A school cop was accused of sexual misconduct with kids. He kept his job for years.
COLUMBIA, S.C. — The teen was nervous to hear the results of the investigation. Weeks had passed since the 15-year-old reported that a school resource officer sexually assaulted her. In his office. In the middle of the school day.
Now a captain from the Richland County Sheriff’s Department had set up a meeting with the 10th-grader and her therapist to tell them what was going to be done about it.
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The 38-year-old officer, Deputy Jamel Bradley, had previously been the subject of at least five complaints in his nine years at Spring Valley High School. Parents, fellow deputies, an administrator and a coach had all raised concerns that Bradley was acting inappropriately with teenage girls.
The complaints against Bradley are detailed in law enforcement records and court documents.
Two of his colleagues had reported that they saw Bradley, alone with a female student, late at night in a secluded parking lot.
Capt. Heidi Jackson was aware of some of the past allegations when she met with the 10th-grader and her therapist in May 2018, law enforcement records show. With the girl’s permission, The Washington Post is identifying her by her middle name, Dianah.
Sitting in her therapist’s office, Dianah tugged at her armful of bracelets. One said, “It’s ok not to be ok.”
Jackson told Dianah that she believed her story, and others did, too, according to notes taken by the girl’s therapist and shared with The Post.
But some people on the force, Jackson said, “did not want to see this side” of the school resource officer. Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott had personally recruited Bradley, a former star basketball player at the University of South Carolina — placing him at an elementary school before he’d even graduated from the police academy.
Jackson recounted the meeting with Dianah in a law enforcement investigative report and deposition. Bradley’s training and school assignments are detailed in his state licensing records and court documents.
He was painted as a role model in the community, with glowing evaluations and praise-filled newspaper profiles.
Bradley, Jackson told the teen, was “a unicorn in the force … considered rare and precious and above reproach.”
The sheriff’s department, Dianah learned, was not going to arrest Bradley. He was not going to be removed from Dianah’s high school. After briefly being reassigned to another school, Bradley had returned to the halls of Spring Valley.
“I can’t go back to school,” Dianah declared.
At the time Dianah stepped forward, Spring Valley’s school resource officers were already under scrutiny. A video of a different deputy forcibly arresting a Black student during class had gone viral — an incident that ended with Justice Department oversight of the school policing program in the state’s capital.
But even while being monitored by federal authorities, Richland County officials dismissed or failed to thoroughly investigate complaints of sexual misconduct against Bradley, according to a review of hundreds of documents obtained through public records requests, court filings and interviews with students, parents, educators, law enforcement officials and others.
Bradley did not respond to messages, and his lawyer declined to comment. Lott and school officials would not answer questions from The Post. In court filings, the sheriff’s department and Richland County School District Two have denied mishandling Dianah’s complaint and failing to protect her and other students from Bradley.
In South Carolina and across the country, the presence of more than 20,000 local police officers and sheriff’s deputies in schools has been welcomed by many parents fearful of mass shootings and other safety threats, and protested by those concerned about excessive force and the arrests of kids. Largely ignored in the debate: the risk of sexual abuse of children by the officers patrolling their campuses.
A Post investigation has found that predatory school police officers have used their positions to meet, groom and exploit students, while the Justice Department and many law enforcement agencies and school systems have failed to take basic steps to prevent sexual misconduct and root out abusive cops.
The Post identified more than 200 elementary, middle and high school police officers who were charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2022. Some of these officers had faced prior complaints of flirting, texting or touching students — reports that were often downplayed by supervisors as little more than a cop working to earn a student’s trust.
In Georgia, police allowed an officer to work in an elementary school after he was twice accused of inappropriate behavior with students. Later he pleaded guilty to molesting an 11-year-old with developmental disabilities.
In Minnesota, no action was taken after a deputy was seen with a seventh-grade boy straddling his lap. He covered his office windows with paper and went on to be convicted of sexually abusing multiple students.
In Kansas, officials dismissed repeated complaints about a high school officer’s interactions with teenage girls. They didn’t remove him until after he got a 15-year-old pregnant.
