Grooming And The Fight To Protect Our Children

In this powerful episode of Not On My Watch, host April Moss sits down with child-protection advocate Michelle Peterson, whose personal fight for justice helped lead to the first unlawful grooming conviction in the United States.

Michelle shares the deeply personal story of how she first discovered that her teenage son Andrew had been targeted by a trusted teacher and coach. What began as a mother’s instinct that something was wrong soon revealed a disturbing pattern of manipulation and grooming, tactic predators often use to gain the trust of both children and their families before abuse occurs.

Determined to protect her son and prevent other families from experiencing the same trauma, Michelle helped expose critical gaps in the law surrounding grooming. Her advocacy contributed to the creation of the first standalone grooming conviction in the country and has since inspired legislative efforts known as Andrew’s Law, aimed at strengthening protections for children nationwide.

Throughout the conversation, Michelle explains how grooming works, the warning signs parents should watch for, and why trusting parental instincts can make all the difference. She also discusses her ongoing work helping states adopt stronger laws so predators can be prosecuted before abuse escalates.

This episode is a sobering but hopeful reminder that vigilance, courage, and informed parents remain some of the most powerful tools in protecting the next generation.

Learn more about Andrew’s story here: NBC 5 Investigates

Get In Touch with Michelle here: Michellepeterson.org

Subscribe to the Project Defend and Protect Our Children Bulletin here: PDPC Subscribe Form - America's Future

Follow Us On Social Media

Subscribe to our Rumble channel : https://rumble.com/c/AmericasFuture?e9s=src_v1_sa

Facebook: (20+) Facebook

Twitter: (2) America's Future USA (@amerifuture) / X

Instagram: Americas Future USA (@americasfutureusa) • Instagram photos and videos

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Welcome to Not On My Watch. I'm your host, April Moss. Today's conversation is not easy, but it's necessary. Across this country, parents are waking up to a reality they never imagined that grooming and exploitation don't always begin in dark alleys or on hidden websites. Sometimes they begin in classrooms, in trusted spaces with trusted adults. My guest today, Michelle Peterson, knows this reality firsthand. Michelle is not an activist by ambition, but she is a mother who was forced into the fight after her son Andrew was groomed by his teacher in a case that led to the first grooming conviction in United States history. What began as a mother's battle for justice became a national movement to close legal loopholes and protect children before abuse escalated. Through Andrew's law, Michelle is working state by state to ensure grooming itself is recognized and prosecuted because by the time abuse is visible, it is often too late. This conversation is about vigilance. It's about courage, and it's about what happens when a mother decides not on my watch.

SPEAKER_02 1:29

I'm here as a mother, but just not any mother. But the mother of a boy who had the strength to come forward to protect other children. In 2010, we fought a three-year legal battle to get his predator locked up. My son was 16. That case resulted in the first unlawful grooming conviction in the United States. Since that time, I've made it my personal mission to see grooming laws enacted in all 50 states. I have directly or indirectly assisted in multiple states passing grooming legislation. Indiana would be the seventh state connected to that re effort.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Michelle, thank you so much for joining us today on Not On My Watch. It's extremely sobering to hear your story. And I'd love for you to share that before there was national attention on this issue with grooming, you were simply a mother raising your son. What was life like for your family before you realized that something was wrong with Andrew? So, first of all, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_03 2:19

