A California teacher who was outed in a YouTube video by a former student who accused her of molesting her has been charged with sexual abuse.
The former teacher, Andrea Michelle Cardosa, was charged with abusing two girls over a 13-year-period while teaching at schools they attended in Riverside and Perris, both suburbs east of Los Angeles, said John Hall, a spokesman for the Riverside County District Attorney's office.
Cardosa faces a total of 16 counts of child sex abuse—five counts of aggravated sexual assault on a child and 11 counts of lewd acts on a child.
Investigators said the charges stemmed from a video posted on YouTube in video called "A call to my childhood rapist teacher," posted in January. In the video, which has been seen more than one million times, a woman identified as "Jamie X" confronts Cardosa via telephone. The video is believed to have prompted a second victim to come forward as well.
In the video, Jamie X also expresses her frustration that the statute of limitations has expired; however, the district attorney's office said that is not the case:
Because the five aggravated sexual assault charges carry a life sentence, the statute of limitations does not apply though the alleged crimes took place between 1997 and 2001, district attorney's spokesman [Hall] said.
Cardosa is currently held on $5 million bail and is scheduled to be arraigned on Thursday. So far, details of the investigation have traced the abuse as far back as 1997.
Riverside detectives investigated allegations that Cardosa had illegal sexual contact with the first accuser from 1997 to 2001, when the victim was a middle school student in Riverside and continuing when she was in high school. The second accuser is alleged to have been victimized when she was a high school student in Perris, in Riverside County, in 2009 or 2010.
Cardosa's lawyer, Randy Collins, said he had not yet seen any evidence from prosecutors beyond the charges themselves. He said he planned to immediately seek a reduction in bail and will file a motion seeking to have the charges dismissed on grounds the alleged acts were outside the statute of limitations.
Image via Riverside County Sheriff