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Education leaders have long worked to prevent sexual abuse in schools with policies that warn teachers, aides and coaches not to send private texts or social media messages to students, be alone with them behind closed doors or engage in sexual conversations. But for school resource officers, who are encouraged to serve as mentors for vulnerable students, those rules rarely exist.
And predatory officers can exploit the complicated arrangement between school districts and law enforcement agencies. They are typically assigned and supervised by their departments, rather than principals. School administrators, who may be the first to learn of inappropriate behavior, frequently have no authority to investigate and discipline officers on their campuses, even when their districts help fund those positions.
The Justice Department, which has provided hundreds of millions of dollars for school police programs, has issued no guidance to sheriffs and police chiefs on how to prevent sexual misconduct by resource officers trusted to keep kids safe.
John McDonald, a renowned school safety expert, said he has never seen a policy or training aimed at stopping sexual abuse by school police officers.
“It’s time to make this an industry-wide standard. There is no excuse not to,” McDonald said. “If we don’t, we’re going to find ourselves in a position where we’re looking back at it like the Catholic Church did during its sexual abuse scandal.”
At Spring Valley, Dianah was an honor roll student who struggled with depression and anxiety. Deputy Bradley was the adult the 15-year-old had confided in the most — more than any guidance counselor or teacher.
Bradley gave Dianah passes to get out of class whenever she felt overwhelmed. She would come to his office on the second floor and talk to him, often with the door closed.
When she learned during her meeting with Jackson that Bradley was back at Spring Valley, the 10th-grader was furious.
“I still don’t think it’s right that he’s back in school and going to do the same thing again to someone else,” Dianah told Jackson.
The captain apologized that more wouldn’t be done: The department had “prematurely” closed the investigation, she explained, “without looking at all of the evidence,” according to meeting notes. Jackson, who declined to comment, had been told to “move on.”
Jackson noted in her report that the investigation was closed while she was out of the office.
Dianah warned that she would not be the last girl to come forward.
She would be right.
Bradley is now facing sex crime charges — not for his behavior with Dianah, but for allegedly abusing two other female students.
If convicted, Bradley could be sentenced to a maximum of 15 years in prison and be required to register as a sex offender. But prosecutors have offered Bradley a deal, they said. In exchange for a guilty plea, they will recommend Bradley receive probation and no time on the sex offender registry. On Tuesday, the proposed plea will be presented to a judge.
One of the girls Bradley is charged with abusing told The Post she believed she could trust the school resource officer because he was married to a therapist she’d been seeing for years. When Bradley started touching her, she said, he called her “his little secret.”
The girl and a teacher she confided in described her years as a patient of Bradley’s wife. The Post also reviewed the girl’s medical records with her permission.
Her alleged assault occurred after Dianah’s, during the 15 months that Richland County kept Bradley working as a school resource officer.
The sheriff’s department would eventually move him. First, to an elementary school. Then to a middle school. And finally to jail.
‘A great school resource officer’
Bradley’s career in law enforcement began when he met Sheriff Lott at a prayer breakfast in 2007.
They were seated at the same table, Lott would later recount to The State newspaper, when the sheriff asked the former college athlete what he wanted to do next.
Growing up in West Virginia, Bradley had been teased about his speech impairment after he lost 80 percent of his hearing. He told Lott he hoped to work with kids and be a role model for children with disabilities.
“Good, you’ll make a great school resource officer,” Lott assured him.
During a background check obtained by The Post, Bradley, then 28, admitted that he may have given alcohol to people underage. A polygraph report indicated deception when he was asked about using or selling drugs illegally. Still, Bradley was assigned to work at Joseph Keels Elementary School — at least six months before he finished basic training at the police academy.
Bradley’s polygraph report, training and assignments are detailed in his state licensing records and court documents.
In 2009, Bradley moved to Spring Valley High, which had about 1,900 students. Within a year, another school resource officer, Ben Fields, alerted the sheriff’s department about Bradley. Fields told The Post that he was concerned Bradley was acting inappropriately with teenage girls, including driving them home in his patrol vehicle. Bradley was verbally counseled, department records show.
Then, in November 2011, Fields forwarded a complaint to a supervisor on the force: A Spring Valley administrator was reporting Bradley for advising a student that her dress was not too sheer and short — after the administrator had explicitly said it was.