And we live about 80 miles southwest of Chicago in a small farming community. And prior to any of this happening in our lives, it was just a normal family, right? Normal mom, um, maybe a little bit abnormal in that I actually coached my son's baseball teams. I was like that token female coach. I was very involved in my son's life and coached his teams from the time he was eight years old until, man, he was 17 years old. Just kind of doing our normal everyday things. You know, I'd go to work every day, I'm a physical therapist. Andrew was that typical kid and would go to school every day reluctantly, as a lot of kids did. And I was a single mom for a long time until he was about 10 years old from the time he was three. I would to preface this with I think sometimes a lot of these groomers will target single parents. And I think this guy thought I was still a single parent at the time when he targeted my son. When did your instincts first tell you that something was not right? Was it Andrew's demeanor? So there was a little bit of that, but it was actually a conversation that I overheard in the fall of 2010. He was on the phone and was extremely upset. I could hear him say, I don't know how often you want me to call you, you know, that I'm busy, I'm working two jobs, I'm taking a class in college. At 16, I thought maybe he had a new girlfriend. And then I overheard him say, you know, I'll pick up those paintballs in your classroom tomorrow. And my heart just sunk. And I knocked on the door, I said, Who are you talking to? And he told me it was this teacher who was a baseball coach, and 11 o'clock at night in October, I said, Why is he calling you at 11 o'clock at night? That's completely inappropriate. You need to hang up the phone. And he did, and I went and looked up the phone number he was talking to on our computer. And looked up the phone bill and then saw thousands of messages between the two phone numbers. No verbiage, it was just the cell phone bills, so just like you get in your normal bill. So just the two numbers back and forth since May of 2010 through October of 2010, and just thousands of messages and many messages coming in in the middle of the night. There'd be sometimes 10, 20, 30 messages coming in from the teacher with no response back. And now looking back, I'm sure that was my son just like, I don't want to even respond to this, but then felt like he had to because this is somebody in a position of authority and a teacher.

SPEAKER_01 4:25

I want our audience to hear something in your own words about what grooming actually looks like. Sure.

SPEAKER_03 4:31

So you have normal grooming where you groom someone to be a CEO of a um company or hospital or a company or whatever. But then you also have um look where you groom your kids to be of good moral character. This is unlawful grooming, whereby somebody who is in a position of authority or somebody's older is going after a child who is younger to do something nefarious to that child. But they don't only just groom the child, they will groom the family, they groom the community, and that's what actually happened in our case as well.

SPEAKER_01 4:59

So you would say those are some of the major warning signs that parents need to pay attention to is that they want to build trust with the child's parents and with other people in the child's life so that you don't question. Is that correct? Correct.

SPEAKER_03 5:14

Yep, they will try to build trust any way they can. When I went and talked to the principal, for example, about this the very next day after he overheard that conversation, he sat back in his chair and just let out this huge sigh. And he said, I just gave him a teacher's award two weeks ago, right? So he also groomed the school. None of these teachers and his colleagues ever thought that he would do anything like this to a child. I was also coaching softball at the same high school where he was coaching baseball. And I'm a physical therapist. So I was in his home treating a family member for home health physical therapy at the time he started texting my son in May of 2010. So he knew me as a parent, as a colleague, and as a healthcare provider. I think he never thought that I would ever do anything nefarious to him, right? And that I would never question anything about what he was doing. And he couldn't have been further from the truth because as soon as I heard that conversation, my gut instinct as a parent and as a mom, I was like, there's something off here, there's something wrong. And that's where Yep, and that's where I think some parents try to just push that away. But you have to go with your gut instinct and know right away that if you think there's something wrong, there probably is, and follow that instinct. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 6:24

It's hard to do, especially when everything in the natural seeming like there's nothing wrong, but you know in your gut. When you began pursuing justice for Andrew, what shocked you most about the gaps in the law surrounding grooming?

