NOTE: All information in this article is based on publicly available reporting, official records, and the subject’s own published statements and podcasts. The views expressed are solely those of the author.
In 2015, Elizabeth Scroggs was arrested at Coahulla Creek High School for what Georgia law defines as sexual assault by a person in a position of authority. The student she was involved with was legally an adult, but she was his teacher, a fact that rendered any notion of consent irrelevant under state statutes.
At the time, I was 15 and a freshman at Coahulla Creek High School. I didn’t really understand what had happened. All I knew was the version that filtered through teenage gossip: some boy got his pickle touched.
Nearly a decade later, Scroggs—now Elizabeth Pickel—has married that student, launched a podcast, and carefully reconstructed the story of her downfall.
This is not just a local scandal that faded with time. It is a case study in how, in the age of personal branding and confessional media, even criminal conduct can be repackaged into inspirational content. It raises unsettling questions: When does accountability become a performance? What happens to the people, those “invisible” figures she blames for “turning her in,” who were left behind in her quest for absolution? And when a community is asked to move on, who decides that it’s time?
The Crime Behind the Story
Elizabeth Scroggs wasn’t an obscure figure in the school system. By the time she was arrested, she was a three-time nominee for local teaching awards and had been named “Best of the Best” teacher in 2010. She taught language arts, coached cheerleading, and had led the girls’ cross country team.
This wasn’t just a teacher with a single classroom of students. This was a woman woven into the fabric of the school’s extracurricular life, known to hundreds of teenagers, trusted by administrators, and elevated as a role model.
On January 20, 2015, an anonymous tip reached school administrators alleging she was in a sexual relationship with an 18-year-old student. She admitted to the relationship during questioning. Under Georgia law §16-6-5.1, her position of power made any such relationship a felony, comparable to a probation officer sleeping with a parolee or a police officer with an inmate.
Within days, she was arrested on campus and charged with felony sexual assault by a person with supervisory or disciplinary authority. Police report that this relationship between Elizabeth and the student took place beginning in December 2014 and occurred off of school property.
In March 2015, her attorney, Steve Wilson, gave a statement admitting the relationship happened. However, he insisted it was a consensual connection between adults, saying, “She is no sexual predator.” He pointed out that the student was 18, supported himself financially, and, by implication, was not vulnerable. He claimed the statute was meant to protect children, not to criminalize adult relationships.
It’s a line of argument that sounds reasonable if you ignore everything we know about power dynamics. Because what it conveniently leaves out is that Georgia law explicitly forbids teachers from having sex with their students, no matter their age or independence, because the relationship is inherently coercive.
The defense strategy boiled down to reframing her crime as an unconventional romance—a narrative that would later become the cornerstone of her podcast redemption story.
She was initially held without bond. But according to a website dedicated to teacher misconduct, I found a record stating:
“[Steve] Williams represented Scroggs during a bond hearing Thursday. A $25,000 property bond was set by Magistrate Judge Gayle Gazaway. Scroggs was still in the county jail as of Thursday evening. As conditions of the bond, Scroggs is not allowed to have contact with the student, his family or anyone under the age of 18. She is also ordered to stay off of any school property”
Note: It appears that the Daily Citizen no longer has the pages related to the incident accessible. Many original reports published by local outlets, appear to have been removed from their online archives in the years since Elizabeths’ arrest. Other than this secondary quote, this article relies on material preserved via public records, official statements, podcast episodes, and secondary references.
From Arrest to Rebrand
After her arrest, Scroggs spent six months in Alabama living with her parents, working at Fresh Market. Even there, she couldn’t escape the fallout. She later recounted how an anonymous tipster called her new employer to report her pending felony charge which she had lied about in her application. She was fired and sat in her car crying, asking God why she couldn’t outrun what she had done.
In episode I’m Still Standing, she described it this way:
“I could not fathom who turned me in, because no one knew me there…I just could not escape these invisible people.”
and
“People were still coming for me. My life is already at the bottom of the barrel…and you are still coming for me. I don’t even know who you are. I mean, I would love if this person would come forward and we just have a conversation and maybe I apologize if I offended you, but you are trying to wreck my life still.”
After this event, Elizabeth eventually found employment as a scorer for Pearson Education Services, a company that contracts with school systems and state testing agencies. According to her LinkedIn profile, she worked in this role from 2015 to 2019, grading standardized writing assessments for students in grades 5–12. While this position did not involve direct contact with children, it allowed her to continue working in the education sector in a limited capacity despite her probation and restrictions on interacting with minors.
