On Nov. 22, two women will appear in a McMinnville courtroom. One is a girlish, deluded dreamer who at nearly 30 still scribbles hearts and Cupid’s arrows in her diary, writing her beloved’s name over and over in flowery script. The other is a sexual addict desperate enough to send nude cell-phone photos and explicit videos of herself to an adolescent boy, with a lengthy prison stretch as the likely outcome. Both women are named Pamela Rogers. “I don’t mean she was psychotic,” says Nashville psychologist Joan Schleicher, one of the few therapists to have examined Rogers who is not bound by confidentiality (because she’s not treating Rogers). “She wasn’t. It was almost like somebody that’s into video games. She was not schizophrenic. That’s not what I mean by the two parts.” Instead, Schleicher says, the convicted teacher suffers from the same “magical thinking” that afflicts gamblers—which, in this case, led the 28-year-old Rogers to form a romantic and sexual relationship with a 13-year-old boy in her class, hoping for a happily-ever-after ending that did not come. Such thinking “is something that kids do, and in large part adults grow out of it because we realize that the world is not like this,” Schleicher says in a recent interview with the Scene. “It would be real anticipation, but over an outcome that’s just chance. That’s what we do when we wish for Santa to come and bring presents and stuff. We do it all of the time in our culture. “There is a rush of excitement with the anticipation. And there is also suicide sometimes when it doesn’t work.” On three separate occasions in a cramped private room in the Warren County Jail, between April and July of this year, Schleicher got what every tabloid reporter in North America would give their eyeteeth for: an exclusive with Pamela Rogers. Her candid and startling findings illuminate a woman who has been depicted as a predator, a fantasy figure and an object of salacious curiosity throughout her public downfall. Rogers’ saga became public on Feb. 4, 2005, when the Warren County elementary school PE instructor was charged with 15 counts of sexual battery by an authority figure and 13 counts of statutory rape. But it began months earlier, Rogers told Schleicher, when a boy in her class (known for the purposes of this article as T.K.), a tall, lanky basketball player with a mop of shaggy dark hair, began to flirt repeatedly with her and make sexual suggestions. Rogers told the therapist she came to enjoy the attention. “He would say, ‘I’m going to go to your house,’ ” Schleicher says. “And he would take her house key off of the key chain during physical education. And he would bring it back to her and say, ‘Now I’m going to get a copy of this and come to your house.’ ” But as fate would have it, he didn’t have to come to Rogers’ house. She ended up in his. The teacher had moved out of the home she shared with her husband, then Warren County High School basketball coach Chris Turner. Their acrimonious divorce would end up reported across the country, with allegations of adultery, drugs and gambling. But for now, Rogers was quietly looking for an apartment. Ironically, the mother of the very boy who had been pursuing Rogers so vigorously in gym class asked her if she wanted to stay at their home for a while. “Pamela was hesitant because of him,” Schleicher says, “but then she was also liking the attention from him. So she went to the house and stayed there.” The major turning point in the relationship—when Rogers became as much pursuer as pursued—came one day via a cell phone exchange, according to quotes attributed to Justin Grissom, 19, of McMinnville, a friend of T.K.’s since the two were toddlers. “I think you’re cute,” blinked a message on the 13-year-old boy’s cell phone. The message was from Pamela Rogers, the teacher with whom he had trifled following each ring of the gym-class bell. “I think you’re hot,” the boy answered back. From there, according to legal records, Rogers and T.K. engaged in oral and vaginal sex more than a dozen times over three months. At the time, locals noted what seemed like strange behavior on the teacher’s part. Rogers appeared to follow the boy night and day, hung out with him around town, walked him to his family’s car after basketball games, sat with him during games and cheered exclusively for him. It was an anonymous tipster who finally brought Pamela Rogers’ life and career crashing down. Dressed in a conservative dark suit, Rogers came to court and copped a plea. In an agreement that her Nashville attorney, Peter Strianse, struck with then District Attorney Dale Potter, the teacher got off with 198 days