A twisted New Jersey teacher who groomed and abused two students ended up getting pregnant by one of the teens — then broke his heart by getting an abortion, it was revealed as she was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Julie Rizzitello, who was an English teacher at Wall Township High School, had told one of her victims that she’d fallen pregnant after convincing him to have unprotected sex with her on his birthday, it was revealed in court Wednesday, according to Jersey Shore Online.
The 37-year-old mom later informed the teenager, whom she’d groomed as a freshman, that she’d terminated the pregnancy.
“Not only does he have to deal with the fact that he’s groomed throughout his entire high school years, that he was preyed upon by his teacher who he loved and trusted … that he was sexually abused by this teacher,” Monmouth County Judge Jill Grace O’Malley told the hearing of the young victim.
“But now he’s struggling to come to terms with the fact that this individual had an abortion and wasn’t comfortable with it. This is the psychological impact – the devastation.”
The disgraced teacher, who pleaded guilty last year to two counts of second-degree sexual assault, abused each of her victims for months at a time, prosecutors said.
The first boy — with whom she got pregnant — was a freshman when she started grooming him in 2017.
She told him she dreamed of having sex with him, which they then did multiple time in 2017 and 2018.
“This is grooming,” the judge said. “It is traditional grooming that I see every week here in this courthouse. This is the behavior of a standard sexual predator. You’re no different,” he told the teacher, according to Jersey Shore Online.
Rizzitello also targeted another boy, an 18-year-old student, in early 2024.
The sex pest teacher copped to having sex with both boys at her home, in parking lots and even at her family-owned bagel shop where the two victims worked.
When the teacher kept interrupting to deny being a groomer, the judge snapped: “Stop shaking your head… These are the facts.”
After Rizzitello was arrested in July 2024, prosecutors said she contacted both victims and asked that they scrub their phones and devices of any evidence.
“These crimes were not isolated incidents constituting moments of poor judgment; they were textbook cases of grooming, involving a defendant who repeatedly leveraged tactics of isolation, manipulation, and control for the sake of her own selfish purposes,” Monmouth County Prosecutor Raymond S. Santiago said in a statement.
“The egregious nature of the conduct was further compounded by the plain fact that the emotional and psychological harm she inflicted came at the expense of two of the very same young minds she had been entrusted to develop and nurture.”
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