Staff Photo by Angela Lewis/Chattanooga Times Free Press
Tonya Craft speaks to the media in her parents' East Ridge home Tuesday a jury found her innocent on 22 counts of child molestation.A memoir by Tonya Craft is scheduled to come out next month.
Craft, a former kindergarten teacher at Chickamauga Elementary School, was acquitted in May 2010 on charges of molesting three girls, including her daughter. Craft's trial turned Ringgold into a national news stage, with the teacher appearing on The Today Show and Larry King Live soon after the jury found her not guilty.
Craft said after the case that she would dedicate her life to helping the falsely accused. She has since enrolled at the Nashville School of Law.
Craft's book will be available Sept. 1. Four days later, Barnes & Noble at Hamilton Place will host a launch party, beginning at 2 p.m.
Craft worked on her memoir with Mark Dagostino, a celebrity journalist who has written books with Gavin MacLeod, Hulk Hogan and the former college football player who inspired the film "Rudy."
The book begins with Craft at her home in May 2008, when she says Catoosa County Detectives Tim Deal and Stephen Keith (now a Catoosa County magistrate) informed her that she had been accused of molesting children. She writes that she never expected to hear that news.
Tonya Craft book cover: "Accused."Craft said she first thought the detectives were talking about an incident a couple years earlier, when supposedly her daughter and another child were caught touching each other.
"I've taken care of that," Craft says in the book.
"You've taken care of touching kids?" the book version of Deal replies.
"I - what? What do you mean?" she asks.
In researching her book, Craft said she drew on court documents, videotaped proceedings, transcripts, taped conversations and media coverage to re-create events. She also relies heavily on her memory and that of her friends and family to recreate events that happened outside the courtroom.
"What you're about the read is my story, told from my point of view," she wrote in the author's note. "Some of the details in these pages are quite graphic in nature - not by choice, but because they represent the truth."