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Aug. 12, 2025 - Blood Money
25:17
Mama Bear Fought Everyone to get the 1st Grooming Conviction in the country with Michelle Peterson
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Hi guys, this episode was shot at the incredible Rev17 conference where they are raising funds to get a huge piece of property to house trafficked children.
There is no more worthy cause than to save these children.
Please click on the QR code and donate to Rev17.
So how's it going?
Why don't you do a quick little introduction on who you are and what you're doing at this wonderful festival here?
Okay, my name is Michelle Peterson and I'm from Illinois and we have the very first grooming conviction in the United States.
So unfortunately my son was the victim of a grooming incident with a male coach and teacher at our high school back in 2010.
So it took us three years to get this guy convicted, but we finally did it.
What was he doing?
Tell me what you mean when you say grooming.
So I'll back up a little bit.
I'm a physical therapist.
I was actually also coaching softball at the same high school where this guy was coaching baseball.
And I was a healthcare provider in his home with a family member.
And so he knew me as a healthcare provider, as a colleague, and then also as a parent.
And in October of 2010, I overheard a conversation.
My son was on the phone late at night on a Sunday, and he sounded angry and annoyed.
And he said, I don't know how often do you want me to call you.
You know that I'm busy.
You know, I'm not going to be able to do that.
Your son sounded angry.
Yes.
He said, I'm working two jobs.
And then I hear him say, as I'm walking past his room, he says, well, I'll just meet you in your classroom tomorrow and pick up those paintballs.
Paintballs.
What?
So I opened the door.
I'm like, who are you talking to?
So I thought he had a new girlfriend, right?
I mean, who's just bothering him?
And he was annoyed.
And so he told me who he was talking to.
I said, you need to hang up the phone.
I said, it's completely inappropriate that he's calling you this late at night.
And then I went down to the computer, looked up the phone number that he was just talking to.
And then I saw thousands of text messages between the two of them.
Oh, wow.
So just the phone numbers back and forth, just the cell phone bill.
But it went back to April of 2010 all the way through October.
And I printed off a few weeks' worth.
And it was about a quarter of an inch thick, but just a few weeks' worth.
And I checked my son's phone all the time.
He was 15, he turned 16 in that timeframe.
And I would take his phone intermittently throughout the week and just check his text messages, his emails, his apps, whatever.
Never saw one of over 6,000 messages between the two.
And I took the papers to the principal the next day and I said, I think we have a problem.
And the principal sat back in his chair, completely exasperated.
And he said, I just gave him a teacher's award two weeks ago.
So he had a feeling and could tell that there was probably something wrong.
Met with the two of them that day.
They both denied any wrongdoing.
My son, again at 16, just wanted this to stop.
The teacher was 34.
And so I think my son thought now that I knew it would just stop and could just go away.
And I came home and I said, you know, he wouldn't tell me.
He just said there was nothing wrong.
But I said, I'm going to find somebody and get these messages off this phone.
So I started researching who can pull deleted messages off the phone, found a detective in Joliette, Illinois.
And I told my son, this was weeks later.
And I told my son after the weekend, I said, I need your phone.
I found somebody who can get those messages off the phone.
And his face just went green.
And I said, is there something you need to tell me?
He's like, I can't tell you.
He couldn't even look at me.
And he's like, I'll talk to the detective tomorrow and to the principal.
And I had already opened up a DCFS investigation and also filed a police report preliminary because I just knew that something was not right.
And so that night, though, I kind of kept vigil over his room because I was concerned.
We had to talk to about suicide, that this is not an option.
And just, I wanted to make sure he was okay.
And so we go the next day.
He talks to the principal and to the detective and tells them that he wanted to make a sex video with him, offered him up to $500, then $1,000, then $1,500.
And the money was actually for oral sex.
And then also make a sex video with him.
And then would refer to his body part as my little guy.
You know, am I ever going to get to see the little guy?