When she returned to Georgia in mid-2015, she pleaded guilty under the First Offender Act and received ten years of probation. She avoided jail time and sex offender registration, an outcome that many observers suspect would have looked very different if she were a man. She was then barred from working or volunteering with minors under sixteen.
A Marriage as Proof?
In November 25 2017, she married Pickel, the former student at the center of the case.
In her podcast, Authenticity, she often frames the marriage as evidence that what happened wasn’t predatory, but simply unconventional love.
The Scandal That Became Content
From 2021-2022, Elizabeth produced a podcast named Authenticity about her life. She talks about her failings, upbringing, and crime, though she rarely calls it that.
Instead, she calls it a “bad decision” born from loneliness and emotional turmoil. She frames herself as someone who was “unwell” rather than someone who crossed a line that the law exists to protect.
Her podcast description reads as follows:
Baring all, Elizabeth attempts to unmask her life in order to bring peace and solace to those who feel they don’t deserve or get a second chance in life. By sharing her own story, and the stories of others, listeners will get a glimpse into lives that have been transformed, and how they have learned how to live an authentically, happy life.
Elizabeth talks about how her obsession with perfection began in childhood. She grew up in a conservative Christian household, the oldest of three sisters, taught from an early age to believe that her worth was measured by her purity and discipline.
By her own account, she developed an eating disorder as a young teenager, driven by a need to master her body and project an image of flawless goodness. She stayed a virgin and avoided alcohol until 21, something she describes as one of her proudest accomplishments. She seems to have internalized the idea that to be respected, she had to be beyond reproach. That meant never being “the girl who went to parties,” never being the one who was talked about.
Being the oldest, she wanted to teach young girls that “you did not have to go to parties or sleep around. That it was okay to be a good girl”. After reflecting on this she worried “I’m almost scared to say that now due to cancel culture.”
Ironically, all this rigidity only set her up for deeper failures later on. At 23, she rushed into a marriage with a man she barely knew, a relationship she now says was volatile and marked by mutual harm. But she refused to leave because divorce, in her mind, was proof that she had failed and marriage was a sacrament to god.
In her podcast, she shared that she had always struggled with standardized testing, despite believing she was intelligent and having good non testing grades. She sometimes wondered if she had an undiagnosed learning disability. Test anxiety repeatedly derailed her academic standing, and she failed several key exams that were necessary to maintain her teaching credentials.
She began her first year as an educator on a provisional license after failing certification tests. When it became clear she would not pass in time, she was told she would have to resign or be terminated.
“I feel like I had to hide the fact that I was failing, because people expected more out of me.”
The following summer, she finally passed the required exam. During the job hunt, she says, she was already carrying the fear that she would be hired based on connections rather than merit. Her husband at the time was also employed in the Whitfield County school system, and she worried her position would be seen as something she hadn’t truly earned.
Even when she began to receive professional recognition, including being named “Best of the Best” teacher, she did not feel the success brought relief. She recalled how conflict at home overshadowed her accomplishments:
“It did not go over well,” she said of her awards.
In her telling, she hoped that accolades and professional validation would prove she was good enough, both as a teacher and as a wife. But her marriage continued to deteriorate. She has described feeling especially ashamed because she was the first person in her family to get divorced, which she saw as a profound failure.
According to her, this was one of the reasons she stayed married as long as she did.
By the time she began the relationship with her student, she recounts feeling emotionally depleted, isolated, and desperate for approval.
This is the context in which she began her ‘relationship’ with Pickel. A pattern of chasing validation, chasing control, chasing an ideal of herself she could never live up to. It’s telling that in her own retelling, she seems to see her biggest mistake as finally becoming the woman who was talked about. The scandal was never just that she crossed a boundary, it was that she could no longer pretend she was perfect.
“That affair caused me to leave education, leave my marriage in a very abrupt way, um and that was probably the biggest failure of my life.”
There’s no question she has the right to tell her story. But what happens when that story becomes content? When accountability becomes a carefully managed narrative, what’s left for everyone else?
Female Offenders
It’s impossible to look at Elizabeth’s story without noticing how differently we respond when the offender is a woman.
Research shows that when female teachers exploit teenage students, their actions are often portrayed not as predatory, but as evidence of loneliness or unmet emotional needs. In one analysis by criminologist Andrea J. Darling, these women are frequently described as “troubled” rather than dangerous, and their victims, especially if male, are dismissed as willing participants.
As Darling explains:
“Social and cultural norms mean that women are often viewed as nurturers and carers…the ‘fairer sex’ and therefore not capable of sexual aggression. So this means that abuse by a woman is seen as being less harmful than abuse by a man—and viewed as the result of mental instability…This not only minimises the offending behaviour, but it also unfairly downplays the consequences for victims.”
