For Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader Sarah Jones, maintaining a clean reputation isn’t easy.
The 26-year-old ex-teacher’s first brush with scandal came when she sued TheDirty.com for publishing several derogatory posts about her.
Now Jones will be the one facing legal action as a Kentucky grand jury indicted her Thursday on charges of first-degree sexual abuse for allegedly having sex with a minor. The charges stem from when she was a freshman English teacher at Dixie Heights High School, a job from which she resigned last year for “personal reasons.”
Investigators say Jones had sex with a 16-year-old high school football player four or five times while she was employed at the school. She allegedly sent several text messages to the teen, leading to another charge of using electronic means to induce a minor to engage in sexual activities.
If convicted Jones could face up to five years in jail.
The grand jury also indicted her mother, Cheryl Jones, the principal at a Kentucky middle school, for tampering with evidence in her daughter’s case.
Lawyers for Sarah and Cheryl Jones told NBC WPTV that their clients would plead not guilty.
“Sarah has maintained her innocence,” their lawyer Charles Lester said in a statement. “The indictment of her mother is completely baseless.”
Sarah Jones is currently the captain of the Cincinnati Ben-Gals cheerleading squad.
In 2009 she made national headlines and appeared in television interviews after suing TheDirty.com for posting multiple salacious stories that claimed she slept with several Bengals players. The posts also said she had sex in her classroom.
“I literally broke down,” she told “20/20” last year. “I worked my butt off to make sure I had a clean, great reputation and then it was ruined by one post.”
Her defamation suit against TheDirty.com was scheduled to go to trial in June.