And my son kept telling him no, kept telling him to leave him alone.
There'd be 10, 15, 20 messages coming in.
My son wouldn't respond back.
And then he felt like he needed to respond because this is somebody in a position of authority.
And grooming, just so people know, like you have normal grooming where you groom someone to be a CEO of a company or you groom your kids to be good moral character, right?
This is unlawful grooming, whereby somebody tries to gain the trust of somebody in a more like a lesser position, right?
So somebody who's younger.
And usually when it's in this type of a capacity, that person wants to have sex with that child.
So they take the phone, and this detective had the phone for about three months.
And Apple had just an upgrade, so they couldn't get the messages off the phone.
They were having a hard time.
And Apple and all these other carriers, and they do not have to help them get these messages off the phone.
And then they took the phone down to the Illinois State Police and they had the phone then for another few months.
So by the time we got the messages back, it was probably about eight months later.
But we weren't going to get the messages back until I actually met with a friend of mine who her husband was a Secret Service agent.
And they got me connected with another Secret Service agent who was on a pedophile task force.
And I told him my story.
He's like, they just want you to go away.
This isn't enough for just one kid.
And but it's my kid.
And so he's like, I'm going to give you two business cards.
You keep one for yourself.
You give one to the state's attorney.
You tell them if they don't have the messages off that phone the next seven days, you're going to turn it over to the feds.
He's like, I'll have them off of there in 15 minutes.
So I did that the next day, three days later, we had the messages.
And I met with the two assistant state's attorneys at the courthouse, my husband and I. My husband is my son's stepfather.
And there was a stack of papers in front of them.
And they said they didn't think they had enough to go on, that there were too many gaps in the transcripts because they couldn't pull all the messages.
So on the phone, like when new messages come in, some others get kicked out.
So there's only so much capacity in there.
But the messages are still in the phone.
And I said, well, are those the messages?
Can I see them?
And they both looked at each other like they weren't expecting that.
And I said, well, here's the deal.
I said, that's my property, and so is the phone.
So if you're doing nothing with them, I'm leaving here today with both things.
So they let me read the messages, and everything I told you was in there where he offered them money for oral sex, want to make a sex video, refer to his body part as my little guy.
And other lewd and lascivious things were in there.
And tears are just dripping from my face.
And I just pushed the messages back and I slammed my hands on the table.
And I said, You've got to be kidding me.
I said, You guys, the older gentleman, I said, You have grandkids that go to this school, and the younger gentleman, you have kids that will be going to the school.
You're okay with this guy teaching your children.
And they said, Ma'am, you need to calm down because I was really angry.
And I said, I don't need to calm down.
You need to do your job.
And up until this point, it was pretty calm and pretty cool and collected.
But we're like 10 months in already on this.
And my husband's kicking me into the table.
I said, You kicked me one more time, I'm kicking you out that door.
It was an ugly scene, which is why I came up with this logo, right?
Because that's what you look like when you're fighting, right?
So it's not that mama bear logo where they're like crawling nicely, but become like this.
So we left there.
I met with the actual state's attorney the next day, and we were kind of nose to nose.
And I said, He said he wasn't familiar with what was going on in my case.
I'm like, We live in the county seat, and you went to this high school, you have no idea what's going on with my case.
I'm like, that's a problem.
And I set down a newspaper article where he said that he came back to the county to protect children and the families of the county.
I said, How about we start doing this?
And so that set up our little tumultuous relationship between the two of us.
And I left there, nothing is really happening at this point.
They put the teacher on paid administrative leave because of the contract, right?
He has to actually be convicted of something before they take him off of being paid.
And I get a call a few months later from the principal, and he said, They really need to talk to you.
So I go down to the school and he said, I have been telling the state's attorney to subpoena his personnel file.
There are things in there that they're going to want to see, and they're not doing it.
So I go back down to the state's attorney's office and ask him to subpoena the personnel file.
