We have a shocking update to a case of a married high school specialed teacher and soccer coach accused of having sex with a student. Christina Formela is now facing 52 more charges in connection to her alleged sex acts with an underage student and her husband appears to be standing by her side. We're on the case now. Let's get to the story that we have been following outside of Chicago where Christina Formelo was arrested in March and she was accused of having sex with a teenage student. Now, she said that the student had taken her phone, that he had tried to set her up by sending text messages between the two phones, making it seem like they were having a sexual relationship. But now, prosecutors have the receipts that show that this story allegedly goes far beyond what we first thought. For was in court this week in DuPage County, Illinois, outside of Chicago, and her husband was by her side. She kept her head forward going into a hearing where she would be arraigned on 52 new charges of sex crimes with a teenage student. Before I get to the proof that prosecutors say they have to back up those new charges, let's get to the body cam video of Formela, a high school teacher and a soccer coach who was arrested in March. Hey, how you doing? Hi, Officer Guzman with Down Grow. Do you have your license on you? Yes. Tonight? Yeah. I'm going to explain. I'm sure you're confused. I'll explain it to you. running through a double doors. You're Christina? Yes. Okay, Christina, do me a favor. Can you step out of the car for me? I know you're confused. I'll explain everything to you. You don't have anything on you? Just you can just grab whatever you need. Whatever I need? Yeah, whatever you need. Like your phone, your your purse. Go ahead and grab it. Is she going somewhere or? Yeah, we're going to explain everything to you guys. Go ahead and grab it out. We're not going anywhere right now. Of course. Of course. Yeah. I don't understand what's going on here. I get it. Yeah. You can go grab your things. Can he come with me? Yes. Yes. You stay there right for right now, sir. Just stay there. But yes, you can. But come on back here. Should I shut the car off? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Off. It's right back over here. So, we do have an investigation going on. Um, we have to talk to you about it at the police department. Okay. So, we're going to explain everything to you there. Um, it's not my investigation. I don't know the full details, but you do have to bring you there, though. Okay. So, I do have to put you in handcuffs and bring you to the police department. Just a down. Yes. Unfortunately. Yes. I'm like willing to go with you. I I get it. Yeah. Unfortunately, we have to do it that way. So, do me a favor. We just take this off. Can I ask you why? Of course. Of course. Yeah. It's not like I said, it's not my investigation. Obviously, we we're here for a reason. So, go ahead and turn around for me. in trouble. So, right now he's being detained and there is a that needs to talk to you at the police department. So, we'll let if your husband know he can just come to the police department as well if he wants to wait for you there. I'm like I get it. You have a lot of questions. So scared. Yeah, everything's okay. Okay. We just need to talk to you at the police department. That's all. Um, nothing else on your pocket right now. Anything else? My phone. Just your phone. Okay. Okay. All right. We're sitting back in this car on the other side. Once you get to the police department, um, you'll talk to the detective and he'll explain everything to you. But you can't even give me like an at what this is about. Other than that it's an investigation. That's all I can really tell you right now. I'm sorry. I wish I could tell you more. Is she coming with me? We'll let him know right now. Forla, as you can see there, seemed confused and shocked that police were taking her away. This is video of her in the rear of the police car being taken to the station. Before we get back to this episode from On the Case, I want to bring you a law and crime legal alert because if you received a Depo PA birth control shot and were later diagnosed with a brain or spinal tumor called menioma. Excuse me. Is my husband coming with? Yes. Yeah, he's taking his phone number down. We're staying in touch with him. We're just going to Downer Grove, though. So, 10 minutes away. No, I know. But I really would prefer that my husband's with me, of course. [Music] [Music] [Music] Am I in trouble? Like, I'm so I'm so lost right now. I'm I'm sure you are. Like I said, I can't answer any questions to tell you that right now you're being detained for an investigation and we're bringing you to the police department and once you get there, they're going to fill you in on everything. [Music] Heat. [Music] [Music] Heat. [Music] But once she got to that police station, detectives laid out their case that this teacher, this wife, this soccer coach was accused of having sex with an underage student. And just take a look at how she reacted. I'm just going to put your seat belt on. Are you able to leave it down there? All right. Sure. You don't want a tissue or something? I have a feeling I'm going to throw up. You want a bag? Yes, please. All right. Sean, can you grab like a bag out of there? Honestly, hey, can you get like a bag just in case she gets nauseous? Yeah. I don't know. Do we have any of those MSS bags like laying around the box? I think there's something better than nothing. Here, if you stay with her, I'll go [Music] Oh my god. [Music] What the [Music] [Music] Just kind of put it on the floor here. All right. Okay. Few paper towels in the door here if you need it. All right. