Attorney again accused of sexual misconduct
Teen accuser says her story has been ignored
About eight months after former Seminole judicial candidate Andrew Jones was arrested for the statutory rape of a 17-yearold working on his campaign, another girl came forward to police with allegations of sexual misconduct against the wellknown attorney.
But Jones was never arrested or charged in the new case, despite investigators having found probable cause that he had committed lewd and lascivious molestation of a child younger than 12. Now, after Jones took a plea deal in the statutory rape case that allowed him to avoid being declared a sex offender, his other accuser feels cast aside.
“It’s like I told my story to multiple people and it just got ignored,” said the teenager, who the Sentinel is not identifying because she’s an alleged victim of sexual abuse. “... I just want people to believe me and believe
it actually happened.”
Her case remained open and under review by prosecutors through last week’s hearing in which Jones pleaded guilty to two felony charges after admitting he had sex with a girl whom he knew was 17.
He was not sentenced to any jail time in the deal; instead agreeing to two years of community control, which is similar to house arrest, followed by eight years of probation, including completing sex offender treatment and not living near or working at a place frequented by children.
A spokesperson for the Seventh Circuit State Attorney’s Office, which oversaw both cases, told the Orlando Sentinel prior to the hearing that prosecutors planned to bring up the molestation case when Jones took his plea. But they never did. The case was quietly closed soon after, with prosecutors citing insufficient evidence.
Jones, 42, never agreed to be interviewed by law enforcement in the additional case. His attorney Mark O’Mara said the case was “resolved the way it should have been,” calling the details of the case “really suspect.”
The girl who came forward with the molestation allegations said she feels neither case was taken seriously enough.
“[Victims] need to be believed, and people need to be held accountable to their actions,” said Kelly Smallridge, the executive director of Haven of Lake and Sumter Counties, Inc., which advocates and supports victims of domestic and sexual abuse. “That’s always a huge concern of a sexual assault [victim’s] thought process, that they’re not going to believe me, especially if this is someone respected in the community.”
‘What he did was wrong’
For years, the now-teenager said she buried what Jones did to her, worried she would get in trouble if she came forward — something she said Jones told her as a child. But when she learned that another girl had recently made accusations against Jones, she said she felt safer speaking up.
She came forward to the Oviedo Police Department in May 2020: Jones, she told police, had on multiple occasions touched her inappropriately over her clothes as a young girl, more than 10 years earlier.
She later sat through long interviews at Seminole County’s Kids House, which assists law enforcement in child abuse investigations, again explaining what happened to her.
OPD soon after filed a report detailing the allegations, requesting a warrant for Jones for lewd and lascivious molestation of a child under 12, records show, but Jones was never arrested. OPD officials declined to comment on the case this week because the agency had yet to receive notice from prosecutors the case was closed.
While she understands her case could have been hard to prove, since the alleged abuse happened years ago and there was no physical evidence, she said she wanted to do all she could to hold Jones accountable and make sure it never happened again.
“I wanted it to be acknowledged, and I wanted him to understand that what he did was wrong,” she said.
She said she still wonders if by reporting the abuse sooner she could have prevented what happened to the other girl, who at the hearing last week said she’s still traumatized by what Jones did to her.
“If I had said something sooner, would [the incident with the other girl] have never happened?” said the teen who accused Jones of molesting her. “And that still eats me up.”
It’s unclear to what extent prosecutors investigated her case. She said she only spoke to them once, in an October Zoom meeting, when she repeated what Jones had done to her years ago — and was told there wasn’t enough evidence to go forward.
Bryan Shorstein, a spokesperson for the State Attorney’s Office, did not respond to questions about why her case was never brought up at Jones’ plea hearing or why it was left open for so long after that Zoom meeting. O’Mara, Jones’ attorney, said the second criminal case wasn’t brought up in plea negotiations because it “wasn’t particularly well-founded, so nobody really cared about it.”
‘Action should be taken’
The memo closing the case said an “exhaustive review” determined there was insufficient evidence to prove the case. The memo cited the “late disclosure” of the allegation and lack of witnesses or forensic evidence.
On the same memo, prosecutors summarized the other case against Jones, in which the teen girl working on his campaign accused him of engaging in multiple sexual acts with her, then buying her the Plan B contraceptive pill the next day.
The memo noted that Jones had tried to destroy evidence, including by washing his bed sheets and deleting home security camera footage.
Investigators were still able to retrieve a semen sample that matched Jones’ DNA profile from the girl’s jeans, as well as find his Plan B receipt, records show.
But despite the evidence, prosecutors said they decided on the plea deal “after extensive discussions with the victim and the defense,” noting it would avoid putting the victim through a trial and citing Jones’ lack of criminal history and “the fact that the victim was approximately a week away from her 18th birthday” when the sex acts occurred.
That victim’s attorney, Zach Stoumbos, said they were satisfied with Jones’ sentence. He declined to comment on the other criminal allegation against Jones.
But Deborah Barra, a former sex-crimes prosecutor in Orange and Osceola counties, said she found it odd that prosecutors in the Seventh Circuit kept the second case against Jones open for months after telling the victim there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute it.
“Telling the victim is the last thing,” Barra said. “... The victim is obviously the main concern and once you tell them, there’s nobody else.”
Having another allegation against a defendant can create leverage when negotiating a plea deal, she said, though that would be unethical if prosecutors had already decided the case couldn’t be proven beyond without reasonable doubt.
“If the prosecutor believed there wasn’t anything there they could prove, then they shouldn’t have used it as a bargaining chip,” Barra said.
Barra said late disclosure of an allegation, even without physical evidence, shouldn’t automatically disqualify the case for prosecution. She there are other factors to consider, such as whether the victim is compelling and could convince a jury.
The teen who came forward with the child molestation allegation said she doesn’t feel like prosecutors advocated or fought for her. She wasn’t invited to attend or speak at Jones’ plea hearing in the other case and said she feels like nothing was done in her case.
“If someone’s coming to you about something that has been sexually done to you, some type of action should be taken,” she said.
Donna Hedrick, a survivor of sexual assault who helped change the statute of limitations for sex crimes against children, said she knows what that feels like.
“It always felt like a real slap in the face, it was really hurtful, every time someone told us, ‘No,’ they can’t do anything about it,” Hedrick said. But, she said, “over time it gets easier to tell your story without being hurt by it every time — somehow it makes you stronger.”
Avoided sex-offender status
Barra said the charge on which Jones was initially arrested — unlawful sexual activity by a person older than 24 with a person 16 or 17 — is often pleaded down to a lesser charge, like child abuse, depending on the circumstances. But she said the victim’s desires should have a greater bearing on that decision.
“The victim has a lot of power when it comes to sex crimes,” Barra said.
She said in cases with coercion, especially if the victim is left feeling traumatized — as Jones’ victim said she was — prosecutors should push for the defendant to be designated a sex offender.
Smallridge said her organization supports victims choosing to report their assault to law enforcement, especially because she’s seen cases in which someone named an assailant who investigators already had on their radar.
“You just never know, they always need to report it even if it’s years later,” Smallridge said. “He did it once, it wouldn’t shock me if he had done it before.”
That thought keeps going through the mind of the teen who accused Jones of molestation, especially now that he’s out on community control and not incarcerated.
She said she knows teens at her high school who got in trouble for selling drugs and had to wear ankle monitors, but Jones doesn’t have that restriction.
“How do you track him?” she said. “How do they know when he is home? ... It makes me feel like he’s able to just freely live however he wants and there’s no way of tracking where he is.”