There was no one more disappointed than I was when The Philadelphia Inquirer and then-Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams started going after the Archdiocese of Philadelphia for covering up sexual abuses by Catholic priests, or the horrible statistics when the John Jay Report, The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States 1950-2002 was released. Priests should be above the sexual abuse, and sometimes outright rape, that was documented.
Alas! it seems that (supposedly) celibate priests have not been the only ones engaging in the sexual abuse of minors. The arrest of Jeffrey Epstein in 2019 exposed a whole other world of adult men trying to diddle teenaged girls, and if the left have been trying everything they could to tie it to President Trump — something the Biden Administration could not do when it had possession of the Epstein evidence for four years, despite all of their attempts to disqualify and jail Mr Trump before the 2024 elections — it’s clear that plenty of other miscreants had been enjoying themselves on “Epstein Island.”
Nevertheless, those were the wealthy and powerful, those who thought they could do no wrong. But what we have been seeing more and more these days is not the wealthy and powerful, but ordinary, working-class citizens, heavily tilted towards public school teachers.
By Valarie Honeycutt Spears | March 30, 2026 | 5:50 PM EDT
Bardstown police arrested a Bardstown High School substitute teacher on Monday and charged her with sexually abusing a student, police and school officials said.
Mary “Hanna” Mattingly, 31, was charged with first-degree sexual abuse and procuring or promoting use of a minor by electronic means, police said.
No, of course the Lexington Herald-Leader did not publish Miss Mattingly’s photograph, despite the fact it was available as a public record and has been available online from several other sources. The First Street Journal does publish those mugshots, and I use them whenever I can find them.
Bardstown City Schools’ Superintendent Ryan Clark confirmed Mattingly was also an assistant high school girls’ soccer coach.
Mattingly was listed in that role on the Kentucky High School Athletic Association website for the last two seasons.
Clark said in a statement that an anonymous letter was received Thursday “alleging inappropriate conduct by a female substitute teacher and a Bardstown High School juvenile.“
“Bardstown City Schools immediately initiated an investigation, removed the individual from her job duties, placed her on administrative leave, and alerted the authorities,” the school district’s statement said.
Several stories noted that Miss Mattingly (allegedly) communicated with the student on more than one occasion, a record of persistence. WBRD reported, “It had been going on for several months,” Bardstown Police Detective Eric Williamson said Wednesday. “Social media was the main avenue for the communication.”
But what none of the stories I could find told us whether the student she contacted was male or female. That is a frequent enough occurrence for me to conclude that the credentialed media do not want anyone to infer that homosexuality is in any way connected to sexual abuse, even though the John Jay Report noted that 81% of the victims of sexual abuse by an all-male clergy were boys. We have previously noted how The Philadelphia Inquirer tried to conceal the fact that a teenaged murderer was transgendered, and you’ll find several more such stories on this site.
I take no inference in the specific case of Miss Mattingly, though I’d note from her photo that she’s pretty enough to have attracted plenty of attention from adult men. Bardstown had a Census Bureau estimated population of 14,104 on July 1, 2024, and isn’t a particularly poor place as small towns in the Bluegrass State go.
Miss Mattingly is listed as being 31 years old, and that means she is certainly old enough to have known better than to mess with a student. There have been enough stories in the media concerning adults in general, and adult teachers specifically, going after minor students, that no one with an IQ above room temperature could have been unaware that attempting a sexual relationship with a minor, with a public school student, was tremendously dangerous. And no teacher of any experience could be unaware that students talk; this stuff can’t be kept secret for long.
Miss Mattingly is, of course, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
We have been saying this for a while now, and it seems that every passing day reaffirms the truth of it: if a person is, in the characterization by Colonel Batguano in Dr Strangelove, a “deviated prevert” in one thing, the probabilities that he will be a pervert in something else are very high. 
