Mr Mays, who declined to comment for this article, was charged with one count of felony sex with a minor, although his lawyer told the court the instructor had a “strong case for innocence”. The case was later dropped, with prosecutors saying there was insufficient evidence to pursue the case.
The school district, on the other hand, eventually averted a lawsuit by agreeing to pay about half a million dollars to three students who said Mr. Mayes had acted improperly.
Obedience comes first
In JROTC classrooms, instructors are not just teachers. They are senior officers and students are taught to follow the chain of command.
“Obedience is the first lesson every soldier must learn,” says one of the program’s textbooks.
Victims of abuse said the power dynamics in the program made it more difficult to resist sexual assault.
One of them, Jordan Leloup, came from a troubled childhood of poverty and drugs in Tennessee and is no longer in contact with her parents. She said she longed for something like “family.”
Jordan Leloup about 16 years old.
When JROTC instructor Michael Bass approached her one day during the 2013-14 school year about joining the program at Hendersonville High School, she said he had an attractive commercial. “We’re like family,” he told her.
After she joined, Mr. Bass, who was 44, invited her to dinners at his home, where she would socialize with his wife and children. Then one evening, she said, she arrived and found herself alone with Mr. Bass, who had set two places at the table, with wine. He later took her to an upstairs room where the first sexual assault took place. She was 17.
After that, she said, Mr. Bass told her almost every day where to meet him in private — sometimes in a storage room at school or in an office where he locked a metal door. When she began to express reluctance, she said, he pressured her.
“Every time he told me to be ready or to meet him somewhere, I had to be there,” she said. “If I didn’t, there would be consequences.”
One night when she threatened to tell the police about the affair, she said Mr Bass hinted that his time in the army had given him the skills that would allow him to kill her without anyone finding out.
Ms Leloup eventually went to the police, who charged Mr Bass, citing a recorded conversation in which he admitted to a sexual relationship. He pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated statutory rape in 2019 and was sentenced to four years in prison.
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