Bradley’s supervisor was already dealing with another complaint, from a cheerleading coach.
The coach, Blythe Branham, said in an interview with The Post that she saw Bradley flirting with one of her varsity cheerleaders at every home football game. With the cheerleader’s permission, The Post is identifying her by her first name, Jade.
Jade had met Bradley years earlier at Joseph Keels Elementary.
When Branham questioned Jade about her relationship with Bradley, the teenager shared that they communicated on Facebook and talked about how it wouldn’t be long before she turned 18.
“The other officers know that he is mine,” Jade told Branham.
The conversation between Jade and her coach is documented in law enforcement records. Both recounted the details to The Post.
Alarmed, the cheerleading coach reported Bradley’s behavior.
The school resource officer denied anything inappropriate had happened with Jade, according to internal affairs records, and said they never conversed on Facebook.
When the 17-year-old and her parents were brought in for questioning in November 2011, Jade protected Bradley, she later told The Post. She didn’t mention the hugs that the school resource officer gave her. Or how he always told her she was pretty.
The coach’s complaint was deemed unfounded, internal affairs records show. The teenager had repeated that she communicated with Bradley on Facebook — but she said no one in the sheriff’s department asked to see the messages.
‘Delete..school can see this’
It took nearly two years after Bradley was hired for him to get any specialized school resource officer training.
This delay isn’t unusual in the world of school policing. The Post analyzed policies and laws across the country and found the majority of states allow school resource officers, often called SROs, to start working on campuses before they complete specialized training. More than a third of states have no SRO training requirements at all.
When officers do receive this education, they are typically instructed that part of their role is to counsel struggling kids. That tremendous access and authority comes with few guardrails, The Post found. In dozens of cases, arrested SROs were accused of abusing children on school grounds, including in their offices.
Mo Canady, executive director for the National Association of School Resource Officers, told The Post that officers should never be alone with kids behind closed doors or exchange texts or social media messages with students.
“This is something that every SRO working in the school should be required to read and to know,” Canady said.
Yet those instructions appear nowhere in the group’s guidelines for officers, which are widely seen as the gold standard for school police programs across the country. The organization, which has received nearly $2 million in Justice Department funding since 2013, uses its “Best Practices” guide to advise schools and law enforcement agencies on everything from what type of uniforms SROs should wear to what paper supplies they need; but not on appropriate boundaries between officers and students.
When pressed by The Post, Canady said the failure to address sexual misconduct is an oversight the organization is now planning to fix.
(Madeline Gray for The Washington Post)
At Spring Valley, students and educators said, Bradley was known for giving out fist bumps and high fives, but usually reserved his hugs for girls.
One former student told The Post that when she was a 17-year-old senior in 2015, the officer gave passes to her and her friends whenever they wanted to skip class and hang out in his office.
Then the senior started going to see Bradley, who was nearly 20 years older, alone. With her permission, The Post is identifying her by her middle name, Jennifer.
That October, Bradley invited Jennifer to meet him before school. They made the arrangements using their school email.
When Jennifer sent her cellphone number, Bradley responded, “Delete..school can see this.”
Emails, phone records, depositions and agency documents detail Jennifer’s interactions with Bradley and law enforcement officials. She recounted them to The Post as well.
Ten days later, a school resource officer at Spring Valley made headlines all over the world. But it wasn’t Bradley.
Deputy Fields was filmed as he removed a Black student from class because she was refusing to follow instructions. The video showed Fields, who is White, yanking her out of a chair and throwing her across the classroom. Bradley then helped him handcuff and arrest the girl.
Community members had already complained to the Justice Department that too many children in Richland County were getting arrested for petty classroom disturbances and ending up in the criminal justice system — concerns, they said, that were dismissed by Sheriff Lott.
Community members described their interactions with Lott and the Justice Department, and shared emails about the sheriff.
Now Lott, whose school policing program had received more than $2.7 million in federal funding, moved quickly to defuse the outrage over the video. Within days, he held a news conference to announce the firing of Fields. Though local and federal authorities would ultimately choose not to bring charges against Fields, the sheriff made it clear to the public: He was calling on the FBI to investigate.
