Spencer Herron Went From Being Teacher of the Year to Registering as a Sex Offender

In June 2018, Jenifer Faison was sitting in the living room of her Georgia home watching her husband panic. Moments later, police officers arrived and arrested Spencer Herron. Confused and scared, Faison was left wondering what in the world was going on. According to ABC News, two days later she gained access to her husband's Facebook profile in order to shut it down but instead found something shocking.

She clicked on a folder labeled "photos" and was met with hundreds of pictures of women. "I start scrolling down and all of a sudden there's a photo of a woman half naked. And then there's another one and then there's another different woman naked," she said. Obviously, having an affair isn't illegal. What landed her husband in prison was the fact that he was sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl at the school where he taught. Where is Spencer Herron now? Here's what we know.

In December 2019, the Office of the District Attorney for Cherokee County said in a press release that Herron had pleaded guilty to one count of sexual assault. He was sentenced to six years, the first five of which would be in prison. This sentence was to run concurrently with a 20-year sentence he received in Cobb County. The first five years of that sentence would be spent in confinement with the remaining 15 on probation, per The Atlanta-Journal Constitution. Both incidents involved the same victim.

A little more than two years later, Herron was granted parole in the summer of 2022 and was forced to register as a sex offender. Faison told her story in a podcast titled Betrayal, which was later made into a Hulu series. In it, she interviewed Herron while he was in prison. After this conversation, Faison concluded that Herron was incapable of being honest with himself. She hasn't spoken to him since and has no plans to.

In October 2023, the victim of Spencer Herron filed a lawsuit in a Georgia federal court accusing "Hulu, ABC News, and a production company behind the docuseries Betrayal of using recordings of her without consent," reported Reuters. Rachel Heller was only 16 when Herron sexually assaulted her and was deeply traumatized by the experience. Despite that, she later agreed to be interviewed on the podcast but did not want to be part of the Hulu series.

Prior to a November 2022 speaking engagement with Faison, Heller repeatedly told Hulu as well as producers for ABC News and Glass Entertainment Group, that she did not want "consent to the use of her image or voice in the docuseries." The production company filmed the event at a criminal justice class at the University of North Georgia, promising to give Heller total control over how the footage was used.

Afterward, they once again began pestering Heller about signing a release form for the footage, which she refused to do on multiple occasions. They ended up using both her interviews and recordings from the speaking engagement in the podcast. "She said no. They did it anyway," said James Hawkins of Ichter Davis, who is representing Heller in the lawsuit.