LOUISVILLE (KY)
Lexington Herald Leader [Lexington KY]
December 23, 2024
By Lauren Liebhaber
A former Kentucky Catholic schoolteacher has pleaded guilty to child pornography-related charges after authorities said he photoshopped students’ faces onto nude female bodies and shared them online.
Jordan A. Fautz pleaded guilty Dec. 18 to charges including distribution of child pornography, and distribution of obscene visual representation of child sexual abuse, according to court records.
McClatchy News reached out to Fautz’s attorney Dec. 19 for comment but did not immediately hear back.
While employed as a seventh- and eighth-grade religion teacher at St. Stephen Martyr Catholic School in Louisville, Fautz shared child sexual abuse material online with an undercover FBI agent, according to a criminal complaint.
Several images Fautz shared included the yearbook photo of a St. Stephen student, believed to be between 12-15 years old, photoshopped onto the body of a nude woman engaged in sexual conduct, court records said.
An adult victim’s face, also taken from a yearbook photo, was photoshopped onto a sexually explicit image of a female body, court records said.
Authorities said the two victims are mother and daughter, and their real names were used to identify them on the files.
Investigators said Fautz sent the undercover agent a Dropbox file with 115 images of “mostly teenage girls labeled with what appears to be their real names,” court records said.
The Dropbox file contained photos of students wearing “red shirts labeled with the letters ‘SSM’ standing in front of a ‘SSMCardinals’ school photo backdrop,” according to the criminal complaint.
Authorities were able to trace the IP address of the account that shared the photos to St. Stephen Martyr School, records show.
A review of Fautz’s computers and cellphone revealed he used “multiple photo editing applications and software to create fake nude images of school-aged girls,” the earliest dating back to November 2020.
Fautz is scheduled to be sentenced March 19, court records show.
If the judge accepts the plea, prosecutors agreed to recommend that a sentence of 19 years and seven months in prison would be appropriate.
Fautz also will owe a $20,000 special assessment and could be ordered to pay restitution to victims, according to his plea agreement.