Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoes bill that would have prevented filming porn in K-12 classrooms, even after 2 teachers were fired last fall for allegedly filming OnlyFans content at Arizona middle school

Katie Hobbs, the Democratic governor of Arizona, has vetoed a bill that would have outlawed filming pornographic material in public schools or any other building funded by state taxpayers. The veto comes even after two teachers lost their jobs last fall for allegedly filming sexually explicit content at an Arizona middle school and then posting it to the adult-access site OnlyFans.

Last November, TheBlaze reported that a married couple, Samantha and Dillon Peer, had been fired from the Lake Havasu Unified School District after they supposedly recorded Samantha, aka Khloe Karter, engaging in sexual activity inside her classroom at Thunderbolt Middle School at a time when students were not present. The couple then reportedly posted the explicit content to OnlyFans and then shared links to it on various social media accounts that several of her former students followed. Ms. Peer then issued a video statement justifying her behavior on financial grounds, claiming that public teachers' salaries "did not pay enough." Mr. Peer was also a teacher at another school in the district before he was terminated.

The Peers may not have been the only Arizona teachers to use a public classroom as a makeshift studio for pornographic social media content. KPNX-TV reported that a kindergarten teacher in the Marana Unified School District resigned two years ago after she supposedly snapped explicit photos of herself on school grounds and then posted them online.

In order to prevent other such incidents in the future, Republicans in the Arizona legislature passed Senate Bill 1696, which would have banned exposing children to "sexually explicit materials" and from filming or "facilitating" such content in public buildings, the Arizona Capitol Times reported. The bill drew little support from state Democrats.

Though Gov. Hobbs acknowledged the Peer debacle in the Lake Havasu area and admitted that "not all content is appropriate for minors," she still vetoed the bill as "little more than a thinly veiled effort to ban books." Her fellow state Democrats have argued that the bill would be used to ban classic books such as "1984," "The Great Gatsby," and even the Bible from schools and public libraries since those works make reference to sexual content. Others have alleged that the bill would remove other books related to puberty and pregnancy for the same reasons.

Republicans countered that they weren't trying to ban traditional literature or science books, but they were trying to prevent children from accessing sexually explicit books marketed to minors, such as "Gender Queer" and "All Boys Aren’t Blue." They also expressed outrage that Democrats did not want to prevent teachers from filming porn at schools.

"No 12-year-old child should ever have to worry that their middle school desk was the location of a porn shoot," said Sen. Jake Hoffman (R-Queen Creek), who co-sponsored the bill, "yet because of Hobbs’ actions, this is precisely the case.

"Hobbs should be ashamed of herself," Hoffman continued, "and every parent in the state of Arizona should be outraged. This is a despicable use of government resources, and there should be legal repercussions in place to discourage these types of practices from ever occurring again."

Robert J. Campos, a former prosecutor in Maricopa County, agreed that Arizona law likely does not expressly forbid filming pornographic material at public schools, but argued that the Peer incident was an outlier that was not likely to be replicated. "It sounds like overkill to me," Campos said. "I think it sounds rather drastic to pass a law when you’ve had one incident."

The bill would have made filming explicit content at public buildings a Class 5 felony. In Arizona, those convicted of a Class 5 felony can face anywhere between six months and eight years in prison as well as fines.

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