A teacher who was sacked after her topless selfie ended up in the hands of a student has filed a $3 million lawsuit against the school district.
25-year-old Laura Miranda, a maths teacher at Bellport Middle School in Long Island, USA, claims she was fired after a student received a topless selfie of her.
She claims the photo was sent to her former partner, who was also a teacher in the district, two years ago. Miranda doesn’t know how the 2-year-old photo ended up in the student’s hands.
Her lawyer, John Ray, said his client was ‘wrongfully chastised’ by the school because of the topless photo and was sacked for not being a proper ‘role model.’
At a press conference, Miranda said: “Men can bare their chests without it being questioned or thought twice over, my upper torso is no more offensive than a man’s.
“It’s pure, I’m getting makeup in one hand, and I’m taking a picture in the other.
“My career has been ruined. My reputation has been tarnished. I have been stigmatized.
“What kind of role model am I, to now roll over and hide? I am showing my face and saying something happened to me that I didn’t want.”
Ray also said his client had been discriminated against by the district and that a male would never have received such treatment.
“Any time a man has ever exposed his chest, no one has ever commented or had any problem with it whatsoever. But when a woman displays her chest, as happened here, she gets fired from her job.
“This would never have happened to a male teacher. The Suffolk County Administrators and School Board have not yet discovered that women are equal to men. Lauren is rightly proud of her female torso. A woman’s breasts are not inherently prurient.”
He added that he also didn’t know if the student had been reprimanded or not.
Miranda also said: “He said, ‘How can I put you in front of a classroom where boys would be able to pull out their phone and look at this image of you?’.”
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