SPEAKER_03 6:38

So I didn't even know what grooming was at the time when this first started. There was no law in Illinois for grooming at the time. And so what they were actually going after, because he offered my son money for oral sex in a text message, want to make a sex video with him, and he'd refer to his body part as my little guy. You know, am I ever gonna get to see the little guy? This sort of thing. So they would have to solicitation of a minor and enticement, which is much different than grooming. So enticement is where you're actually talking about the the act and um also seduction, like where you're actually doing the act. Grooming is everything that leads up to it. So it doesn't start with offering the money. It doesn't start with, hey, you want to make a sex video, right? It starts with, you know, I'm sorry that you're having this bullying incident on the baseball team. I'm here for you, whatever you need. I know that your mom is busy and you can always rely on me for whatever you need. You know, I'll I'll get you some paintballs, like I said in that conversation. You know, it's all of these things that lead up to that, where they're garnering trust of that child. And even though my son is very intelligent, even at 16, 15 years old, he was very intelligent, but they still don't have the the maturity to be able to handle a situation like this. And so he, you know, these groomers, when they're good, they will actually pull these kids in and get them to trust them, to feel sorry for them, to do whatever they need to do to gain that trust and get some sort of a relationship with them. And they use that, whatever opening there is. So in this case, it was a bullying incident, they will use that to open the door to get into that kid and try to that what they try to do is separate that child from the parent. So that's what they try, they they really try to pull that child in. So even in your family, let's say that you have a family member who is really honing in on just one child, they will try to separate that child from some from everybody else. So those are things that you have to watch for. If they're really trying to do that, or like let's say that you have three kids and they'll isolate that one kid away. Hey, I'm gonna take this one for ice cream. Well, why aren't you taking the other two? You know, so it's those types of things that you have to watch for. It seems very benign in the moment, but if it's happening over and over again, you have to really kind of hone in on that because this is not a white man syndrome. These are not people that they don't know. More than likely, probably about 80% of the time, it's somebody that they know. It's somebody in the family, it's a neighbor, it's clergy, it's a teacher, it's somebody in your realm who is going to try to do something like this to your child. Hindsight's 2020. My son was withdrawn, he was tired, I couldn't get him up in the morning. He didn't want to go to school, which I never had a problem with, a resting heart rate of 120, going down to the nurse's station a couple times a week. This was way out of his character from anything before. But again, he was 15. So was this just a normal teenage thing, right? Was it just hormones? I never even thought anything twice of this until I overheard that conversation. And then I started thinking back, I'm like, well, this resting heart rate was anxiety. Yeah. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

Yep. So those are things to watch. Andrew has certainly been through a lot, and he's actually partnered with you to bring much needed change to the law structure as grooming is not recognized as a crime. But recently, Andrew gave congressional testimony and he showed extraordinary courage when he testified. I would love for our audience to hear a portion of that testimony.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

Because of the law, we were able to come forward. The state's attorneys were able to prosecute that case, and it got the teacher out of the school system and away from the other players and away from pu uh from future potential victims. There's absolutely no reason that we are that you all are discussing passing, as she said, a law about vaping when we are barring minors from buying vapes and willing to protect them in that way, but not willing to afford them protections before the actual physical abuse begins.

SPEAKER_03 10:42

Yeah, so that testimony was in Indianapolis, and I've been working with some legislators there to put a grooming law in place in Indiana, and for whatever reason, they wanted to um define a child as anybody under the age of 14 instead of somebody under the age of 18, which would go along with all their other statutes, or other laws in Indiana, they define a child as anybody under the age of 18, except in this case, for whatever reason. Yeah, even when we tried to tell them the National Centers for Uh Missing Exploited Children state that the most vulnerable ages are between the ages of 14 and 18 to be abused, exploited, effect, that those are the kids that we really need to protect. And this gap leaves them wide open. And even in the Illinois laws, as I said, when we first started this, Illinois didn't have a grooming law, and I couldn't figure out for the life of me why this was taking so long. It took us three years to get this guy convicted. But we had to wait on this law, and we had to wait on God to put this law in positions. He was going to take a plea deal. This teacher was gonna take a plea deal in August of 2013, and then just in July of 2013 is when Illinois got a grooming law put in place. And so that's when we went after the grooming law. And then we go to court in October of 2013, and that's when we got the very first unlawful grooming conviction in the United States, which is set precedent now, and they use that case for trafficking cases, other grooming cases. He also got convicted of solicitation of a minor, but he went to appeals for that, and that got appealed. And so the only um conviction that stuck was the unlawful grooming conviction. So we have the only standalone grooming conviction in the United States, and he did 30 days in jail. He had to register as a sex offender for only 10 years. Yep. And he paid like a $2,700 fine, but he could never teach again, which was my main goal. And he was sentenced to 180 days in jail. I had to do the first 60, and would only do the other 120 if he violated probation. And because of day-for-day good behavior, the initial 60, he only had to do 30 days.

