TEACHER CHARGED WITH FORCING BOY TO MAKE PORN VIDEO

Frank Bauer, an art teacher at Salegian High School, a parochial boys school, is charged with posing online as a woman so that he could blackmail a teenage student to make pornographic videos.  Bauer allegedly concocted a scheme last year to coerce the youth to produce sexually explicit videos.  The student was under the age of 16 when he struck up the online friendship with Bauer last year.  When the boy tried to end the relationship, the fictitious e-mail acquaintance allegedly threatened to circulate doctored photographs of the youth engaging in sexual activity to his schoolmates and to post the images on the Internet.  To avoid this, the youth was told he had to produce a pornographic video of himself and leave it at a designated spot in the high school.  He made the video and left it in the school but when he was told to make four more videos, he approached Bauer for help not realizing his teacher actually was behind the scheme.  The teacher allegedly told the boy he would send an e-mail to the woman on the teen's behalf.  The boy told his parents what had been going on and they contacted the police.  Police, working with the district attorney's High Technology Crime Bureau, traced the e-mail to Bauer.  Bauer is free on $50,000 bond after pleading innocent at his arraignment on charges of extortion and use of a child in a sexual performance.  He faces up to 15 years in prison.