Rajiv Gola
Appearances
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
That simple admission, just doing parent stuff, would end up derailing Laura's entire career and turn this story from a gossipy small-town scandal into a series of felony charges and national headlines.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
Randy Etheridge is a veteran criminal defense attorney out here in Pensacola. He's a textbook good old boy, a true back-slapper and bullshitter. At least, that's the impression I got when I made the six-hour trek to Pensacola to speak with him.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
He's a lifelong Floridian who has deep roots in the panhandle. And this case was a bit more personal than most of the cases he dealt with. I guess it starts with Mr. Bubba Grover. Bubba, Laura's husband. I should also say here that Bubba isn't his legal name, but it may as well be. Even the newspapers call him Bubba. How do you know him?
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
Within weeks of the homecoming election, the school held a disciplinary hearing to figure out what to do with Emily and Laura. And both of them submitted letters to the superintendent, which were, well, thoughtfully worded. They actually both admit to snooping on other students using Laura's Focus account, and they're sorry for it. Here's what Emily wrote.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
There is no excuse for me seeing other people's grades, but insecurities and curiosity led me to poor choices. I 100% know it was wrong and would do anything to undo it, but I had no idea that this much trouble would come from this. Laura's letter said this, So, both Emily and Laura fully admitted to spying on other students.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
But, and this is a big but, they didn't say anything about the homecoming election. they took no responsibility for the fraudulent votes. Their defense was their alibis.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
When the fraudulent votes were cast, Randy says Emily was at a slumber party with a friend whose father worked with the sheriff's department.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
But Laura's alibi gets a little weaker when you consider the fact that the votes had been cast over the course of more than 48 hours, on both Laura's personal and work devices. So, unless Laura was training for an ultramarathon, it was pretty clear that she was the most likely person behind the fraudulent votes.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
After a short deliberation, the district expelled Emily just a few months before graduation. And Laura was suspended from her job.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
Cue the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the highest police authority in the state. For them, a data breach and misuse of public school data was a serious allegation. They opened an official investigation into the matter. They pulled cell tower data, internet service records, and interviewed dozens upon dozens of parents, students, teachers, and administrators.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
The investigation focused on Laura as the prime suspect. Again, her devices had cast at least 100 fraudulent votes and had viewed the focus profiles of every one of those students. For Emily's part, investigators alleged that she had a long history of misusing her mom's Focus account to snoop on her classmates, stretching as far back as freshman year.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
She would even brag about it to other students. After five months, FDLE agents obtained arrest warrants for Laura Carroll and Emily Grover. The evidence was pretty damning, but at this point, the worst outcome that Laura and Emily could probably expect was a slap on the wrist in the form of probation and fines. But then, national media got a hold of the story.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
But it's easy to see why the story took off. A mother-daughter duo was placed in handcuffs for allegedly hacking their homecoming election. It's a Mean Girls-type plotline that only gets better when you throw the word Florida into the mix. It was almost too easy to poke fun at them and riff on the absurdity of the whole thing.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
For a hot minute, Laura and Emily became the biggest villains on TV news.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
Now's probably a good time to tell you that we reached out to Emily and Laura, but they declined to speak to us. But back then, they did do one sit-down interview with Good Morning America.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
A reporter joined Laura and Emily at their house. The two sit on their porch, a pot of orange flowers slightly out of focus behind them. Emily keeps smirking, as if she can't believe any of this is actually happening. Laura has a perpetual scowl on her face, as she defends herself and her daughter.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
It's a short segment, just over four minutes. Randy says the interview was fair, but it also completely doomed Laura's chances in court.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
As a Floridian myself, this was something I was familiar with. Emily and I share the experience of having our hometowns caricatured as places where human id can run free and unbridled. Where tragedy is broadcast as comedy. And where things that might have otherwise been regular small town news items get blown out into national headlines. Simply because they happened in Florida.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
And this was a prime example of that Florida feedback loop. Something crazy happens in Florida, local papers report on it, national news picks up on it, the media circus comes to town, and prosecutors double down so they don't look bad. Now, Emily and Laura were each staring down the barrel of felony charges and up to 16 years in prison.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
Randy was confident about getting Emily's case resolved, and he managed to strike a deal with the prosecutors to put her through a pretrial intervention program.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