But Lott had a different response weeks later when two of his deputies spotted Bradley in a secluded part of a Target parking lot with a female student at 10:30 p.m. It was Jennifer.
“Based on the sensitivity of this issue and the fact that very little people needed to know about this,” Bradley’s supervisor, Capt. John Ewing Jr., wrote in a memo, “I skipped the Chain of Command and spoke with Sheriff Lott.”
Rather than have internal affairs handle the matter, Lott instructed Ewing, one of his roughly 700 sworn deputies, to interview the girl himself.
Ewing described his handling of the incident in a memo and deposition reviewed by The Post. Lott testified years later that he didn’t remember asking Ewing to handle the investigation instead of internal affairs.
Jennifer looked at the captain standing in her principal’s office and assumed she was in trouble. She grew more uneasy as Ewing quizzed her about Bradley. Why were they in a dark parking lot together the night before?
Years later, in a sworn deposition, Jennifer would describe what happened with Bradley her senior year: They were regularly having sex in his school office. He also had the teenager visit him at his home, she said, advising her on how to avoid his security camera.
But in 2015, Jennifer thought she was in a relationship with Bradley — one the school resource officer had instructed her to keep quiet. So the 17-year-old described him as a mentor.
Jennifer and Bradley told Ewing different stories about why they met in the Target parking lot: She said she was seeking his advice about asking a boy to a dance, while he said he was advising her on “one of her friends who was being a ‘bitch.’”
Ewing, who declined to comment to The Post, noted the discrepancy in their statements in his memo but didn’t probe further. He would later testify that he did not review Bradley’s school emails or records from his department-issued cellphone. If he had, the supervisor would have discovered more than 20 phone calls, records show, between Bradley and the high school senior.
Ewing closed his inquiry by giving Bradley a verbal reprimand for meeting a student after hours. It was the fourth time in five years Bradley had been accused of inappropriate behavior. No one from the school district or the sheriff’s department notified Jennifer’s parents that there were concerns about her interactions with a school resource officer.
The outcome of the inquiry and the other complaints are detailed in department documents and court records.
Weeks after the incident, Jeff Temoney, Spring Valley’s principal, gave Bradley his evaluation. The two men had known each other since their days at the University of South Carolina. Temoney, who declined to comment, gave Bradley the top score for his relationships with students. He ended the evaluation with a written request to the sheriff’s department: Please keep Bradley at Spring Valley.
But the questions about Bradley didn’t disappear. Days before graduation in May 2016, there was another complaint about Bradley’s behavior — this time from the mother of one of Jennifer’s friends.
She sent an email to the principal, telling Temoney he should train the staff “on NOT having sexual relations with [their] students.” And she went above him, briefing the assistant superintendent and the superintendent about the situation.
District officials chose not to launch their own review — despite federal requirements under Title IX to investigate allegations of sexual harassment and assault. The school’s Title IX coordinator later testified she was not informed about the complaint, and Temoney, in his deposition, stated law enforcement was handling the matter.
At the sheriff’s department, internal affairs opened an investigation. Bradley was asked a total of seven questions, according to agency records, and he denied having sexual contact with a student. The investigation was closed and labeled “non-sustained” because of insufficient evidence. Jennifer said she and her parents were not contacted.
But by the start of the next academic year, the supervision of the school police program was no longer going to be left to Richland County officials alone. The Justice Department’s Office for Civil Rights had launched a three-year monitoring process and was requiring the sheriff to turn over all recent allegations of “improper behavior” involving school resource officers.
It’s not clear whether the sheriff’s department failed to turn over the complaints about Bradley and Jennifer — or if federal officials chose not to further investigate them. The Justice Department declined to answer any questions about Bradley or the complaints against him.
Bradley returned to Spring Valley that August, as Dianah started her freshman year.
‘Where there is smoke, there is fire’
Dianah’s mom was thrilled to see Bradley at Spring Valley’s 2016 freshman orientation. The school resource officer had helped her sons, she said, and now he was promising to look out for Dianah, her youngest child.
She remembered him assuring her: “You don’t have anything to worry about.”