That dynamic is exactly what you see in Elizabeth’s narrative. She casts herself as someone who was simply unwell, who made “a bad decision,” who loved too earnestly. And the fact that she eventually married her student becomes the ultimate proof that it wasn’t really abuse. This is how gendered myths about female offenders work: they transform exploitation into a story of misunderstood romance.
Additional research by psychologist Anna Salter, who has spent decades studying sexual predators, describes three broad categories of female offenders. The first group typically targets very young children, often their own, in situations involving severe violence that is rarely disclosed. The second group includes women coerced by male partners to commit abuse. The third and largest group, where Salter places many educators, consists of women who believe they are in love with teenage victims.
According to Salter, these teachers are often in their mid-30s, married, and well-liked in their communities. She notes that this likability can be easily mistaken for trustworthiness. Because their victims are adolescents with more autonomy, these offenders are more likely to be discovered than other sex offenders.
Charol Shakeshaft, a professor of educational leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University, has called these women “opportunistic abusers.” She observes that such teachers often attempt to blend in socially with students and seek validation through personal connections.
“A female teacher with a weak self-image might be attracted to a male student in her class and feel excited when she talks with him,” Shakeshaft wrote. “She starts to think that pursuing him is acceptable because he’s a teenager.”
Shakeshaft also highlights that social expectations can complicate disclosure, especially for boys. Cultural norms have taught many teen boys that they are supposed to feel flattered or honored by sexual attention, even if they feel conflicted or repelled.
Another case in Ohio reflects similar themes. In 2018, Canton high school teacher Natalie Eichler pleaded guilty to three counts of sexual battery after prosecutors said she had groomed male students for sex. Prosecutors specifically warned that leniency often follows when the offender is a woman and the victims are boys.
“Prosecutors told the judge…they had ‘always been concerned that the sentencing in this case would be considered differently because [Eichler] is a female teacher with male student victims, and that there would be a level of sympathy given…which would not have been given if the genders of the parties were reversed.’”
Despite the charges carrying potential prison time, the judge decided not to sentence her to prison, citing her remorse, the loss of her teaching license, and the assumption she was unlikely to reoffend. Eichler received 30 days in jail and probation.
Cases like Eichler’s and Scroggs’ highlight an ongoing debate about how gender, perceived vulnerability, and cultural narratives about female offenders can shape both the legal process and public perception.
“I own my mistakes. That’s the one thing you all will learn from me. I own my shit, if you will”
Elizabeth Pickle
Who Gets to Move On?
Who Gets to Move On?
When a crime becomes content, who gets to move on? Who gets to feel vindicated, and who is left questioning whether boundaries mean anything at all?
Elizabeth has described her podcast as an exercise in transparency and redemption. She talks about owning her mistakes, about her faith, about rebuilding her life with the man she once taught. In one episode she says:
“It’s about, yeah, you saw me all over the news, you saw me completely fall out of my marriage, but what I want to show you is that you can make a mistake and God can bless you and bring you back from it.”
And:
“You can come back from anything. If I have, you can.”
The podcast asks listeners to see her as a complex, remorseful person. But it also asks them to accept a version of events where marrying a former student is proof that no real harm was done. It’s worth asking what it means to consume that story or any story like it. When you listen, comment, or share, are you endorsing her right to heal, or are you helping recast exploitation as a misunderstood romance?
This isn’t unique to Elizabeth. We’ve built a culture where any narrative, no matter how complicated or morally fraught, can be rebranded as entertainment. You can see the same impulse in the fascination with Gypsy Rose Blanchard. Gypsy suffered unimaginable abuse, living under her mother’s control until she orchestrated her murder—an act of violence she carried out by enlisting a mentally ill man she met online. Today, she has millions of followers, sponsorships opportunities, and media deals.
Elizabeth talks about redemption as a moral necessity: that you can’t hold someone’s worst act against them forever, that grace must be possible. That is true. But does redemption mean the past ceases to matter? And is this really in her past if they are married? Forgiveness doesn’t mean trust is automatically restored. And when the harm was built on a power imbalance, when the story ends in a wedding, it doesn’t necessarily prove there was never any exploitation. At what point does this power imbalance go away? Can they ever truly be equals?
“People being shocked that I hadn’t committed suicide because that’s what our society tells you, if you make a mistake, if you fall flat on your face, you are not worthy enough to come back from it.”
Maybe the question isn’t whether she has moved on, but whether we should. Whether we’re willing to remember what happened even when it’s been packaged as something simpler. Whether we still believe that some boundaries matter, even when the ending looks like a happy one.