But after the Good Morning America interview, it was clear that Laura was not going to plead guilty. She was gearing up for a fight, and Randy knew that there were no guarantees once they went to trial.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
Laura had already admitted on tape to misusing Focus to check up on Emily's classmates, or as she called it, doing parent stuff. And that made the whole case a lot riskier than Randy anticipated.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
There was a strong possibility that Laura, the wife of one of his oldest and closest friends, could go to prison. And that wasn't something Randy could stomach. Really, the whole thing had become a lot more than he bargained for when he took the case a year earlier.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
Randy notified the court that he'd be leaving the case and passed off the file to another well-known lawyer in the area.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
Randy had asked Chris to take this case because Chris is a trial lawyer. He's calm under pressure, exudes natural ease, and yeah, he's annoyingly handsome too.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
The state was using every avenue they had to gather evidence. Nothing was off limits.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
It seemed like such a drastic law enforcement reaction all over a simple school kid scam. But Chris says it's important to think about this case as two separate things. First, there was the accusation of the homecoming election scheme.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
That's what the media latched onto. That's what turned this whole case into a Ripley's believe it or not national news story.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
This was the actual meat and potatoes of the case. This is what was really on trial here.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
And it wasn't just the prosecutors and the judge that saw the case this way. According to Gabe, our resident high schooler, this was how a lot of people in Pensacola saw the story.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
It's November 2020 in Pensacola, Florida, and Laura Carroll is in a small, closed room at the school district headquarters. She's been summoned here by the district investigator, Gary Marsh. If there's something criminal happening in the schools, Gary Marsh is going to sniff it out.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
In his own way, Chris agreed that locals weren't concerned with the homecoming election part of this story.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
To outsiders, this case seemed to confirm stereotypes of a sleazy backward South that still cared deeply about old school traditions. It was dance moms meets daughters of the Confederacy. And Gabe, being a part of the rumor mill in Pensacola, saw a lot more of that side of things.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
In the end, Emily did get to go to University of West Florida and join the same sorority as her sister. She's done her best to put this behind her and just be a regular college kid, partying with her friends and going on beach vacations. And even though Emily's charges were dismissed and record expunged, her lawyer, Randy Etheridge, says that she didn't exactly get off scot-free.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
And Laura, for her part, eventually pled no contest to a single felony count, the use of a two-way communication device to facilitate a felony charge, and was given 18 months of probation. The rest of her charges were thrown out. But now she's filed an appeal claiming that the admission she made to the school investigator, Gary Marsh, should not be admissible in court.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
She was a school employee being interviewed by a school official and knew her job was on the line. So Laura's attorneys claim that she was just saying what she needed to say to protect herself. The judge in Laura's trial didn't agree with that and allowed the tape to remain on the record.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
After everything that came out of this small-town scandal— the arrests, the felony charges, the media whirlwind, the expulsions, suspensions, and firings— the biggest irony of the whole thing— was that Emily could very well have won the homecoming election, even if a single fraudulent vote had never been cast.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
Laura has been with the school district for 20 years, moving up the ranks from teacher to assistant principal at Bellevue Elementary. For a school employee, getting called to the district headquarters is the equivalent of getting called to the principal's office, and it's likely that her job is on the line.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
The system they're asking about is called Focus, and it's an online portal used to upload grades, mark attendance, and store all sorts of other sensitive student information for thousands of students within the Escambia County School District. But Marsh is curious about one student in particular.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
It's the fall of Emily's senior year, and Tate High School's homecoming game had just taken place that weekend.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
My name is Rajiv Gola, and I'm from Daytona Beach. This story takes place up in Pensacola, the panhandle, which is basically the other goofy part of Florida. So it's only natural that I pulled the short stick and had to return to a world I'd done my best to forget about completely. High school.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
I went to a public high school that had about 2,500 students and had some pretty well-regarded sports teams. You had your nerds, your theater kids, your cool crowd, your jocks, and what have you. I, of course, was a National Honor Society mathlete who competed in the annual soil identification competition. I placed third in the state.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
As you might guess with a resume like that, I didn't have much experience with going to school dances or sports events, and homecoming court was not very relevant to my life. But that wasn't the case for Emily Grover, a senior student at Tate High School in the suburb of Cantonment, Florida.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
