- Kaitlyn Cannon sued her former math teacher after learning her nude photos were posted from his computer.
- Cannon sent the intimate photos to a boyfriend years before they ended up online.
- The teacher's lawyer implied in court that he wasn't the first to post them online.
TOMS RIVER, NJ — Kaitlyn Cannon was fresh out of Pennsylvania State University, and embarking on what she felt was a promising career in television news, when a March 2018 text message changed her life.
An old friend reached out with nightmare news: intimate photos of Cannon were on a website notorious for trafficking in non-consensual pornography — or "revenge porn."
Cannon had sent the photos to an old boyfriend when she was in college and they were still dating. Now she's won a New Jersey lawsuit against her high school math teacher after an investigation revealed the nude selfies were posted from his home IP address.
An Ocean County jury on Friday found that Christopher Doyle, who was Cannon's teacher at Wall High School in New Jersey, disseminated 14 of her nude and semi-nude selfies online. She still has no idea how he got them.
"I was shocked and confused, hoping it wasn't real," Cannon testified Wednesday in Ocean County Superior Court.
Some of the photos showed her face, and all revealed her uniquely-spelled first name, her last initial, and her small South Jersey hometown. That explained why in the weeks earlier Cannon had received more than 10 creepy Facebook requests from men across the state. It also explained why her parents and grandmother would soon answer their home phones to hear heavy breathing and men speaking lewdly, she testified.
It was scary for Cannon, now 29, but that fear turned to outrage when her lawyer's investigation uncovered that the photos were linked to an IP address for Doyle — a man who once taught her math and coached her sister in tennis.
"I didn't think there would be someone in my life who would do this kind of thing," Cannon said sobbing on the witness stand last Wednesday. "He's my former teacher. He's not someone who's supposed to see me that way."
After five years of nightmares, panic attacks, lost friends, and what she described as hundreds of hours in therapy, the jury of four women and three men decided Cannon was owed $10,000 in damages for the violation of her privacy.
Doyle was found to have violated New Jersey's nonconsensual pornography statute as well as a law against publicly disclosing private facts.
Cannon's lawyer, Cali P. Madia, told Insider that the jury didn't believe when Doyle said in court that he did not remember whether or not he posted the photos.
Doyle's attorney did not return a call for comment Monday, and declined to comment on Doyle's defense in court last week.
"Unfortunately, despite this egregious finding, the jury awarded KC a mere $10,000 in damages," Madia told Insider. "We're obviously delighted that the jury saw through the defendant's story, but also disappointed that the award doesn't reflect the real harm the defendant caused."
Doyle taught math and coached high school tennis before resigning due to the allegations
Doyle is a tall, stout man with a bald head and a graying beard. He began teaching math at Wall High School in 2004. There, he also coached tennis for young men and women.
He resigned from the school because of the allegations, his lawyer said in court last week. Doyle sat in the Jersey Shore courtroom on August 15 hunched in a charcoal-covered suit and shielded his face with his hand so as to not be photographed.
Cannon wore black pants, a gray jacket, and her flowing hair with blonde highlights fell down her back.
On the stand, she explained that she took the nude selfies around 2016 — about four years after graduating Wall High School — when she was a student at Penn State University. She sent them to her high-school boyfriend, whom she dated for four years.
"I wanted to express intimacy with him," she testified.
That young man, now her ex-boyfriend, later told her that he had lost that phone. How her photos traveled from that phone to Doyle's IP address at his Jackson, NJ home is a mystery.
What is not a mystery is that the Dutch website Anon-IB, which was shut down in a criminal investigation in late 2018, was a clearinghouse for non-consensual pornography. It grouped photos by cities and towns, allowing online Peeping Toms to search the internet for photos of their neighbor's naked bodies. Commenters referred to photos as "wins." As of Thursday, an anonymous porn site with the same name appeared to be back online.
Doyle's attorney, James Uilano, declined to explain his client's defense to Insider last Wednesday.
"I can't comment at all with the trial going on," he said last week outside the courtroom.
His cross-examination of witnesses, though, suggested he would argue his client was not the initial person to post the photos.
While not denying Cannon's charge that Doyle shared her photos on Anon-IB, Uilano implied that his client might not be the first nor only party to distribute them online.
"There's a theory Mr. Doyle would have seen them on the internet," he said.