SPEAKER_01 12:41

So, um You know, Michelle, as you've walked through this, I'm sure it's so disheartening to realize that the law is really giving so much favor and protection to pedophiles. But Andrew's law, the national impact that has happened through this as it expands across states, can you explain what the law does and why it's so important?

SPEAKER_03 13:02

Yes. So what we initially started to do is we were going to amend the current grooming laws across the country, which would be known as Andrew's Law. What that would do is make it so that you couldn't take a plea bargain if you were convicted of grooming andor trafficking, also expand the sex offender registry if you were convicted of grooming to lifelong instead of just 10 years. And it would also expand it so it would include places of businesses that are privately owned that cater all or in part to children, because places like Chuck E. Cheese, Dave and Busters, those places didn't exist when this law was written. So those are free game to these folks who are on the sex offender registry. So those are just literal playgrounds for these guys. So we started here in Illinois and we have House Bill 1140 and Senate Bill 284. And those bills have been sitting in committee for two years. And from my understanding, they were told to stand down on those and never call them for vote to get them out of committee. And so I asked the person who had that intel, was it JB Prisker that wanted those to sit in committee forever and never called for vote? And she said it was either him or it was the speaker of the house. So now we all know with some of these Epstein files dropping, you have Tom Prisker, who is the CEO of Hyatt Hotels. And then JB Prisker was also just mentioned recently by Bill Clinton that he had been on the Lolita Express with him. So if you have people who are actually involved in this, they're gonna try to tamp this down and never let these bills get called for vote. While there were prior to 2024, there were no other laws in place for grooming. So nothing happened to these predators until they actually touched and defiled these children. So I started working with Allie Hopper, who is a peer illegal out of Florida, was introduced to her by General Flynn and Mary Flynn O'Neill, and she started knocking on the doors in Tallahassee trying to get somebody who would sponsor a grooming law because once she started looking at the criminal code and realized they didn't have a bill or a law to amend, then we took a step back to start getting some of these laws in place. I had gone down and spoken at a GOP meeting and then met the senator who was willing to sponsor this bill in Florida. He pulled me to the side, wanted to hear a whole story, and then he said he was in. So he sponsored this bill. So in April of 2024, that's when Florida got their law put into place and was signed by Governor DeSantis. Not too much longer after that, then we were working with the representative Mark Thompson out of Iowa. They then got a law put in place. Then Arizona reached out to those two states because they needed a law. So then Arizona has a grooming law in you know, 2024. And then there's a woman in Georgia who was trying to get a grooming law in place for three years, could not get it put into place until these other three states fell in 2024. Then Georgia's law became, you know, went through finally for her. And so she had had a daughter named Susan Cobb. She'd had a daughter who was actually groomed and then molested by a YMCA gymnastics coach. And so for three years, she was trying to fight to get this put into law in Georgia. So that's kind of how this is going. Some some places it's taking on a life of its own. There are other states where they actually need a little bit of help to put those these uh laws into place. And that's where I am willing to come and testify if I need to as to what happened to our family, because I don't want this to happen to any other family. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

Well, I I give you so much accolade and credit for loving your son so much to go to these extremes to protect him and protect other children. And it's what absolutely every strong mother who loves her child would do. If a parent who's watching today is sensing that something is wrong with their child but isn't sure what to do, can you give them a first step that they should take?

