State Sen. Manny Díaz accused of inappropriate behavior as Hialeah-Miami Lakes teacher
Prominent Miami state Sen. Manny Díaz Jr. is facing allegations of inappropriate behavior with former students — accusations he denies and is threatening legal action against — following social media posts and a broadcast by his accuser on Miami Spanish-language radio.
JennyLee Molina, a 2000 graduate of HialeahMiami Lakes Senior High when Díaz was a teacher there, accused Díaz of making inappropriate comments about drugs and clubbing to students, as well as on girls’ appearances, allegations that two other former students largely corroborated to the Miami Herald.
“I didn’t expect it to be [so] explosive because this was common knowledge, this was common culture that people knew about and talked about in circles,” Molina told the Herald.
Molina’s allegations first became public on Friday, when she tweeted that she
and her former high school classmates remember Díaz as a “pervert and inappropriate teacher” who she said would openly talk about doing ecstasy at Miami clubs.
Díaz, 47, taught social studies for four years at Hialeah-Miami Lakes beginning in 1995. He also spent two years as an assistant principal.
On Tuesday afternoon, Molina, 38, appeared on Radio Caracol, invited by former Hialeah mayor and radio show host Raul Martinez. She repeated the same allegations, and said she had not been contacted by Díaz to dispute what she had said on Friday.
Three hours after the radio interview aired, Díaz denied the claims for the first time in a statement provided to the Herald. He also posted the statement on his Instagram account Tuesday night, but disabled comments.
“It is disgusting and impermissible that Democrat operatives have fabricated a slanderous political attack to target me and my character because they dislike my strong conservative values and opinions,” Díaz said in the statement Tuesday. “My record proves that the comments that have been made about my career as an educator are baseless and defamatory.”
On Wednesday night, the state senator’s attorney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Radio Caracol for amplifying Molina’s allegations, which Díaz’s attorney labeled as “slanderous” and “politically driven.”
Earlier Wednesday, Roberto Cespedes, chief content producer at Radio Caracol, deferred questions on the matter to Martinez.
A communications professional, Molina worked as a temporary employee on President-elect Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. She says she’s never done political work until she lost all her firm’s clients due to COVID-19.
She tweeted her allegations in a response to
Díaz’s tweet questioning why Broward County Public Schools offered mental health services to students the day after President Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, resulting in the deaths of five people, including a Capitol Police officer, and not after the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer.
“When he addressed his concerns, I addressed mine,” Molina told the Herald. “He’s never talked about funding mental health; he’s never talked about funding teachers. It was a combination of all of those things.”
Accusations against Díaz trickled in on social media, including the Instagram and Facebook pages of local filmmaker Billy Corben and an account called “Dade,” which posted screenshots of Molina’s tweets. Several people commented on the social media posts and said they, too, had attended Hialeah Miami-Lakes and recalled similar stories about Díaz.
“He was always flirting with the girls and trying to be the popular teacher,” said Noel Pernas, 38, who said he had Díaz as a social studies teacher. “Everything she said about him is true, all the partying.”
A Miami Herald request for Díaz’s personnel file from Miami-Dade County Public Schools is pending. A spokeswoman from the school district says Díaz does not appear to have any disciplinary investigations in his file.
Díaz’s attorney, Robert H. Fernandez, said “there is absolutely nothing in any of his disciplinary records that would corroborate any disciplinary actions(s) or accusation(s) regarding improper conduct involving a student.”
Pernas, however, says he remembers Díaz always having conversations with female students, and his assistants — students who passed out paperwork and stayed after class — were all girls. Pernas says he doesn’t know Molina, but he, too, graduated in
2000.
Pernas says he doesn’t remember Díaz talking about drug use. He does remember Díaz acting
“like the older, cool brother” and talking to 15- and 16-year-olds about clubs, like the Baja Beach Club.
“He’s a whole total different person to what he was back then,” Pernas said. “I don’t know if he wants to be that now or he’s just doing that because of his career.”
Neyda Borges, who graduated in 1999 and now teaches journalism at Miami Lakes Educational Center, says she didn’t have Díaz as a teacher, but remembers he was one of the younger “cool” teachers in a culture of “really weird behavior.”
