Boys at her school shared AI-generated, nude images of her. After a
fight, she was the one expelled
[December 22, 2025]
By HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH and JACK BROOK
THIBODAUX, La. (AP) — The teasing was relentless. Nude images of a
13-year-old girl and her friends, generated by artificial intelligence,
were circulating on social media and had become the talk of a Louisiana
middle school.
The girls begged for help, first from a school guidance counselor and
then from a sheriff’s deputy assigned to their school. But the images
were shared on Snapchat, an app that deletes messages seconds after
they’re viewed, and the adults couldn’t find them. The principal had
doubts they even existed.
Among the kids, the pictures were still spreading. When the 13-year-old
girl stepped onto the Lafourche Parish school bus at the end of the day,
a classmate was showing one of them to a friend.
“That’s when I got angry,” the eighth grader recalled at her discipline
hearing.
Fed up, she attacked a boy on the bus, inviting others to join her. She
was kicked out of Sixth Ward Middle School for more than 10 weeks and
sent to an alternative school. She said the boy whom she and her friends
suspected of creating the images wasn’t sent to that alternative school
with her. The 13-year-old girl’s attorneys allege he avoided school
discipline altogether.
When the sheriff's department looked into the case, they took the
opposite actions. They charged two of the boys who'd been accused of
sharing explicit images — and not the girl.
The Louisiana episode highlights the nightmarish potential of AI
deepfakes. They can, and do, upend children's lives — at school, and at
home. And while schools are working to address artificial intelligence
in classroom instruction, they often have done little to prepare for
what the new tech means for cyberbullying and harassment.
Once again, as kids increasingly use new tech to hurt one another,
adults are behind the curve, said Sergio Alexander, a research associate
at Texas Christian University focused on emerging technology.
“When we ignore the digital harm, the only moment that becomes visible
is when the victim finally breaks,” Alexander said.
In Lafourche Parish, the school district followed all its protocols for
reporting misconduct, Superintendent Jarod Martin said in a statement.
He said a “one-sided story” had been presented of the case that fails to
illustrate its "totality and complex nature.”
A girl’s nightmare begins with rumors
After hearing rumors about the nude images, the 13-year-old said she
marched with two friends — one nearly in tears — to the guidance
counselor around 7 a.m. on Aug. 26. The Associated Press isn’t naming
her because she is a minor and because AP doesn’t normally name victims
of sexual crimes.
She was there for moral support, not initially realizing there were
images of her, too, according to testimony at her school disciplinary
hearing.
Ultimately, the weeks-long investigation at the school in Thibodaux,
about 45 miles (72 kilometers) southwest of New Orleans, uncovered
AI-generated nude images of eight female middle school students and two
adults, the district and sheriff's office said in a joint statement.
“Full nudes with her face put on them” is how the girl’s father, Joseph
Daniels, described them.
Until recently, it took some technical skill to make realistic deepfakes.
Technology now makes it easy to pluck a photo off social media, “nudify”
it and create a viral nightmare for an unsuspecting classmate.
Most schools are “just kind of burying their heads in the sand, hoping
that this isn’t happening,” said Sameer Hinduja, co-director of the
Cyberbullying Research Center and professor of criminology at Florida
Atlantic University.
Lafourche Parish School District was just starting to develop policies
on artificial intelligence. The school-level AI guidance mainly
addressed academics, according to documents provided through a records
request. The district also hadn’t updated its training on cyberbullying
to reflect the threat of AI-generated, sexually explicit images. The
curriculum its schools used was from 2018.
A school investigation hits obstacles
Although the girls at Sixth Ward Middle School hadn’t seen the images
firsthand, they heard about them from boys at school. Based on those
conversations, the girls accused a classmate and two students from other
schools of creating and spreading the nudes on Snapchat and possibly
TikTok.
The principal, Danielle Coriell, said an investigation came up cold that
day as no student took responsibility. The deputy assigned to the school
searched social media for the images unsuccessfully, according to a
recording of the disciplinary hearing.
“I was led to believe that this was just hearsay and rumors,” the girl’s
father said, recounting a conversation he had that morning with the
school counselor.
But the girl was miserable, and a police incident report showed more
girls were reporting that they were victims, too. The 13-year-old
returned to the counselor in the afternoon, asking to call her father.
She said she was refused.
Her father says she sent a text message that said, “Dad,” and nothing
else. They didn't talk. With the mocking unrelenting, the girl texted
her sister, “It’s not getting handled.”