served (with good behavior taken off a total sentence of 270 days) in the Warren County jail—plus seven years and three months probation, registration as a sex offender, surrender of her teaching certificate for life, and the restriction that she cannot grant any interviews for eight years or profit in any way (including books and movies) from the case. Her jailer, Sheriff Jackie Matheny, who described Rogers to the McMinnville newspaper Southern Standard as “absolutely gorgeous, a beautiful girl,” confined her to a cell by herself part of the time and at times with a cellmate. She attended Bible study classes at the jail and was allowed a Bible and one paperback book at a time. Only paperbacks are allowed so they will be less lethal as weapons. On the day she walked free, Southern Standard reported that a male admirer sent her a large basket of red roses. But by the time the florist arrived with the roses, Rogers had already ridden away in a minivan to seclusion on the chicken farm of her father, heralded Clarkrange, Tenn., girls’ basketball coach Lamar Rogers. Pamela Rogers could have gotten as much as 100 years in prison. But apparently stern edicts from the court and the threat of more time in the slammer were not deterrent enough. Within days after walking out of jail, having served her previous light sentence, she violated her parole by sending text messages, nude cell-phone photos and sex videos of herself to the same teenage boy. Warren County legal authorities say Rogers had established an Internet website (entitled “PJ’s site”) in order to contact the boy, and had sent 126 messages on the site and received 223 messages. She used her basketball-coach father’s cell phone, owned by the Fentress County school board. Facing Circuit Court Judge Bart Stanley on these new charges, Pamela Rogers exhibited a trait that many women teachers in these cases share: contrition. At her hearing, she sat at the defense table wearing leg shackles and a black-and-white-striped jail uniform, sobbing quietly into a Kleenex clenched in her handcuffed hands. Eventually given permission to address the court, Rogers said she had been “blinded by emotion” after she went free on probation. Tears streaming down her cheeks, gasping for breath, Rogers turned and apologized to her mother, father and sister, seated about 10 feet behind her in the courtroom. Then she apologized to T.K.’s mother, father and sister, seated immediately behind the Rogers family. Both families were sobbing. “I have lost my freedom, my dignity and my dreams, and now I feel I may have even lost myself,” Rogers told Judge Stanley between choking sobs. “Please have mercy in your judgment.” If Rogers threw herself on the mercy of the court, it didn’t work. Saying, in effect, that she had thrown away the second chance she was given, Judge Stanley sentenced her to serve the remaining seven years of her eight-year sentence in the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville. The threat now looms of even more time. On Nov. 22, she returns to court to face an additional indictment on four counts of sexual exploitation of a minor. How could a personable, attractive teacher destroy her career, her reputation and her future for something so plainly disastrous—and needless—as a fling with a minor? The defense hired Schleicher to analyze Rogers and report her findings to the court. Over the course of three sessions in the jail, she gave Rogers a battery of psychological tests, including Rorschach inkblots; on the latter she consulted with Leslie Phillips, a 91-year-old former Vanderbilt professor and international Rorschach expert. In addition, Schleicher talked with Rogers at length and pored over some 12 diaries that Rogers had filled over the years. Rogers, the psychologist testified, is suffering from significant post-traumatic stress, from a great deal of trauma in her life and from extreme immaturity. “The diaries did tell me how much she lived in a dream world,” Schleicher says, “because the outcome of what she hoped for was just unrealistic.” One page is scrawled with florid handwriting and filigree, alongside a drawing of a heart and a basketball goal surrounded by little arrows. On another, Rogers had written T.K.’s name over and over. On yet another, she wrote over and over, “Pamela K…Pamela K…,” as if they were married and she had taken his name. “Even in jail, she was writing in florid handwriting about her and [T.K.], and also if they had a child what they’d name it,” Schleicher says. “It was just a whole world she could go into and it just fueled her lack of reality testing.” Asked if this were essentially the flip side of