And he said, Well, what could possibly be in there that we need?
I said, What skin is it off of your back?
Can you just get it?
So he does the subpoena.
The attorneys at the school wouldn't release the personnel file until I came and signed off on it.
And they use the HIPAA law because my son's a minor and his name is all over this.
So I go in there, and this was a meeting that took place with the principal, the superintendent, the teacher, and the union rep. And so he asked him flat out.
He had been a counselor before, I asked him flat out, did you ever offer Andrew money for sex?
Did you want to make a sex video?
And did you refer to his body part as my little guy?
He said, he put his head down, shook his head in affirmation, and said yes.
And he signed it.
So, like, we got him.
So I go back down to the state's attorney's office.
I tell him what was in there.
He said, well, why'd they let you see it?
I said, because of the HIPAA law.
And my son's a minor.
He's like, they didn't have to do that.
I said, honestly, I think they did this because they knew how much trouble I was having down here with you and that you weren't doing anything.
And if they turned it over to you, I would never know what was in there.
So now that I do know, if he's not arrested in the next seven days, I'm going to have every major news station on your front lawn.
So he waited the full seven days before he indicted him.
And then we went status hearing after status hearing after status hearing.
Nothing is happening.
And then we voted in a new state's attorney in 2012.
And then January of 2013, the detective went to him and said, hey, there's this case you need to work on.
It's been hanging out there for two and a half years.
So he starts looking at the case.
He meets with me and my husband, my son now, who's 19, just finished his first semester in college.
And he said, you know, I think we're going to have to take a plea deal.
He's like, it's just been so long.
There's too many gaps in the transcripts.
And they're going to shoot holes through this whole thing saying that you can't remember exactly what happened.
I was livid.
And so we go to court in August of 2013.
And God's hand has been all over this from the very beginning.
So we go to court and the teacher decides he wants to take it to trial.
Now that never happens, apparently.
And the judge was pissed.
So he lights up him and his attorney, said, you have dragged this family through the mud for two and a half years.
This young man's been home from college for the summer.
We could have gone to trial this summer.
Now we've got to bring him back from school in the fall because we weren't going to go to trial until October.
And he just lights them up.
And we leave there.
And then I met with the state's attorney and his first assist.
And he said, you know, there's a new law that just came into play in Illinois.
It's a grooming law.
Just came into play last month, so July of 2013.
He said, everything that's in that law is everything that happened to your son, to your family, and to this community.
He's like, but there's no precedent set, so it's going to be difficult to get.
I said, okay, so we go to court in October, and my son's on the stand for four hours.
The defense puts me down as a witness to keep me out of the courtroom.
And we get a conviction of solicitation of a minor in the very first unlawful grooming conviction in the United States.
Wow, wow.
Tell me, how long has he been in jail for prison?
So he did 30 days in jail.
30 days only.
In the county jail.
Not even in prison.
So he was sentenced to 120, had to serve the first 60, and then would only serve the other 60 if he violated probation.
He paid a $2,700 fine.
He had to register as a sex offender, but for only 10 years.
So as of last May, he's no longer on the sex offender registry.
But he can never teach again, which was my main goal.
So fast forward now, 10 years, and I go to a reawaken event in Nashville, and I meet a trafficking investigator in paralegal, Amy Coelho.
And she started telling me about a couple cases she'd been working on.
And one of them was the La Luso Muno case out of California.
It's a church cult.
They're in 74 different countries.
So the women in the church prepared the kids in the church for the men in the church.
And it took her 10 years to get this guy busted.
And they busted 23 different sex trafficking cells between Mexico and California.
And then she was talking about Larry Nasser gymnast was one of her clients.
Tells him about a couple of other cases.
And so then I'm like, I'm going to tell her about my measure little case from Illinois, right?
So I started to tell her my case.
And she's like, hold on, are you from Illinois?
And I said, yes.