SPEAKER_03 16:31

Yes. So they can contact their Department of Children Family Services or Child Protection Services in their state. And you can, as a parent, file uh an investigation at any time. So you don't have to wait for the school to do this. So when I went in and talked to the principal about this that next day, I asked him if he was going to contact DCFS as a mandatory reporter. And after he had met with my son and the teacher, and they said that there was no wrongdoing, they were just normal text messages. He said, My hands are tied, Michelle. He goes, But you're Andrew's mom, you can do whatever you want. You want to open up a DCFS investigation, you can do that. He told me three or four different ways in that first conversation, essentially to open up a DCFS investigation and get the ball rolling. And so that's what I did. It still took me a week to do that after some prayer and reflection because this is somebody's livelihood. It's their life. You want to make sure that what you're actually seeing or feeling is what you think is actually happening. So that's what parents can do. They can open up an investigation. And I'm going to tell you what the investigator that I met, Amy Coelho, when I met her at one of the reawaken events in January of 23, told me, she said, You did the one thing that most parents won't do. They get told by authorities no and they walk away. She said, You didn't take no for an answer. And every time you got told no, you went another direction. You found another avenue. You found another door. And she said, that's what parents need to do, is they need to stay on top of this and never take no for an answer and protect your kids and fight your for your kids at all costs.

SPEAKER_01 17:56

And I and I think that it's fantastic that you are continuing to work with other states to ensure that they have the crop correct and proper avenues and channels to go through to be able to prosecute for grooming and for pedophilia and everything else. And um, Michelle, I'm so sorry that this is the story that you've had to walk through and how just absolutely devastating this had to have been for your family. But I'm very proud of you for pressing on. And I know that Andrew is so proud of you as well. Before we go, tell everybody where they can find you. And and uh for those listening, they want to get in contact with you.

SPEAKER_03 18:34

Sure. So I do have a website that was initially gifted to me by the America Project. After they heard me speak at the GOP meeting that I was that I attended in Florida, they asked how they could help. I said, I need a landing page, I need a place to put all of my stuff. And so it's just my name. It's Michelle with two L's, Peterson, P-E-T-R-S-O-N.org. And on there, you will find a tab that says Andrew's Law. There's a federal bill draft on there as well. I have a federal representative who is sponsoring this at the federal level for a standalone grooming bill at the federal level. That's Aaron Houchen out of Indiana. And I also have on there the two Senate, the Senate bill and the House bill here in Illinois. And then there's another tab that says current grooming laws that I need to update now and put Indiana on there. But there are all of the bills and all the laws are on there so that people can go right on there directly, take it. It'll go right to the legiscan and take them to the actual law and they can pull it off of there for their own state. So if somebody has a rep or a senator in their state that they know personally that they would they could talk to you about actually sponsoring a grooming bill in their state, um, I will help them as much as I can, but you can pull all the information off the website. Everything's free game there. And just wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to use. There's also on there an education tab. So you can go on there as a parent or as a grandparent, um, and it gives you some information about things to look for, what grooming looks like, what you can look like as far what it can look like as far as somebody who is trying to entice your child, um, what to look for. So all of that education is on there as well. And then there's a contact page, and you can go on there and fill it out. The email comes directly to me. Once you fill that out and um fill out your information, I'll get a and hold a hold of you. If you have a representative or you need help with something, they can go on there and fill that out, and I'll be more than happy to help to the best that I can. And currently, Wisconsin, they actually have a bill that passed the House and the Senate. So that's going to the governor to be signed within the next couple of weeks. And I'm actually going next week to testify in Tennessee. There's a Senator Bowling in Tennessee and a representative Jody Barrett who sponsored the bill in Tennessee. So I'll be testifying in the congressional hearing next week, along with Hope Beryl Green. She is also testifying, and she is a um resident of Tennessee. So this is a real thing. This is ongoing, and we're more than willing to help in any way that we can to get this put in place in your state.

SPEAKER_01 20:53

Michelle, thank you so much for your courage and for turning pain into protection. Thanks for being here today. Thank you so much. If today's conversation impacted you, I want to ask you to do something simple but powerful. Like this episode, share it with another family or friend and parent, and subscribe on Rumble and your favorite podcast platform. When we bring these stories into the light, we make it harder for darkness to operate in silence. Hug your kids, know what's influencing them, and never surrender your role as their first line of defense. This is not on my watch.