New Jersey High School Librarian Brings Defamation Suit Against Residents Accusing Her Of Being A "Child Predator"
Which of the four named defendants actually have children attending this particular high school? The answer is ZERO.
Roxana Russo Caivano has worked as a librarian at Roxbury High School in Morris County, New Jersey, for 15 years. Last month, she filed a defamation lawsuit in the Superior Court of Morris County against four residents of nearby towns, stating they have publicly accused her of “luring children with pornography” and described her as a “child predator”.
Caivano, who filed the lawsuit last month, says the attempts to defame her began last September, when Thomas Seritis, one of the defendants named in Caivano’s complaint, posted online that Caivano had included “hard-core pornography” in child pornography in the high school’s library. The other named defendants are Christina Scarbrough Balestriere, Kristen Cobo and Katrina Albo.
Balestriere, Cobo and Albo allegedly stated at a Roxbury Board of Education meeting on March 6, 2023, that Caivano had “engaged in luring children with sexually explicit materials” and “endangered the welfare of children”. The fear of children being led astray by evil (often sexual) forces is not new. It can be traced back to at least the Middle Ages — and is rooted in anti-Semitic believes.
The lawsuit alleges Caivano has suffered emotional distress, as the defendants have tried to interfere with her employment and prospective economic opportunities.
One of the book drawing objections is Maia Kobabe’s award-winning graphic novel Gender Queer: A Memoir. Maia Kobabe:
I did brace myself, in 2019 when the book was released, for a certain amount of negative attention online . . . Instead, Gender Queer was met with a wave of online love.
The first print run (just 5,000 copies) sold out the week the book was released. As I toured six states and numerous bookstores in 2019, I received only positive, often heartwarming and deeply moving, feedback. People told me they related to Gender Queer more than any other book they’d ever read. They told me it made them feel less alone. They told me they had shared the book with a parent, or a partner, or a friend, and it had opened up conversations they’d never been able to have before.
Caivano’s complaint notes: “None of these defendants have children who are students at Roxbury High School . . .”
Having people with no connection to the school pretend to be concerned parents has become a common tactic among far-right extremists, as they coordinate disruptive attacks against school boards and libraries. These attempts at banning books have evolved in recent years, from complaining about a certain book to attempts to remove hundreds of books at once.
There were 1,269 attempted book bans and restrictions in 2022, more than double the number of challenges from 2021 (729, which had been the previous record), according to the American Library Association. Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who directs the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom: “The last two years have been exhausting, frightening, outrage inducing.”
In 2019, objections were made against 566 books. That number increased to 1,858 in 2021 and more than 2,500 last year.
The vast majority of complaints, according to Caldwell-Stone, concern books with LGBTIQA+ or racial themes. Numerous states have passed (or are trying to pass) bills restricting the availability of books, including Texas, Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, and Oklahoma.
PEN America posted an update to its April 2022 report, Banned in the USA: Rising School Book Bans Threaten Free Expression and Students’ First Amendment Rights:
Bans occurred in 138 school districts in 32 states. These districts represent 5,049 schools with a combined enrollment of nearly 4 million students. . . .
Among the 1,648 unique banned book titles in the Index,
674 banned book titles (41 percent) explicitly address LGBTQ+ themes or have protagonists or prominent secondary characters who are LGBTQ+ (this includes a specific subset of titles for transgender characters or stories—145 titles, or 9 percent);
659 banned book titles (40 percent) contain protagonists or prominent secondary characters of color;
338 banned book titles (21 percent) directly address issues of race and racism;
357 banned book titles (22 percent) contain sexual content of varying kinds, including novels with some level of description of sexual experiences of teenagers, stories about teen pregnancy, sexual assault and abortion as well as informational books about puberty, sex, or relationships;
161 banned book titles (10 percent) have themes related to rights and activism;
141 banned book titles (9 percent) are either biography, autobiography, or memoir; and
64 banned book titles (4 percent) include characters and stories that reflect religious minorities, such as Jewish, Muslim and other faith traditions. . . .
PEN America estimates that at least 40 percent of the bans counted in the Index of School Book Bans for the 2021-22 school year are connected to political pressure exerted by state officials or elected lawmakers. . . .
Since March 2022, we have also seen for the first time educational gag orders passed that implicate restrictions on books, most notably in Florida, as well as a range of other new laws that have put pressure on schools to censor their libraries. . . .
Altogether, this report paints a deeply concerning picture for access to literature, and diverse literature in particular, in schools in the coming school year. Book banning and educational gag orders are two fronts in an all-out war on education and the open discussion and debate of ideas in America.
All across the US, librarians are under attack from far-right nutjobs, who target them at their work places, their homes, and online. Many school boards now conduct meetings with armed deputies in attendance. Following the maxim that “Every conservative accusation is a confession”, many on the far-right are being sued and arrested and jailed for sex crimes, often against children. A sampling:
Rudy Giuliani, who has disgraced and embarrassed himself in every way imaginable in recent years, is described as a “sexist sexual predator and abuser” in a January 2023 sexual harrassment lawsuit. (Also, Rudy’s “confused and hostile alcohol-laced tirades” often featured racist and antisemitic ravings.)
Matt Schlapp, the chair of American Conservative Union and a CPAC organizer, was accused in January 2023 of “sustained and unwanted and unsolicited” sexual contact with a campaign staffer working for Herschel Walker, including groping and fondling the young man’s crotch.
Ali Alexander, the founder of Stop the Steal, apologized earlier this month after texted surfaced of him asking a 15-year-old boy for nude photos (“jack-off material”) . Alexander apparently received nude photos from another teenager and made unwanted sexual advances to other young men. (He initially insisted, naturally, that the texts were “fake”.)
One of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s 2022 interns was Milo Yiannopoulos, who has said it’s fine if adult men have sexual relationships with boys as young as 13. The law refers to those relationships as “statutory rape”).
Drag queen, volleyball star, and serial liar George Santos has been accused of sexual harassment and of manipulating and dating teenagers.
Former Republican mayor Phillip Briggs (Spencerville, Ohio) was arrested for videotaping underage girls while they were undressing. Two of the girls were his girlfriend’s daughters.
Ted J. Tomaszewski, 53, a former Republican mayor in New Jersey, was arrested for the repeated sexual assault of a 15-year-old.
John Rose, a Tennessee representative and a Republican, was 42 years old when he met his wife — a 17-year-old high school student at an Future Farmers of America competition. No criminal conduct has been alleged, but Rose’s actions clearly fall under grooming, predatory behaviour.
Rocky Hayes, the Jones County Republican Party Chair, was charged with three counts of possessing child sexual exploitation material.
Gerald Fairbanks, a former Ada County (Idaho) sheriff’s deputy, has been charged with eight counts of lewd contact with a child and two counts of child sex abuse.
Daniel W. Merrick, a right-wing radio host (and Christian pastor), was charged in February 2023 with 886 counts of child sexual exploitation materials. (He blamed his wife.)
The grooming is coming from inside the house.