Teacher Suspended After Reporting Rape Former Student Charged; Woman Says She’s Being Doubly Victimized

A Chewelah high school teacher was suspended after reporting she was raped by a former boyfriend who was once one of her students.

The suspension resulted from allegations against the teacher that surfaced after the alleged rape on Dec. 7.

The teacher reported the next day that former student Tony Borg Jr., 21, raped and sodomized her while Mike Conner, 22, held her down. Now, the woman said, she is being accused of sexual impropriety and drug use.

Borg and Conner, both of Chewelah, are awaiting trial on charges of second-degree rape and unlawful imprisonment. Borg contends in a court document that the sex was consensual, but police say both men gave incriminating statements.

Borg declined to comment and Conner could not be reached. Court-appointed attorneys for the men also declined to comment.

The Jenkins High School business teacher, 34, said she feels doubly victimized because the allegations against her are by friends and associates of the men she says raped her.

“It’s incredible that any rape victim has to go through such scrutiny when they turn a rape case in,” the teacher said. “Allegations from a rape suspect’s friends should not be allowed until the rape case is finished.”

Chewelah School Superintendent Marcia Costello declined to release details about the teacher’s paid suspension on Jan. 19. However, she said the suspension resulted from allegations that surfaced after the rape report.

“Some serious allegations have been made,” Costello said. “It’s our job as a school district, first and foremost, to protect our students and follow the law.”

The suspended teacher said she has been advised in a letter that the suspension relates to incidents during the 1992-93 school year, her first in the district. She said she is not sure of all of the charges against her, but believes they include improper sexual contact with students and drug use.

“It’s not true,” she said. “I feel very confident that I can blow all this away. … If it happened in my first year of teaching, why didn’t they turn it in?”

Costello, who has been with the district for two years, said she had heard no complaints against the teacher until after the alleged rape.

State law requires credible allegations of sexual impropriety by teachers to be reported to the state superintendent of public education. But Costello said she won’t know whether a report is justified until a private investigator finishes studying the case.

State law does not prohibit sexual contact with former students who are 18 or older.

Until last August, the Chewelah teacher said, she had no contact with Borg since he was in one of her classes during the 1993-94 school year. She recalls that he didn’t complete that class, and she flunked him out of her information processing class the year before.

Records show Borg subsequently dropped out of school. Records also show he was convicted of car theft in 1989 and second-degree residential burglary and forgery in 1990. Conner, who did not attend Jenkins High School, was convicted of third-degree theft in 1991.

Borg’s former teacher said she didn’t know about his background when she encountered him at a car show last August and later at a Chewelah tavern. At the tavern, she recalled, “He said he had loved me for three years. My mouth just dropped open and that’s when I could start thinking of him as a boyfriend. …”

She said her friends offered nothing but encouragement, and she noted that relationships between older men and younger women seldom raise an eyebrow. Still, she said dating Borg was “an aberration. This is not my standard of dating, to date young men.”

They dated about three weeks and broke up amicably when Borg’s former girlfriend returned, the teacher said.

Then she said Borg and Conner, whom she didn’t know, asked her to play pool with them in December and she declined because it was a school night.

After the teacher declined the invitation, she said she granted their request to stop by her house later that evening.

“I just said, ‘It can’t be too late,”’ she recalled.

Court documents say both men admitted the woman fought Borg’s sexual advances that evening, but claim they thought she was just playing.

Borg faces trial April 15 in Stevens County Superior Court; Conner on April 29.

, DataTimes