Before long, Dianah was confiding in Bradley about problems with friends, a bad breakup and a hospitalization for her mental health. In the fall of her sophomore year, Bradley was featured in a local newspaper for his talent connecting with kids.
By then, Dianah was retreating into Bradley’s office almost every day. Bradley, she said, began closing the door more often.
A friend of Dianah’s told The Post that in early 2018, she grew worried when the school resource officer began talking to Dianah about his personal life and getting physical with her, hugging the teen and putting his arm around her waist.
One day in March, Dianah found her friend in the hallway and revealed that Bradley had just groped her in his office. The friend said she quickly told a school administrator.
Then, the friend’s mother wrote the principal, alerting him to “disturbing information about inappropriate behavior and comments” from Bradley.
“I know as a parent and a former law enforcement officer, that where there is smoke, there is fire,” the mother wrote in an email reviewed by The Post. “I’m relying on you that this matter will be thoroughly investigated.”
The next day, an assistant principal, Stacey Baker, met with Dianah to find out what was going on.
Dianah’s conversations with school officials are detailed in law enforcement records, school memos and depositions.
Dianah thought about Bradley, who’d mentored her for nearly two years. She thought about his two children. She said she also thought about how violated she’d felt when he put his hands on her body.
In the coming days, the teen described to Baker a hypothetical girl named “Ashley” and a school resource officer she called “the married one with two kids.” In his office, Dianah said, the school resource officer had pushed “Ashley” on a table and kissed and touched her. Sometimes, instead of talking about “Ashley,” Dianah slipped and said “I” and “me.”
“She kept talking about how guilty she felt, how she did not want to get him fired,” the assistant principal wrote in a memo.
Baker told The Post that when she spoke to Dianah, she had not been aware of the history of complaints against Bradley. The 15-year-old was a private, mature kid who didn’t like drama, Baker said. She immediately believed Dianah.
Once, Baker said, Dianah had hid behind her in the cafeteria because Bradley was walking toward her.
Baker advised Temoney that it was an unnecessary risk for Bradley to remain at Spring Valley.
Baker, who no longer works in the school district, recounted her interactions with school and law enforcement officials in a memo, deposition and interview with The Post.
But the principal told Ewing, Bradley’s supervisor, that Dianah might be making up the story to switch schools and said there were no “red flags” about Bradley’s behavior, according to law enforcement records. Ewing instructed Bradley to stay away from Dianah. The sheriff’s department determined “there is nothing further to be done.”
The next week, Dianah told her story again, this time to her therapist, who contacted the sheriff’s department. They arranged for the teen to meet with a specially trained forensic interviewer.
In video recordings of the interviews reviewed by The Post, Dianah said Bradley molested her in his office twice and groped her on campus three times, including once between her legs when the principal was standing nearby.
She knew there had been other accusations made against him. He’d told her that himself, worrying that he might be transferred from Spring Valley if there were more.
Bradley, when questioned by law enforcement, confirmed he had told Dianah about past accusations.
By reporting Bradley, the 10th-grader thought, surely the adults would finally do something to stop him.
‘Purposely non-cooperative’
Once again Bradley was summoned for questioning. Once again he denied any sexual contact with a student. This time, though, he admitted to leaving his body camera off several times when he was with Dianah.
On the day Dianah said she was assaulted, there was a graduate student in his office who could vouch for him, he claimed. That woman told investigators she wasn’t there that morning — but she had once returned to the office and found the door locked. When Bradley opened it, Dianah was inside, crying.
The graduate student shared her observations of Bradley and Dianah with The Post and in statements to law enforcement.
Bradley was given a polygraph and determined to be “purposely non-cooperative.” The deputy who administered the polygraph later testified that he did not believe Bradley was being truthful about whether he touched Dianah.
Questioned again after the polygraph, Bradley told investigators he “might” have kissed the girl on the head “in a comforting way.”
A lieutenant with the special victim’s unit and Jackson, the captain who’d talked with Dianah and her therapist, recommended that Bradley “not be placed back at Spring Valley in light of these allegations and that he be moved from the SRO program,” according to an investigative report.