“He wanted to joke with the boys on the baseball team and talk about that kind of club culture,” she said, adding there were “insinuations that he was one of those people who would look the other way if kids were engaging in all kinds of stuff or [comment on] what girls were wearing.”
Borges says the allegations haven’t been surprising to people she knows who were at the school around that time.
“Part of why it has taken off was people were surprised when he came out as this very conservative guy because that was not the rep he had when he was there,” she said.
Díaz, a member of Republican leadership in the Florida Senate who is running to become Senate president, defended himself against allegations he says are politically motivated.
In the cease-and-desist letter, Fernandez, Díaz’s attorney, points to a series of social media comments that Molina sent to Díaz on July 10, 2013: “Oh, I am soooo grateful to you as a teacher and now a great community leader…Thank you, so happy to reconnect. You were a great teacher!
Molina, contacted Wednesday night after learning of the cease-anddesist letter, said, “I’ve never hated Manny Díaz but I, along with others, can attest to him being inappropriate.
“Motherhood and adulthood changes perspectives a lot, and I never said I didn’t like him as a teacher,’’ she continued. “I and many other people have said he was a player in a pervasive culture that in retrospect was highly inappropriate in his role as an educator. That’s usually how abuse of power structure works.”
Fernandez also pointed to Molina’s past work for the Biden campaign in Florida, noting “any assertion that this is not politically driven is respectfully laughable.”
Molina denies politics influenced her decision to go public.
Fernandez also targeted Martinez’s politics.
“As a former Democratic congressional candidate in 2008, Mr. Martinez was only too eager to hear these scandalous claims against a political opponent,” Fernandez said.
Martinez, speaking on the Tuesday radio show, blasted Díaz for trying to intimidate him into killing the interview with Molina. The former mayor called Díaz a “coward” for trying to have one of his political consultants interfere with his show, a move, Fernandez wrote, was meant as “notice of the potential slanderous claims that were going to be made.”
Martinez viewed it differently. On Tuesday’s show, he said: “There must be some truth to the allegations if Manny Díaz is so worried that he has people calling in to prevent a person, who does not have the power he has, from speaking publicly.”
With that opening salvo, the interview started.
Molina repeated the claims against Díaz on the show for 25 minutes. She said Díaz would ask her to stay after school with him alone — requests she said her mom deemed inappropriate when she found out. Molina was 16 at the time, she said.
“It is very ugly and very sad that one can send their children to school so they can be told about drugs,” Molina said. “As a mother, I would be furious if a teacher talked to my child the way I remember Díaz talking.”
Fernandez, Díaz’s attorney, addressed Molina’s accusation in the ceaseand-desist letter. The attorney did not say the events happened, but if they did, he said the request would have been “legitimate.”
“Ms. Molina admitted during her radio interview that she would stay after school to help Senator Diaz with the training of the boys’ soccer team — a perfectly legitimate reason for the request to stay after school if in fact it happened 20 years ago,” Fernandez said.
Martinez said he didn’t have a phone number for Díaz but invited him through Miami-Dade County Commissioner Rene Garcia and state Rep. Eddy Gonzalez.
“I’ve known Manny Díaz for years, never knew any of these issues, so I decided I was going to track down this lady I don’t know,” Martinez said. “And so we had her on. If Manny Díaz wants to come and say look, don’t know her, never did it, he’s entitled to and I’m going to ask questions.”
Martinez said the radio station received an email 15 minutes before the 4 p.m. show from GOP political consultant David Custin, warning that it would be “slanderous and wrong for a political operative to utilize your radio program” to falsely accuse Díaz.
Another email came shortly after, offering an explanation from Díaz’s spokeswoman on how the accusations were discredited last week.
“If Manny wants to sue me or the station, he’s going to have to go into a deposition under oath,” Martinez said.
Meanwhile, Molina recalls helping Díaz with soccer team duties after school. She said he would tell her her legs looked toned and that she looked nice that day. Molina says she talked to a counselor at the time to get out of that commitment.
“I feel like he would look at me a little too much,” she said. “Even back then, I could feel the creeper radar.”