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, I'm good. Yeah. Yep. See [Music] What's up? Oh, I don't know. Let's try the very very first one. But frankly, what she was accused of in March in that body cam video pales in comparison to what she is now being accused of by prosecutors. Let's start with the original charges. In March, Forla was charged with two counts of sexual abuse and criminal sexual assault. This story came about when a now 17-year-old boy and his mom filed a report saying that the boy had sex with Formela when he was 15 years old in 2023 and he was one of her students. The boy told police that he and Forla had sex just once in her classroom during a tutoring session. Now again, there's much more to this alleged story now. The boy's mom found out about this alleged relationship when she ordered her son a new phone after his original phone had broke. She went into his iCloud account and found very graphic messages allegedly between Formela, the teacher, and her son. And here are a couple of those text messages. The woman's son, the victim in this case, wrote, quote, "I love you so, so much, mama." And an unknown number texted back. And that is who prosecutors say is the teacher, Christina Formela. She says, quote, "I love you so much, baby. Even though this morning was short, it was perfect." Fora also allegedly texted, "I love having sex with you." And the teen responded allegedly, "I know, baby. I love it so much. It feels so good. It's so passionate. It's so intimate. It's so perfect." Police also looked at Formela's phone and allegedly found long entries in her notes section where she is talking about not just having sex with the student, but allegedly considering him her boyfriend. Quote, "I'm not upset. I'm not mad." Fora allegedly wrote, "I'm not any of that. I've just lost interest. I went back and screenshotted every single time that I said we should break up until after the wedding and after you graduated. And every single effing time you came back and convinced me it would be fine. I initiated every single breakup only for you to end things saying you couldn't get over it. That this teenager who we thought was 15, but apparently this relationship allegedly went to when he was 14. That he had broken into her phone. He set her up. He was the one sending all these text messages. But you look at what prosecutors lay out where apparently she was sending text messages they say when she was on vacation with her husband in Italy. How much does this new evidence carve into the defense that she apparently gave police when she was arrested? I'm not here to say that prosecutors are always right. I am here to say that defend ants come up with the most ridiculous excuses when they're confronted with clear evidence against them. And she must have been backpedaling in her head. How can I explain away this evidence that they're presenting in front of me? Let's remember anybody who has a cell phone, anybody who uses iCloud or any other backup service forgets that nearly every interaction is preserved, protected in the cloud, in the backups, easy to find. Prosecutions for this sort of crime 50 years ago before you and I were around uh doing this sort of stuff must have been much harder because it was all eyewitness stuff. He said, she said. But in an era where everything we do is logged and backed up to the cloud, evidence of these uh these crimes is just so much easier to prove. How damning is it for her defense, if you were her defense attorney, that she made those statements that this was a one-off. He set me up when prosecutors now are laying out that they have a lot of evidence that this was far more than that. What I've seen prosecuting cases like this is that there are certain kinds of offenders who think they can talk their way out of anything, which is usually pretty dumb. This is I'm not a defense lawyer. I prosecute. But usually why defense lawyers tell their clients to shut up because they know that other evidence is coming. There's a process called discovery where each side gets to see the other side's evidence. So, the defense lawyer wants to wait to see all the evidence against her and then they can come up with whatever their defense is at trial, but I think she thought she was able to talk herself out of this. And she said some things that are going to come back to haunt her should this case go to trial, right? Um, how big of a deal is it that this actually happened when this student allegedly was 14 years old compared to what we first thought, which was 15 to not do this. And so there are so many felonies here that um the defense lawyer is almost certainly coming to the prosecutor and saying please can't we work this out in some way where this woman will be able to be free maybe in her 50s or 60s. I think she's 30 now. So it's unlikely any outcomes in some crazy twist that we don't know about. It's unlikely that any outcome is going to result that won't keep her in prison until she's nearly a senior citizen. And I want to talk a little bit about her bond because she's out right now. They did add with these new uh charges when she was arraigned on those earlier this week. She's wearing a GPS monitor. She can't go near the victim. There's a new software on her computer to track what she's doing online. But she's accused of having sex with a young teenager 45 times. Sexual acts 45 times. It was in school. It was at her home. It was at her home during school hours. I mean, this is not a a small case of a teacher, and not that it's ever acceptable, but crossing the line once. I mean, these are serious