The sheriff’s department reassigned Bradley to an elementary school instead. The district learned on April 27, 2018, that he would not be returning to Spring Valley.
That same day, the department found out that social services, which handles claims of child abuse, showed up at Bradley’s house. Someone had notified them, according to law enforcement records, that the school resource officer had been accused of inappropriately touching four girls. The agency wanted to put Bradley’s family on a safety plan, which could have involved temporarily removing his own children from the home.
Bradley contacted Sheriff Lott, the man who’d recruited and championed him.
The social services visit and Bradley’s contact with Lott are documented in a law enforcement report and confirmed by a deputy who was present.
Within hours, the sheriff’s department agreed to close the criminal case, with no further questioning of Dianah or Bradley. Dianah’s friend and the friend’s mother, who both reported concerns about Bradley’s conduct, said they were never contacted. A memo, which was shared with social services, concluded there was not enough probable cause to pursue an arrest warrant for Bradley.
Spring Valley was told there was a change of plans: Bradley was coming back.
‘A monster that worked among us’
Three years had passed since Jennifer, the girl who was seen alone with Bradley in a Target parking lot, had graduated. She was on a trip to North Carolina in the summer of 2019 when her roommate FaceTimed her.
Jamel Bradley was standing in her apartment, in his uniform. He warned Jennifer that the Richland County Sheriff’s Department was looking into allegations made by another girl.
Jennifer recounted Bradley’s visit to her home and their conversation in an affidavit and deposition, as well as in an interview with The Post.
Dianah and her mother had filed a lawsuit against the school resource officer, the sheriff’s department and the school district. The allegations she’d once made privately were now public.
In a letter to the sheriff’s department, school officials said they didn’t want Bradley working in their district anymore. The department’s solution: move Bradley to a middle school in one of Richland County’s other school districts.
The lawsuit also forced the sheriff to turn over years of complaints including ones with Jade, the varsity cheerleader, and Jennifer.
A judge ordered the sheriff’s department to release records to Dianah and her mother and pay attorneys’ fees after failing to follow public records laws. Despite the judge’s order, the department has refused to release some of those same records to The Post, including a video of Bradley’s polygraph.
Jennifer would later testify that she hadn’t seen the school resource officer since her senior year. She had no idea how he found her apartment.
“Did you have sex with this girl?” she asked over FaceTime.
No, he responded.
Jennifer said his instructions to her were clear: She needed to cover for him. She told him not to worry; she didn’t want to revisit that period of her life.
But Jennifer kept receiving unwanted visitors, she said. Someone from the sheriff’s department went looking for her at her job and her childhood home.
Then, in October 2019, the department’s attorney, Joanna McDuffie, showed up on Jennifer’s doorstep. McDuffie did not return messages seeking comment. Jennifer called her own lawyer.
“They kept harassing me,” she told The Post.
If their goal had been to silence her, it had the opposite effect. When Jennifer was called to give a deposition in Dianah’s lawsuit, she testified that Bradley had repeatedly had sex with her in his school office. Attorneys accused her of lying about their relationship.
Jennifer suggested officials could have easily figured out what was happening if they had done a better job investigating.
“There’s like call logs and emails,” Jennifer testified. “So how long could someone, like, lie and say, ‘No, nothing’s going on?’”
The next day, Nov. 20, 2019, Sheriff Lott held a news conference. He gripped the sides of a wooden lectern and made an announcement: Bradley had been charged with criminal sexual conduct.
Bradley wasn’t being arrested for what happened with Jade, Jennifer or Dianah. Another teenage girl from Spring Valley High had just come forward with an allegation about Bradley.
With her permission, The Post is identifying her by her first name, Kay.
Kay had been warned about Bradley when she was a junior in the spring of 2018. A teacher, she told The Post, refused to let her go alone to Bradley’s office: “I’m just trying to protect you because he’s under investigation. You need to know.”
Kay and the teacher each recounted the conversation in interviews with The Post.
Bradley assured Kay that he’d done nothing wrong. She believed him.
“I would remind myself, like, this is a police officer, police officers don’t do that,” Kay said. “I thought, basically, he wasn’t going to do anything to me because I go to his wife for therapy.”