As the school day wound down, the principal was skeptical. At the
disciplinary hearing, the girl’s attorney asked why the sheriff's deputy
didn’t check the phone of the boy the girls were accusing and why he was
allowed on the same bus as the girl.
“Kids lie a lot,” responded Coriell, the principal. “They lie about all
kinds of things. They blow lots of things out of proportion on a daily
basis. In 17 years, they do it all the time. So to my knowledge, at 2
o’clock when I checked again, there were no pictures.”
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Joseph "Tucker" Daniels listens to lawyers at his home in Thibodaux,
La., Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Matthew Hinton)
A fight breaks out on the school bus
When the girl stepped onto the bus 15 minutes later, the boy was
showing the AI-generated images to a friend. Fake nude images of her
friends were visible on the boy’s phone, the girl said, a claim
backed up by a photo taken on the bus. A video from the school bus
showed at least a half-dozen students circulating the images, said
Martin, the superintendent, at a school board meeting.
“I went the whole day with getting bullied and getting made fun of
about my body,” the girl said at her hearing. When she boarded the
bus, she said, anger was building up.
After seeing the boy and his phone, she slapped him, said Coriell,
the principal. The boy shrugged off the slap, a video shows.
She hit him a second time. Then, the principal said, the girl asked
aloud: “Why am I the only one doing this?” Two classmates hit the
boy, the principal said, before the 13-year-old climbed over a seat
and punched and stomped on him.
Video of the fight was posted on Facebook. “Overwhelming social
media sentiment was one of outrage and a demand that the students
involved in the fight be held accountable,” the district and
sheriff’s office said in their joint statement released in November.
The girl had no past disciplinary problems, but she was assigned to
an alternative school as the district moved to expel her for a full
semester — 89 school days.
Weeks later, a boy is charged
It was on the day of the girl’s disciplinary hearing, three weeks
after the fight, that the first of the boys was charged.
The student was charged with 10 counts of unlawful dissemination of
images created by artificial intelligence under a new Louisiana
state law, part of a wave of such legislation around the country. A
second boy was charged in December with identical charges, the
sheriff's department said. Neither was identified by authorities
because of their ages.
The girl would face no charges because of what the sheriff’s office
described as the “totality of the circumstances.”
At the disciplinary hearing, the principal refused to answer
questions from the girl’s attorneys about what kind of school
discipline the boy would face.
The district said in a statement that federal student privacy laws
prohibit it from discussing individual students’ disciplinary
records. Gregory Miller, an attorney for the girl, said he has no
knowledge of any school discipline for the classmate accused of
sharing the images.
Ultimately, the panel expelled the 13-year-old. She wept, her father
said.
“She just felt like she was victimized multiple times — by the
pictures and by the school not believing her and by them putting her
on a bus and then expelling her for her actions,” he said in an
interview.
The fallout sends a student off course
After she was sent to the alternative school, the girl started
skipping meals, her father said. Unable to concentrate, she
completed none of the school's online work for several days before
her father got her into therapy for depression and anxiety.
Nobody initially noticed when she stopped doing her assignments, her
father said.
“She kind of got left behind,” he said.
Her attorneys appealed to the school board, and another hearing was
scheduled for seven weeks later.
By then, so much time had passed that she could have returned to her
old school on probation. But because she’d missed assignments before
getting treated for depression, the district wanted her to remain at
the alternative site another 12 weeks.
For students who are suspended or expelled, the impact can last
years. They're more likely to be suspended again. They become
disconnected from their classmates, and they’re more likely to
become disengaged from school. They're more likely to have lower
grades and lower graduation rates.
“She’s already been out of school enough,” one of the girl's
attorneys, Matt Ory, told the board on Nov. 5. “She is a victim.
“She,” he repeated, “is a victim.”
Martin, the superintendent, countered: “Sometimes in life we can be
both victims and perpetrators.”
But the board was swayed. One member, Henry Lafont, said: “There are
a lot of things in that video that I don’t like. But I’m also trying
to put into perspective what she went through all day.” They allowed
her to return to campus immediately. Her first day back at school
was Nov. 7, although she will remain on probation until Jan. 29.
That means no dances, no sports and no extracurricular activities.
She already missed out on basketball tryouts, meaning she won’t be
able to play this season, her father said. He finds the situation
“heartbreaking.”
“I was hoping she would make great friends, they would go to the
high school together and, you know, it’d keep everybody out of
trouble on the right tracks,” her father said. “I think they ruined
that.”
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