was his first kiss. He then got up, gave Bergman a hug, and left the classroom to catch the school bus. And you talk about how innocent this kid is.

The victim admitted he and Bergman had kissed several times over the last few months. Victim also told the officer about love letters and drawings. he and Bergman would write to each other. He said that Bergman kept all of the sheets of paper and folders, that those folders were found in Bergman's backpack in her classroom. And some of those notes, Bergman and the victim allegedly addressed each other with pet names like pooky or haughty. Bergman reportedly wrote to the victim that one of her cousins is in the fifth grade

and she couldn't imagine a man talking to her the way that she was talking to the victim. Supplemental narrative was provided by a deputy who helped collect and catalog the evidence and she noted that she found 53 notes to the victim from Bergman and 46 notes to Bergman from the victim. So this is apparently from Bergman where she says, first off, I still can't believe we have actually kissed. You are the second person in my whole life that I ever kissed. That is so crazy. And I know your first kiss and I'm so sorry you won't ever be able to tell anyone that. Bergman had apparently been set to marry her high school sweetheart.

But when the allegations against her came out, I think you can imagine the wedding, abruptly canceled. By the way, talking about the amount of messages, Hall found more than 35,000 messages, and that amounted to 12,000 pages to go through. The report shows that the first text message was sent from Bergman to the victim on December 26th about meeting up at the ski hill. And based on some of the text messages, it was revealed that Bergman had said multiple times that the two of them messaging each other was inappropriate and that they needed to stop. but she also said there were no cameras in the classroom so david knowledge knowing what you're doing is wrong is a big component of a criminal case huge component i mean she she's basically

admitted in some of these text messages she absolutely knows this is a legal conduct that uh she's engaging in misconduct and then here's the other thing she tries to guilt the victim into making sure that he doesn't say anything. Hey, this is wrong. No one can find out. Hey, this is just between us. You know, it's too bad. You are not able to tell anyone about your first kiss because this has to stay secret. Things like that. Classic behavior by predators to keep the victim silent so they continue, they can continue with the sexual misconduct. And the text, they got worse. They included graphic descriptions of sexual acts as the 11-year-old boy asked for details about sex organs.

One message, Bergman says, that she pleasureed herself to photos of the victim. She also says that the boy is a better kisser than her fiancé. Oh my gosh. Now, two teachers resigned in connection with these allegations. One, of course, was Bergman. But the other was also a fifth grade teacher,

according to school sources who spoke with the New York Post. This other teacher might have known what was going on and didn't report it. She hasn't been charged with any crime, but very serious allegations, to say the least. David, do we see that often in these kinds of school abuse cases that there are other teachers who know what's going on and don't report it or family members that don't report it? Because I haven't seen that too often. Jesse, look, this is what I do for living. I've handled so many of these cases, literally hundreds in my 30 years.

And I'm telling you, nine out of ten times, the abuse could have been prevented or at least put to an end very early on. And why is that? Because other staff members suspected or knew what was going on and did nothing about it. And so this particular case, I read that also about this other teacher resigning. And here's the thing. Every state has what's called mandatory reporting laws for child abuse, for suspected child abuse. And so if you're someone who works with children all the time, you're a mandated reporter, of suspected abuse, which means if you have a suspicion that something is amiss between another

coworker and a child, you are obligated under the law to report that to the police. And then the police come in and investigate. I can't tell you how many times there's been cases where there's another teacher who suspected something and does nothing. And this is a classic example. apparently, you have another teacher who's either resigned or been forced to resign because she suspected or knew and did nothing about it. And here's the thing on this particular case is that it sounds like a lot of the misconduct took place in the classroom, in the classroom at the school. This wasn't, you know, somewhere in a car or out in the neighborhood. This was in the classroom. That should never happen. There should never be a teacher alone with a young student

behind closed doors for an appreciable amount of time in a classroom. If it happens more than once or twice, a person should be fired. David, very, very well said. Appreciate you mentioning that because that is a disturbing trend. Yeah, I mean, the idea that this could be prevented, this could be stopped, right even before it even begins. I want to talk about the defense, though. I want to kind of end there, something that we go in full circle. So after the amended complaint was filed, the defense submitted a motion to dismiss the charge of first degree child sexual assault, most in 60 years in prison count. And they argued that the teacher didn't have sexual contact with the victim because the motion says the issue is whether

defendant engaged in sexual contact of an intimate part of the alleged victim. Applying the facts is presented in the amended complaint, both the plain text and they cite a statute and relevant case law support the legal position that defendant did not touch an intimate part of the alleged victim. Therefore, there are insufficient facts to conclude the defendant committed the crime charged. The defense argued that none of the areas that Bergman allegedly touched the victim, the chest, the hand, the shin, the thigh, that none of that is considered intimate parts. And the motion concluded count one in the amended complaint, however, clearly lacks probable cause and that defendant did not have sexual contact with the alleged victim. Therefore, there is only

one way for the court to safeguard justice, dismiss count one of the complaint for failure. to allege sufficient facts to establish probable cause. While during her preliminary hearing, the judge in this case, Judge Scott Nordstrand, rejected that argument, saying I already concluded, based upon a number of cases we cited and walked through together, that it isn't necessary for that specific word to be used. David, thoughts. The judge got it right. I mean, look, again, the teacher's text messages are the most damaging thing here because

she admits, and not to get graphic, but this goes right to the heart of this particular felony charge, she admits to touching him, to him, you know, being aroused, to her being aroused, to the groping and the kissing and all that. And so you take all that together and she makes reference that they're lying on the floor together and all that. That's absolutely sexual touching. And the judge got it right. You know, the defense, they don't have much to argue with here. So that's kind of their Hail Mary path to like, hey, let's get the most serious charge dismissed somehow by saying she never touched an intimate part. And the judge, you know, he read the criminal statute the way it should be read, which is, which is, you know,

in a broad sense. And he said, no, those charges are absolutely legitimate. And she's, she's facing a very serious felony charge in that respect. the judge found that there was enough probable cause to move forward at trial. Not surprising when you have a preliminary hearing, the standard is very low. You just have to present probable cause that these crimes were committed, that there's sufficient evidence to move forward with the trial. Judge found that there was here, clearly based on everything we just went through. And according to court records, Bergman's arraignment has been set for November. David Ring, thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Tassie.

All right, everybody. That's all we have for you right now here on Sidebar. Thank you so much for joining us. And as always, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jesse Weber. Speak to you next time. Thank you.