A Florida teen who was arrested for allegedly hacking her high school’s homecoming queen vote is suing school officials and state police.
Emily Grover, 18, filed a notice to sue the Escambia County School District and Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), arguing she and her mother, Laura Carroll, had been victims of a false arrest and violation of their civil rights.
In March 2021, the two were arrested after the FDLE obtained evidence it said showed that hundreds of votes in the school’s homecoming contest were falsely entered using student information obtained from a database which Ms Grover’s mother, a vice-principal in the school district, had access to.
Ms Grover was expelled from Tate High School, and her mother lost her job as vice-principal, but the charges against the teen were ultimately dropped after she pleaded no contest and completed a supervision program. (Ms Carroll’s trial is set to begin this month).
But the fallout from the case didn’t end there, according to the teenager. The incident caused her to lose a full scholarship to the University of Western Florida.
"This is a black cloud that is traveling with Emily everywhere she goes," her lawyer, Marie Mattox told WEAR-TV. "She needs to be able to start her life over without this wreckage of the past and be able to live a normal life that she intended to live."
"Number one, she didn’t engage in any criminal activity," Ms Mattox added. "And number two, if there had been a thorough investigation conducted to do a forensic evaluation on any computers, then you would say Emily was not involved at all in casting any votes."
The Independent has contacted the Escambia school district for comment.
The FDLE has said it will not comment on pending litigation.
In the course of the investigation against the teen, students painted an unclear picture of what exactly happened.
One classmate said it was common knowledge Ms Grover used her mother’s data access to look at student records.
“I have known that Emily Grover logs into her moms [sic] account to access grades and test scores since freshman year when we became friends,” one teen told law enforcement. “She has looked up my student ID before in order to tell me what I got on my FST and ACT [tests]… She looks up all of our group of friends’ grades and makes comments about how she can find out our test scores all of the time.”
However, another student gave a deposition in the investigation saying Ms Grover was shocked to learn about the alleged hacking.
“Emily and I were sitting at a table with her mom when all of this happened, and Emily said, ‘It would be my luck if someone hacked the system and voted for me and got me disqualified when I have nothing to do with it,’” the teen said, adding, “Whenever I got to Emily’s house, she was having a freakout, saying she thought that maybe somebody had done it for her.”
Ms Grover told The Daily Beast last year she felt she had been the victim of wider social dynamics at the school, after arriving in a new area and becoming popular provoked resentment against her.
“I came here freshman year as the new girl. Most people at my high school went to the same middle school, and had been friends forever. So a lot of girls didn’t like me because of that,” she said, adding that after four years, “I was very liked—people liked me.”