Tate was a lot like my high school, about the same size, same sort of sports programs, and the same kind of surprisingly high quality education. Emily was your model high schooler. She was on the tennis team. She had a bunch of friends. She was well liked by her teachers. And she got good grades in everything, except math, which to be fair, is a cool subject to be bad at.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
Emily was what you might call a popular girl. Between all her extracurriculars and the student government, she knew just about everyone at Tate, including Gabe Ferguson, who was a year above her.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
That's okay, Gabe. Toot your own horn. Gabe was popular, and he was friendly with Emily Grover. But as anyone at the top of the social ladder will tell you, Being friendly isn't the same as being friends.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
No, by all means, Gabe, feel free to make our staff feel incredibly old. Anyway, given Emily's social status, it came as no surprise when she was on the shortlist for Homecoming Queen her senior year. And homecoming at a school like Tate was a big deal.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
And amidst that entire circus, there was the election for homecoming king and queen. Now, according to every high school movie you've ever watched, this is literally the most important thing for a 15-year-old.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
People may not have voted for the election, but that's not to say that the homecoming court wasn't afforded every bit of pomp and circumstance that Tate could swing. Close your eyes and let me paint you a picture. It's a cool fall Florida evening and the stands are packed with high schoolers and their parents.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
It's halftime and the marching band has just put on another one of their truly impressive shows. Chris crossing the field in perfect time while baton twirlers prance between them. They fall back to make way for the queen contenders.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
The lights glimmer off their ball gowns. Emily's is covered in silver sequins. She holds on to the tuxedoed arm of her father, Bubba Grover. The MC introduces each member of the homecoming court and starts to wind up the crowd. First, he announces the second runner-up. Then, he names the first runner-up. And then finally...
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
The local papers run photos of Emily wearing a tiara and a sash. Bubba's smile could stretch from Miami to Tallahassee. But something already seems off.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
Even though Gabe had already graduated and moved away by this point, he was still plugged into the Tate High School rumor mill, which was running at full bore that week.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
Before Emily had even finished her hair and makeup for the ceremony, there were rumors that the homecoming election votes didn't add up right. Tate's homecoming election was held using an app called Election Runner. Students logged in and used their birthdays as their secret password. And once they cast a vote, they would be barred from editing their decision or voting again. Simple enough, right?
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
Except when some students logged in to cast their vote, they were told that a vote had already been cast in their name. What's more, Election Runner had also flagged hundreds of votes which had originated from the same IP address. In the days that followed Emily's crowning, rumors continued to run rampant, and a phone call was placed to the school's fraud, waste, and abuse hotline.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
The caller left a message that would set off an atom bomb in the Escambia County school system for years to come. That message claimed that Emily Grover and her mother, Laura Carroll, had hacked the Tate High School homecoming election. That tip went straight to Gary Marsh, the former NCIS investigator who could make even the hardest criminal sweat in an interrogation room.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
Right away, he set the wheels in motion to launch his internal school district investigation. That's when he showed up at Bellevue Elementary with a piece of paper, ordering Laura Carroll to meet him that afternoon at the district headquarters for the interview you heard earlier.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
It's unclear if Gary is making this up, but he's giving a master class in playing bad cop.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
To Gary, the evidence was definitive. Laura Carroll was the assistant principal at Bellevue Elementary, and her Focus account had accessed the personal information of hundreds of students at Tate High School, a totally different school than the one she worked at. There was no professional reason to look at any of their information.
Big Time
The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit | 1
Laura Carroll maintained her innocence. She denied all the allegations and any potential involvement in the whole mess. But, almost offhand, she does make one admission.
Infamous
Encore: Dubai's Missing Princesses I Part 3
If my friend transgresses, I forgive once. But if he repeats the offense, I ensure his regret.
Infamous
Encore: Dubai's Missing Princesses I Part 3
I was repelled by your great wrongdoing. A person who has spent his life hunting, he has never hunted. His deeds are like a lion's.
Infamous
Encore: Dubai's Missing Princesses I Part 3
My spirit is cured of you, girl, when your face appears no pleasure I feel.
Infamous
Encore: Dubai's Missing Princesses I Part 3
I have heard that you were sitting in the palace with the British security. I am starting to doubt you.
Infamous
Encore: Dubai's Missing Princesses I Part 3
We will take your son. Your daughter is ours. Your life is over.
Infamous
Encore: Dubai's Missing Princesses I Part 3
In a few months we will take him from you. You will see.
Infamous
Encore: Dubai's Missing Princesses I Part 3
You see, Haya, we don't need you anymore. We don't need you or want you.