paranoia, Schleicher says, “Exactly. And I guess that has to do with all that she fantasized about that the diaries reflect, because it set her up for not having any adult wariness, proper wariness, looking for red flags with people. So vulnerable. So vulnerable.” In other cases, though, her thinking seemed almost childlike. Rogers, Schleicher says, thought she could control whether it rained or not and “thought that she could foresee things that would happen…. That fueled her thought that her love for [T.K.] was above any other law, that what she felt for him and what he felt for her was larger than any law that was made. It was as if she was above the law, in a way, because she could get things to happen. She could control weather, she felt like.” Is Pamela Rogers a pedophile, a sexual predator—or even, as some argue, a victim? On the first count, Schleicher testified at her hearing that Rogers was not attracted to pre-pubescent children, the definition of pedophilia. If anything, Rogers was “ephebophilic,” or involved with a post-pubescent adolescent. The term “sexual predator,” on the other hand, may or may not fit. A sexual predator, broadly defined, is a person who seeks sex partners in a predatory manner, i.e., hunts down others for sex. But Schleicher believes that Rogers suffers from sexual addiction, a psychological malady that remains controversial in some quarters. Reid Finlayson, assistant professor of psychiatry and medical director of the Vanderbilt Comprehensive Assessment Program, has been working with other psychiatrists across the country to have sexual addiction recognized in the forthcoming new edition of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). “It’s a very helpful concept,” Finlayson says. “It’s not an official diagnosis. I do see a lot of people whose sexual behavior fits an addiction model. It does seem in terms of the neurophysiology—the reward pathways that so many drugs can hijack—that also sexual behavior lights up and can sort of take on a life of its own. “I see people who wish they could stop being sexual. They can’t help themselves. They keep on doing it over and over again in inappropriate situations, with inappropriate partners, doing things they wish they could stop.” For now, Rogers’ attorney, Peter Strianse, has filed an appeal in the original case, and says he will be meeting to discuss a possible plea bargain for the remaining charges with the new DA, Lisa Zavogiannis, who defeated Dale Potter by a margin of over 3-to-1 in the recent election. Strianse notes that Rogers has handled herself throughout her long legal ordeal with “dignity. She has never complained about a single thing, despite the rather severe conditions in the women’s section of the Warren County Jail.” In the meantime, what of Pamela Rogers? She has exposed a double standard regarding statutory rape: that a male teacher sleeping with an underage girl is sick, but a female teacher sleeping with a male student is a ticket to the Penthouse Forum. As such, her Internet notoriety knows no bounds; she was even partial inspiration for a recent South Park spoof. But in her Hillsboro Village office, psychologist Schleicher sketches out the fractured world that Rogers lives in: Cinderella on one side, porn star on the other. This fractured world, the psychologist testified at Rogers’ parole-violation hearing, is in great need of repair through therapy. But there is concern now that Rogers is not headed for therapy—not at the Tennessee Prison for Women. “I think prison is going to teach her to become a more jaded felon,” Schleicher says. “It’s not going to help our society at all because she’s going to get out, and is going to have a lot more jadedness and hardness than she has now.” Schleicher is also concerned that Rogers might be vulnerable to lesbian involvement in prison given her now publicized past involvement in lesbian sex, her sexual addiction and her history of vulnerability. “I don’t know if there is any concern on the part of the court, or the prison,” says Schleicher, who served for five years as chaplain at the women’s prison, “because I think that [lesbian activity in prison] is a very frequent thing. She’s going to be a target, and she is going to be vulnerable to it.” The psychologist says that she trusts Pamela Rogers’ recollections of the flirtation that ended up costing the former teacher at least seven years of her life. “I think she’s pretty honest,” Schleicher says, then corrects herself somewhat: “I mean, she’s pretty naive. I don’t know if she can lie as well as some people can.” And then she adds, almost as an afterthought, “And as she can, in a few years.”
