PDF: Craft ammended complaint
Tonya Craft’s lawyers have filed a new version of a $25 million lawsuit that details accounts of parents and police “manipulating” child molestation charges to make it appear as though Ms. Craft was guilty.
The 73-page document, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Rome, Ga., closely examines alleged events that led up to Ms. Craft being indicted on 22 counts of child molestation and related charges in 2008.
The former Chickamauga Elementary School teacher was acquitted on all counts in May by a Superior Court jury in Catoosa County, Ga.
On July 7, U.S. District Judge Harold Murphy declined defendants’ requests to dismiss Ms. Craft’s original lawsuit, filed on May 24. He did order, though, that Ms. Craft more fully explain how each of the defendants supposedly caused her harm.
The newly filed lawsuit states that Ms. Craft deserves monetary damages for “humiliation, indignity, and mental suffering and sorrow” and the denial of her civil rights, among other things.
Plans to “conspire” against Ms. Craft by the defendants through phone conversations and other methods were made in “bad faith” and “conducted with reckless disregard for … (Ms. Craft) and her immediate family,” the document states.
The lawsuit specifically mentions Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment violations, calling her “unlawful seizure” by police a “gross disregard for clearly established constitutional rights.”
In the document, attorney Scott King alleges that some of the 15 defendants, including Ms. Craft’s ex-husband and parents of former students, “intimidated and manipulated (the three alleged victims) with leading and suggestive questions” into claiming they had been sexually molested by Ms. Craft.
Those three victims include Ms. Craft’s daughter, who was removed from her mother’s care on May 30, 2008, and two of her daughter’s friends.
Mr. King was unavailable for comment on Thursday.
Regarding the original lawsuit, Mr. King previously said: “We wouldn’t have filed this case if we didn’t think we would win.”
Joe Manuel, the lawyer representing ex-husband Joal Henke, declined to comment on the amended lawsuit, but said he would be reviewing the document and file pleadings he believes to be “appropriate.”
The lawsuit alleges that the Catoosa County Sheriff’s Office, another defendant, also “manipulated” certain aspects of the case to verify charges against Ms. Craft. The document further claims that the sheriff’s office “refused to interview witnesses who indicated they had information which would tend to show (Ms. Craft) did not commit the acts alleged.”
A phone message with the law office representing Catoosa County was not returned Thursday afternoon.