charges. Six counts of grooming she's facing. Why is she out on bond? It's very troubling. This is a reminder that where you choose to live, you subject yourself to the laws of that state. And in Illinois, in 2023, they changed the law. There's no cash bond. A judge cannot order a cash bond for any defendant in any case. And the the presumption is that the person should not be held pre-trial. This was passed after the summer of George Floyd and and some of the hysterical allegations against law enforcement that were made following that. My concern is less that she's a threat. Don't get me wrong, she's a bad person and needs to go to prison for a long time, but I don't think that in her free time she's looking for 14-year-olds to go have sex with. The threat here is since she's facing an essential life prison, life in prison sentence. The threat is she leaves. She cuts off the monitor. She heads to uh Central America. She never heard from again. She has every incentive to flee. This judge said that there wasn't clear and convincing evidence to be able to uh to detain her. I think the judge made a mistake. How much does because I know part of the reasoning for the judge in only adding the GPS monitor and the software to her computer was, you know, what's new in this case compared to when she was first arrested back in March? How much does the decision in March factor into whether you can take someone into pre-trial confinement? um as opposed to looking at this. I mean, you look at I mean, this is it's it's just shocking the new level that this story has been brought to with what prosecutors have. And I know the defense was saying, well, we already knew all this was already out there and all this and all that. I mean, I think that there's a pretty strong argument that this is a completely different story than what we were first dealing with when it was first uncovered back in April and March. It's true. every single instance of sex with this child is its own felony with four or five years in prison. Start adding them together. A judge doesn't have to run the sentences consecutively, but she could. Start adding them together and it looks like a life sentence. This creates a strong likelihood of her fleeing from justice. This law is so pernicious. The notion that every crime is presumed to be one where the defendant is free the next day after he's arrested. Every crime has that presumption and that the prosecutor, they call them states attorneys in Illinois, has to file a special motion and ask for a special hearing in the hope that he could overcome by clear and convincing evidence that somehow this defendant and has no other way of being kept uh you know from fleeing other than prison. And the judge even lamented from the bench that the law was handcuffing her. It's a bad law. Illinoisans ought to petition their legislators to get it changed and this is just the latest example of how it hurts people. I know the other argument is, oh, she's, you know, we have a GPS monitor on her, so we know that she's not going near the alleged victim. I think when you look at this, you know, dozens of times that they've had some sort of sex act, according to prosecutors, there are these text messages, which if you've read those are over the top to say the least, and explicit. She talked about not wanting to marry her husband and she would divorce him and get millions of dollars. So apparently she's got resources as well. Why not look at this and say that this is someone who does want to be close to this victim and should be in bars um ahead of trial to protect the victim in this case? I think that's a fair argument, too. Again, most of us look at this from our own common sense perspective like, "Wow, if that happened to me, I would never go contact the the alleged victim." But she's a megalamaniac. Her statements suggest that she's a megalamaniac. Somebody who does these things already has impaired judgment. So you make a fair point. She's likely to approach him because quote unquote they're in love or because she'd like to shut him up. Either or. That's one reason why she should be she should be pre-trial detained. The other one that I mentioned is she has a very high incentive to flee the country to get away from this potential life sentence. For as many charges as she's facing, these were 52 new charges. Um just again running through them, arraigned on 20 counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault. You have aggravated criminal sex abuse, indecent solicitation of a child, and then six counts of grooming. If this was to go to trial, how is this tried where you're able as a prosecutor to prove every single point and lay it out clearly for a jury? Well, you have the electronic evidence, right? And so, everyone focuses on the victim's testimony. That's certainly going to be the case. As a prosecutor, when I do sex cases, I would rather not have my child victims testify. They've already been abused by the offender, and I hate to revictimize them by putting on the stand. We have ways of presenting the evidence without calling uh the victim. I think in this case they're going to have to call him, but certainly the electronic evidence, how graphic it is, how specific it is. Uh there there's really no other explanation for what was going on other than these charges. I frankly will be shocked if this goes to trial. I think there will be some agreement of a a plea agreement that will allow her to get out again as I said maybe when she's in her 50s or 60s uh and be a registered sex offender for the rest of her life. Prosecutors feel a strong influence to not put victims on the stand unnecessarily.