Uilano asked Nicholas Larry, the chief legal compliance officer who worked on the subpoena Cannon's lawyer sent to Optimum, if a hacker could have been responsible for making it appear that photos were posted from Doyle's computer.
Larry replied that he had never discovered any such hacker in all his assisting with thousands of criminal child pornography, kidnapping, and mass-shooting threat cases.
Uilano also questioned a pair of sexual abuse experts about the true severity of Cannon's trauma, given that she now has both a steady job and a husband.
Doyle didn't allow an Insider reporter to approach him at the courthouse last week. An email sent to a freshman math teacher named Christopher Doyle at the Perth Amboy High School — a 40-minute drive from where he taught Cannon — was not returned.
The Wall School District did not return a call from Insider to confirm Doyle's resignation. The Perth Amboy school district also did not return calls to confirm whether Doyle is currently a teacher there.
'I felt unsafety in my own body, feeling like it didn't belong to me anymore'
Cannon's husband, Beck Miller, testified on Wednesday about his wife's ongoing struggles.
"She is constantly on edge, even still," he said.
Cannon shivered in the courtroom and fought tears as she testified. Though her lawyer had succeeded in getting her private photos removed from the message board two weeks after they appeared, Cannon explained that she will be forever haunted by wondering who saw them, who might have copied them, and if they could reappear. She testified that for the first time in her life, she suffered panic attacks, uncontrollable crying, excruciating abdominal pain, appetite loss, intimacy struggles, and extreme distrust of strangers and friends.
"It ruined my whole life in New Jersey because I felt like I couldn't leave my house," she said. "I felt unsafety in my own body, feeling like it didn't belong to me anymore."
Cannon was overwhelmed with shock after discovering her former teacher's apparent culpability
Asia Eaton, who teaches psychology at Florida International University, testified in a videotaped deposition played in court that Cannon's symptoms were a "textbook case" of image-based sexual abuse.
The common term "revenge porn" is misleading, she said, because abusers often have other motives including status, sexual gratification, and money.
"She is very clearly a victim of non-consensual pornography," Eaton testified.
Cannon told the jury, and Insider that she kept the ordeal secret from her parents, knowing they were of "a different generation" when "this didn't exist."
She opened up to them eventually because she felt responsible for the harassing calls to their home. Initially, her mother did not understand her choices, but never wavered from unconditional love. Cannon's mother sat in the front row of the courtroom and dabbed her eyes with a tissue.
Cannon testified that when she discovered her former teacher's apparent culpability in sharing these pictures online, she was overwhelmed with feelings of shock, violation, and revulsion that sent her back to therapy. She was diagnosed with PTSD and prescribed antidepressants. She still goes to therapy weekly and expects to continue indefinitely.
"Someone that is on these websites looking for photos of people they used to teach, people who are still in school, that is really concerning to me," she testified. "Part of the reason I'm here today, it bothers me really deeply."
Cannon told the jury and Insider that she went to local police to report the incident, but they didn't end up bringing criminal charges against Doyle.
Despite being distraught over the leaking of the photos, Cannon told Insider she never blamed herself.
"I don't think I ever really felt shame. I sent them to my partner that I dated for four years long distance. I always had a very strong opinion about the fact that I should be able to express myself whatever way that I want to, and I shouldn't be punished for it and abused for it," she told Insider. "That was something that I held true."
Cannon wants to bring awareness to the damaging toll of 'revenge porn'
Eventually, Cannon quit television news and enrolled in graduate school at the University of North Carolina to become a therapist. Now that she works closely with sexual assault victims, she's become more public about her own experience as a victim.
She was quoted by first name in an October 2020 Washington Post article about revenge porn. She also posts TikTok videos about her experience and the mental health effects of revenge porn using the handle "revengeprngirl."
To Cannon, sharing intimate photos is a younger generation's way of owning their sexuality — and this breach of privacy wouldn't stop her from expressing herself.
It does, however, serve as a reminder for people to be more conscious about how their photos are shared online and to be explicit about how they are permitting their photos to be used, Cannon told Insider.
In an interview with Insider, Cannon said she is motivated to speak out — using her full legal name for the first time — because she wants to bring awareness to "how prominent and damaging" anonymous porn can be.
Cannon told Insider her civil case is not about making an example out of Doyle, but rather holding him accountable.
"These websites work by being organized by country, then state, and then town. He went to a page for young women in the town that he works in, and he was looking for naked photos," she said. "To me, that's so alarming. There could have been people who are still his students on these websites."