In what at times appears to be an epidemic of teachers grooming and becoming sexually involved with their pupils, a former New Jersey high school teacher was sentenced to ten years in prison this week for sex charges involving two of her students.
Julie Rizzitello, 37, who taught at Wall High School in Wall Township, a town of about 26,000 in the heart of the Jersey Shore, had been charged with first grooming the two students and then having sex with them in various locations, including her family’s bagel shop.
The two victims worked at the shop at her suggestion, according to the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office.
Rizzitello plead guilty in September to two counts of second-degree sexual assault stemming from crimes in 2017 and 2024.
Authorities in the prosecutor’s Special Victims Bureau and Township police said that Rizzitello met one victim as a freshman and other as a junior at the high school, at first developing them as friends before escalating the relationship to sex.
“While the investigation was ongoing, Rizzitello also contacted both victims and asked that they delete evidence of the crimes from their personal electronic devices,” the prosecutor’s office said.
The teacher was arrested in July of 2024.
As Breitbart News has been reporting, rates of alleged sexual abuse involving educators have dramatically increased in studies conducted in the past two decades.
Monmouth County Prosecutor Raymond S. Santiago said:
These crimes were not isolated incidents constituting moments of poor judgment; they were textbook cases of grooming, involving a defendant who repeatedly leveraged tactics of isolation, manipulation, and control for the sake of her own selfish purposes. The egregious nature of the conduct was further compounded by the plain fact that the emotional and psychological harm she inflicted came at the expense of two of the very same young minds she had been entrusted to develop and nurture.
The school district hired Rizzitello in 2013. She taught English and earned an annual salary of about $62,000 before resigning after her arrest, according to news reports.
Under the terms set down by sentencing Monmouth County Superior Court Judge Jill G. O’Malley Rizzitello will be subjected to lifetime parole supervision, required to register as a sex offender, barred from contact with the victims, and ordered to permanently forfeit her teaching position.
Wall Township Police Chief Sean O’Halloran praised the victims for coming forward.
“I want to commend the courage of those who came forward to report these crimes. It is never easy to speak up, especially when the offender is someone in a position of trust,” O’Halloran said in an official news release.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets , which documents one of the worst cases of child abuse in U.S. history, and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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