She goes, when was it?
I said 2013, 2014.
And she grabbed my arm, got tears in her eyes, and she said, I need to get a picture with you and send this to my team.
And I'm like, what are you talking about?
And she goes, we use your case for every trafficking case we bust, including the ones I just told you about, because we have to prove the grooming in order to prove the trafficking.
And you have the only grooming conviction in the United States.
So after 10 years, we still had the only grooming conviction.
So that's a problem, right?
And she said, we need to get a law put in place whereby somebody convicted of grooming or charged with grooming cannot take a plea deal.
She thought that's why we had the only conviction.
So she asked me if I would, you know, write the statement for the law.
And so I did.
And then I said, so if you're using this for all of your cases, and she goes, no, no, no.
Everybody in the United States is using this for their cases because there is no other case.
And I said, so if that's true, could they have used this for the Glane Maxwell Jeffrey Epstein trials?
And she said, I'd have to look at the case files because, but they would have nothing else to use.
They would have had to have used your case.
So to even think that we had a hand in that is just unbelievable.
And then she said, you know, your tenacity and your son's willingness to come forward.
She says, you guys have saved thousands of lives.
And the weight of that was so overwhelming.
Like, we were both crying, of course.
And you just don't think like the worst time in your life could ever be used for something good, but that's how God works, right?
Like he turns beauty into or turns ashes into beauty, right?
So you get beauty from ashes.
And so anyway, I had become very acquainted with General Flynn, told him my story.
He introduced me to Mary Flynn O'Neill, his sister, who is the CEO of America's Future.
She then introduces me to paralegal out of Florida, has her start looking into the criminal code in Florida to amend their grooming law.
Soon found out that there was no grooming law in Florida.
And we then started looking at every other state, no grooming law anywhere except for Illinois.
So now I've made it my personal mission to get a grooming law put in place in all 50 states.
Wow.
And we were successful in Florida last spring.
So Florida, Iowa, Arizona, Georgia, Montana as of two months ago, and Louisiana as of two weeks ago.
So Louisiana was actually by two guys that came forward who'd been groomed and molested by a couple of priests.
And so they pushed through the grooming law.
But they had these other laws to go by, right?
So that's what we're hoping is that this will eventually have a life of its own so that these other states, see that these states have put laws in place against grooming.
So if we can stop them before they actually defile these kids, that's the whole goal of this, you know.
And just know that, you know, just because this guy didn't touch my kid, I mean, my son's been hugely affected by this.
Psychologically.
I mean, that must be horrible.
Like, to feel like a person of authority is solicitous.
I mean, that's just absolutely disgusting.
Right.
And, you know, one of the things when we file a DCFS report, my son, you know, initially said that nothing happened.
And he didn't want him to lose his job.
He felt bad for him, right?
Because this guy had groomed him and made him feel bad for him.
So that's part of the deal, too, is he's got to get over that issue that he didn't cause us, that teacher did.
And so we've been working on them.
He just turned 31 three weeks ago, and he said that he never would have told me had I not overheard that conversation.
Really?
He just wanted it to stop.
But then he said he didn't want to come forward.
I said, okay.
I said, but what about the three boys across the street and the four that live down the street?
What if something happens to one of them?
How do you face their parents knowing that you could have done something about it?
And so he came down the next morning after sleeping on it and he said, I'm not doing it for you and doing it for me.
I'm doing it for the family across the street and the family down the street.
I said, okay.
So, I mean, it took a lot of convincing to get him to come forward because it's embarrassing, especially for a boy.
You know, like he didn't want any of that, but his friends were extremely supportive.
The families were supportive.
The school was supportive.
The school, like, they did everything right by us, every single thing.
And you don't hear about that all the time either.
You hear about these schools wanting to cover it up and moving the teacher along and just getting them somewhere else.
Yeah, I was surprised actually that the principal seemed like from the start, like he was very forthcoming.
