Gay Teacher Fired After Hacker Posts Sex Tape on School Website
An anonymous hacker hacked into a Dropbox account of a gay teacher and then posted the contents of the account on a school website. Brian Cody Bray, a high school teacher from a suburb of Little Rock, Arkansas stated that an anonymous hacker gained access to a video of him and another man having sex which he had saved on Dropbox and posted it to the school’s website.
After seeing the his video on the faculty website, the school authorities promptly fired him. Now Bray is fighting back against the school authorities, who he says. denied him severance pay and insinuated that he was partially responsible.
Bray told Washington Blade that he was home sick when a school colleague called to tell him about the video posted on his faculty page.
“Pretty much immediately after that phone call I went to the bathroom and threw up,” Bray told the Blade. “I was just in shock that, oh, my God, this is something that will impact my career, impact my life, and what am I going to do?”
Bray tried to explain to the school administrators that he was a victim of hack attack and a hacker had accessed his email account and stolen his passwords to other sites, including his Dropbox account, and phone numbers of students he called regularly about school activities. He also said that the video in question was also stored on Dropbox. The hacker changed the name of the file the video was stored in from “Private” to “FagTeachBray.”
The hacker than sent anonymous texts the students whose number was saved on Bray’s Dropbox account. The message would direct the students to the school website where the video was posted, according to the report.
Bray tried to explain the situation to the school authorities as well as his students by setting up a website to explain how he was a victim of a cyber crime.
Bray admitted that he was wrong and deserved to be fired, “Of course I had to be dismissed at the time because I had lost any kind of authority with my students there.” He also told the Blade he wasn’t ready to return the classroom at that point due to the emotional distress.
However, school officials denied Bray severance pay and insinuated to the school community that he was partially responsible for the situation. Administrators filed an ethics complaint against him with the Arkansas Professional Licensure Standards Board, which has authority to revoke teachers’ licenses. After investigating the charges, the board concluded there was insufficient evidence to discipline him.
Bray says he has filed a police report, but the police were not according importance to his case, which he says, comes under hate crime. Arkansas does not have a hate-crimes law. The Maumelle police department, Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office, and the FBI all declined to comment on whether they were investigating the claims.