Instead of telling his wife what Bradley eventually did to her, she stopped showing up for therapy. His wife did not return messages from The Post seeking comment.
(Madeline Gray for The Washington Post)
At the start of Kay’s senior year, Bradley had been reassigned to an elementary school. But the 17-year-old kept seeing the deputy, she said, because he was allowed to patrol at Spring Valley football games.
It was there, at the same field where a cheerleading coach had reported the school resource officer for inappropriate behavior seven years earlier, that Kay said he groped her breasts and butt. Once, she alleged, he molested her when her father was in a car nearby, unaware.
Kay’s friend first reported Bradley’s alleged abuse of Kay to school officials. Statements from the friend and Kay are documented in school and law enforcement records.
(Madeline Gray for The Washington Post)
During a storm in October 2018, Bradley showed up at Kay’s home late at night and instructed the teen to get in his patrol car. He drove in the pouring rain to a dead-end street, where he penetrated her with his fingers as she told him no and tried to push him away, she said she reported to investigators.
When Kay came forward in November 2019, she said, investigators told her there were accusations involving 15 to 20 girls. The sheriff’s department declined to disclose to The Post the number of allegations against Bradley.
At the news conference announcing Bradley’s arrest, Lott said the deputy had been removed from the school police program and then terminated for interfering with an investigation.
Just a few months earlier, in his deposition for Dianah’s lawsuit, Lott had defended Bradley, testifying he thought Dianah was making up her allegations and asserting that he did not find the repeated accusations of inappropriate behavior with other girls suspicious.
But in front of the television cameras, the sheriff apologized for Bradley’s behavior, declaring he’d like to kill him and calling him a sexual predator. What Lott said next would infuriate Dianah, Jennifer and Kay for years to come.
“We had a monster that worked among us,” Lott said, “that we did not know about. But we do now know.”
‘Accountability’
Jade, Jennifer, Dianah and Kay have never talked to one another and don’t know each other’s names.
Looking back, Jade said, it’s obvious that Bradley was grooming her. If her cheerleading coach hadn’t complained, if her parents hadn’t been alerted, Jade believes she could have been the girl in the Target parking lot.
It took Jennifer years to accept that it wasn’t her responsibility, at 17, to stop Bradley. She sued the school district, which gave her a $600,000 settlement. But her case against the sheriff’s department was thrown out after its attorneys argued the statute of limitations had expired.
Bradley was charged with sexual battery with a student for what Jennifer revealed in her deposition. The criminal cases against Bradley, now 45, have dragged on for more than four years. He has remained free after posting bond.
Kay burned the clothes she wore the night of the storm when she said Bradley assaulted her. She’s never learned to drive. Every time she is in a car, she fears getting pulled over by a cop. Every time it rains, she hears Bradley’s voice telling her to get in his police cruiser.
Dianah eventually returned to Spring Valley and spent her last two years there fighting school and law enforcement leaders to take responsibility. Her case against the school district and the sheriff’s department led to a $900,000 settlement. The sheriff’s department would not agree to resolve the lawsuit, Dianah said, while Lott was still running for reelection in 2020. The case ended two days after Lott won his seventh term.
Terms of the settlement are detailed in county and court records and documented by Dianah’s lawyers.
But the settlement did not come with any admission of wrongdoing. The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, which often handles criminal investigations of officers, said neither the sheriff’s department nor prosecutor’s office has asked it to review Dianah’s sexual assault complaint.
No one, Dianah said, has ever apologized to her for what happened.
“There’s not a single person on this earth who has taken accountability,” Dianah said.
Principal Temoney, who once urged the sheriff’s department to keep Bradley at Spring Valley, is still running the high school.
Ewing, the supervisor who did not review Bradley’s emails or cellphone records after he was seen with Jennifer in a secluded parking lot, served for a time as inspector general of the state’s department of juvenile justice.
The Justice Department, which was monitoring Richland County’s school policing program during the sexual assault investigation into Bradley, ended its review by commending the sheriff’s handling of misconduct complaints.
Lott, who claimed he did not know Bradley was a monster until nine years after the first complaint, was named 2021 National Sheriff of the Year. This November, he is expected to win an eighth term in office.