He was amazing.
Yeah.
Absolutely amazing.
I mean, he even said at one point, he goes, I have a couple other kids I could think about that could have possibly been victims, you know.
This guy had bought a computer from one of them.
And so those sorts of things.
Yeah, but they were, he was the linchpin in this whole thing, the school was.
So, and then I ended up finding out another victim, and he was concerned about coming forward.
He was about four years older than my son, but I think he was afraid it was going to hurt his career.
Same guy, same teacher, same teacher.
Yep.
And so when I talked to him, I said, well, your secret's safe with me unless this guy walks.
I said, but my son's sitting out there by himself.
And this guy did the same thing to you.
So if you could come forward, that would be fantastic.
I said, the only way I see this hurting your career is if you do nothing and people find out.
So he picked up the phone right there and called the detective and he ended up testifying as well.
So yeah, between him and the school, they were, like I said, probably the linchpin in the whole thing.
What's up with the really short sentence, though?
I mean, was that, did that upset you?
Oh, yeah.
So it's a class four felony right now or a class D felony.
So they're very minimal prison sentence.
And so, what we're trying to do is we're trying to amend the current grooming law in Illinois, which would be known as Andrew's Law.
And it would actually make it so that somebody who is convicted of grooming would have a lifelong sex offender registry and increase the sex offender registration to include places of businesses that are privately owned, such as Chuck E. Cheese, Dave and Busters.
It doesn't include those places currently.
So those places didn't exist when this law was written.
So we're trying to put that on there as well.
And then also we would like to make it a Class B felony.
So it would be 5 to 25.
Montana put through the harshest grooming law.
And that just happened, like I said, about two months ago.
So my cousin lives in Montana.
She heard one of my podcasts, and she was in the Navy at the time when this happened with me and my son and our family.
So she had no idea.
She listened to a podcast and she bought her daughter a Bark phone, which I promote on my website.
So Bark actually has an app or a phone or a watch.
And you can get all the messages going in and out of your kid's phone on your phone or just certain keywords.
It has a constant GPS on it.
So she buys one for her 13-year-old daughter.
And within a few months, she's getting messages that somebody is messaging her on Snapchat.
Turns out it was somebody in Iowa.
Well, we didn't know that at the time.
So I said, take it to your local police station.
They pretty much just told her she needed to be a better parent.
So I said, take it to your local sheriff.
She did that.
Same response.
I said, take it to your local FBI.
Now, this guy had been trained by ICAC, which is Internet Crimes Against Children.
He takes the phone.
They start researching it.
They find out it's somebody in Iowa.
And I told her, I said, go get the Chromebook from your school too, because they had just finished school.
I said, get it before they wipe it, see if he's messaging her on there too.
Sure enough, he was.
And so she then, her boyfriend, has a cousin who is a state rep. I said, you need to get a hold of her and see if she'll sponsor the grooming bill in Montana.
So she gets a hold of her.
She's not on the right committee.
She's a Democrat, turns it over the aisle to a Republican who is in the correct committee.
And it passed both the House and the Senate unanimously in Montana.
And their grooming law needs to be model legislation throughout the entire country.
So somebody who is 18 years of age or older, grooming a 12-year age or younger, 100 years in prison, no chance of parole, 100 years in prison.
Beautiful.
No chance of parole for the first 25.
And if they get out at the 25-year mark, it's funny because the question in my head the whole time as you're talking is like I keep hearing my voice in my head going, okay, mandatory minimum 10, 15 years.
I love that you said 100 years.
100 years.
Beautiful.
And no chance of parole for 25.
If they get out at that 25-year mark, it's a lifelong satellite surveillance.
And if it's a kid that is 18 years of age or older, grooming a 16-year or younger, it's four to 100 years.
Same thing applies, lifelong satellite surveillance when they get out.
So Montana's law needs to be model legislation throughout the entire country.
