DOYLESTOWN, Pa. (KYW Newsradio) — A Bucks County jury has found a Chalfont woman guilty of harassment for sending a series of anonymous vindictive text messages to members of her daughter’s cheerleading team.
It was a case that got international attention when charges of harassment were filed against Raffaela Spone, 51. She was initially also charged with doctoring photos and videos from the girls' social media pages, but prosecutors had to drop those charges when they couldn’t prove images were faked.
Spone’s lawyer, Robert Birch told the jury, first off, prosecutors never proved Spone was the one who sent the texts. But, he said, assuming it were her, the texts were screenshots of public social media accounts, sent from one concerned parent to another — and never sent to the teens.
Birch focused on one text with a screenshot of a teenager's post on TikTok, saying she regularly starves herself and she’s thought about killing herself. And he says, in testimony, she conceded that was a call for help.
Birch said the trial shows "no good deed goes unpunished," adding he guesses parents can't tip other parents off to quesitonal behavior of their teenagers because that’s now a crime.
Related
But prosecutor Julia Wilkens said the messages were not sent out of concern.
Wilkens said Spone used an app to send the texts from six different and anonymous numbers over the course of a month and a half. She said Spone’s daughter was on the same team, she knew the three parents, she had their numbers, and, if she was just a concerned mom, she could have sent them from her own number. But when the other moms asked who was texting them, she never answered.
If the messages were sent out of conern, Wilkens asked, then why did Spone send them to the teens’ cheer coaches first, days before she sent them to the parents?
Wilkens told the jury, whether or not they approved of what the parents or the teens were doing, no one should be allowed to weaponize what kids post online in their free time.