Married teacher shared bed with teen student, showered naked and intimately touched her during 4-month affair
A 39-year-old married teacher, who confessed to having an affair with a 17-year-old student, has been jailed for two years.
Daniel Zampatti, an ex-music teacher at Christian College Geelong was sentenced on Friday, May 15, after he pleaded guilty to 10 counts of indecent act with a child under his care or supervision. The County Court of Victoria also banned Zampatti from teaching and placed him on the sex offender's register for the remainder of his lifetime.
After the defendant unexpectedly kissed and intimately touched the minor student in 2016, it led to an affair that lasted from July to October 2016.
In September that year, Zampatti reportedly told his wife he was going on a skiing trip with mates while he made a secret getaway to a five-star Melbourne hotel where they swam in the pool, showered together naked, ate dinner in Chinatown and spent the night in the same bed.
The teacher's misconduct was discovered after his wife grew suspicious and informed the school principal of the same. The defendant was fired from the institute and his registration was revoked.
Prosecutor Joanne Piggot told the court that a high degree of deception and planning was involved in the affair that the defendant had with the minor. She said that Zampatti called and texted the girl an "extremely" high number of times and regularly resorted to touching and kissing the student often within the school grounds.
Before handing down the verdict, County Court Judge Michael Tinney condemned Zampatti's behavior, saying that he "totally abused that trust" of the teenage victim. "This was plainly serious criminal conduct," Tinney said, the Daily Mail reported. "She was 17 years of age and your pupil. This was not an affair. This was not an equal relationship. I have absolutely no doubt at all I must send you to prison."
Zampatti's lawyers' requested that their client be placed on a Community Correction Order instead of being jailed was rejected by the judge, who doled out a sentence of two years and three months jail, with a non-parole period of 14 months. During his trial, Zampatti agreed that his behavior with the student was wrong and that he had asked the minor to keep their affair a secret. He also admitted to asking her to delete the messages he sent on her phone after his spouse began asking him suspicious questions.
Last year, the victim filed a police report, which prompted an investigation against the former teacher.
In other news, it was recently revealed that Brittany Zamora, an Arizona high school teacher who hit national headlines for sending sexually explicit messages to her 13-year-old student and had sex with him on multiple occasions may have been grooming another student as well. The former teacher at Las Brisas Academy Elementary School in Liberty Elementary School District, had first been arrested in March 2018 after starting an affair with the victim via an online instruction app called 'Class Craft.'
She started talking to the victim and the messages, which were initially flirtatious, quickly became sexually explicit. Court records stated they once sexually touched each other in the class while the other students were watching a video. He often sent her notes on brightly-colored sticky notes in class, some of which were love letters while others were more of an obscene nature. She, in turn, sent him naked pictures of herself and others of her in lingerie.