But what we're going to find is that people are going to be weary of charging them with grooming, right?
Because like, oh, 100 years.
We're trying to stop them from having sex with children.
Yeah.
They need to hold on to the money.
It should be tantamount to a murder conviction.
Yes.
Yes.
Because you're ruining a child's self-confidence.
Destroying a life, you know, lifetime of therapy unless they figure it out.
It's like a spiritual death that they're doing.
Right.
And Idaho, Tennessee, and Florida all have the death penalty if a child is raped under the age of 13.
Why 13?
I don't know.
They can't vote until they're 18.
They can't buy cigarettes till they're 18.
They are still children at 17.
So if it's 17 or younger, it should be the death penalty if they rape that child.
And there's Romeo and Juliet clauses in play, right?
So if a mom gets mad because they don't like the kid that their daughter is dating and he turns 18 and she's 17, different story, right?
So there's all these caveats to this.
So it's not like you're going to be absolutely convicted if you're doing this stuff.
There are provisions in place.
But when you have somebody texting something as blatant as this guy was texting to my son, he should have a prison sentence that is equal to what he wanted to do to my kid, right?
I mean, we're 16 years after this, and my son is still struggling intermittently with this, right?
And when I started talking about this again, you know, it was triggering for him.
So people just need to understand that this is what happens.
Like, this is a spiritual battle, and these people need to go down.
They are wicked.
This is funding everything they do.
It funds the election fraud.
It funds the medical fraud.
It funds all of it.
It's a what, 300-plus billion-dollar a year industry.
It's far surpassing the arms race and it's bypassing the drug trade.
This is how they fund everything.
You can sell a drug once.
You can sell a kid 10 to 15 times a day.
And then once you're done using their body for that, then you can organ harvest them, right?
So they're making all kinds of money off of one child.
And then people are like, well, aren't these kids missing somewhere?
But here's the thing that people don't think about.
They take a 12-year-old girl and they impregnate her as many times as they can until she's 30.
Nobody's looking for those kids.
They don't even exist in the system.
Right?
And Epstein Island, that's how they control all of our politicians.
That's how they control the world leaders.
They record them and video them, and then they got them.
And so they're controlling everything they do.
That's how this all works.
And people want to keep their head in the sand.
And I think this is a real thing.
But it all starts with grooming.
All of it starts with grooming.
Even when they bring these kids across the border, they groom the parents to tell them to let them have their children.
So they groom them, give them $500, take the kids across the board, and they never see their kids again.
They're trafficking the kids all along the way.
And then once they get here.
Yeah.
Wow.
But what I really need is any of your viewers who have a rep or senator that they know personally, they could text and tell them about the grooming bill.
And any of those other states that we have not put a grooming law in, we need this bill sponsored by a rep and a senator in the state.
They can go on my website.
It was just my name.
It's michellepeterson.org.
So it's Michelle with two L's and Peterson is O-N, MichellePeterson.org.
And at the top, there's a contact page.
They can go on there and email me and it goes directly to me and I will get a hold of them and we will get this law put in place in their state.
And I will come and testify if I have to.
I'll do whatever I need to.
We'll help them write the bill.
At the top, there's a tab that says Andrew's Law.
All of the laws are written there.
Our conviction is in there so they can see everything firsthand.
They can pull anything off of there that they need.
Wow.
Anything worth you're doing, Michelle?
This is a very powerful interview.
Is there anything we haven't talked about that's worth discussing?
I just think that parents need to believe their kids and fight for their children to the death.
The trafficking investigator, Amy Coelho, she gave me a statistic.
She says 79% of the kids whose parents fight for them will become productive members of society.
Wow, wow.
So fight for your children and believe them and do what you need to do to protect them and the next kid.
Wow, wow.
Michelle, thank you so much for joining us for this episode.
For the viewers out there, make sure you check out AmericaHappens.com for all of our latest episodes.
And I will see you all on the next episode.
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