Gay teacher sacked as hacker posts sex tape to school website

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A gay teacher has spoken about being sacked from his job after a hacker posted a video of him having sex to a school website.

The teacher, Brian Cody Bray, 29, said he was sacked from his job at Maumelle Charter High School in Maumelle, Arkansas.

An unidentified hacker had stolen the video of him having sex with a male partner, and posted it to the website of the school, where students viewed it.

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Speaking to the Washington Blade, Bray said: “Pretty much immediately after that phone call I went to the bathroom and threw up.”

He says after finding out what had happened, he worried about the implications for his career, and more broadly his life.

Bray says he was called to a meeting with the school district executive director and school principal, to whom he tried to explain that his passwords and computer were hacked.

The video in question was contained in Dropbox, which the hacker gained access to, and was “a recording of an intimate encounter between myself and another informed, consenting adult male.”

The hacker, as well as posting the video, had changed the name of its containing folder from ‘Private’ to ‘FagTeachBray’.

While he did not discuss with students that he was gay, the maths and physics teacher’s sexual orientation was known.

As well as the video being posted to the school website on 28 September, on the same day a person identified as ‘Jonathan’ began texting students telling them that he is a “fag”, and encouraging them to watch the video.

Bray later said he doesn’t believe the hacker is a student, and that the hacker had blocked his own number when sending text messages.

He believes the hacker got the students’ numbers from his computer, on which he stored the number to contact them about class issues.

On October 8, Bray was terminated, told that the school and district had no other choice. They also offered no severance pay.

“Of course I had to be dismissed at the time because I had lost any kind of authority with my students there,” Bray said.

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To add insult to injury, the school district filed an ethics complaint with the Arkansas Professional Licensure Standards Board, however in January the Board said there was insufficient evidence that he had breached the code of conduct.

Bray has since filed a criminal complaint about the incident, but says he is unsure how thoroughly law enforcement agents are looking into the case.

The teacher now campaigns on LGBT issues, including for the introduction of anti-LGBT hate crimes protection in Arkansas.

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