The trial of Raffaela Spone, the Chalfont mom accused of launching an online vendetta against her daughter’s cheerleading squad, opened Tuesday. The proceedings began, however, under a revised set of charges against the defendant. Vinny Vella provided courtroom coverage in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Spone’s original charge of cyber harassment stemmed from 2020 reports of her high-tech attack on what she saw as rival competitors on her daughter’s cheer squad, the Victory Vipers.

Prosecutors dropped those charges in a pretrial hearing, moving ahead on counts of traditional harassment instead.

In her opening statement, Assistant District Attorney Julia Wilkins characterized Spone’s behavior as “creepy, unsettling, and criminal.” She said the collapse of the deepfake evidence “doesn’t matter” because “you don’t get to harass kids just because they made mistakes… .”

Spone’s attorney, Robert Birch, said the entire proceeding was the result of “a botched investigation, marred by mistake after mistake.”

He suggested that the actions may have been the work of another cheerleader’s mother, out to embarrass Spone.

“Ask yourself, in all of this testimony, where is [Spone’s] direct communication with a minor? Where are the threats? Where are the fake nudes? You won’t find them, because they didn’t exist… .”

Spone was offered the chance to plead guilty to the lesser charge.

She declined.

More on the original case against Raffaela Spone is in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Update

In a Mar. 25, 3:30 p.m. update to this story, Spone was found guilty of the harassment charge by a Bucks County jury of seven women and five men.

KYW Newsradio reporter Jim Melwert cited that the prosecution’s ability to disprove a defense contention about the objectionable, doctored text messages. In trying to clear Spone, it argued that the information was not sent to the teenage members of the cheer squad but rather to their parents, presumably under the pretext of Spone’s desire to protect them from harmful behavior.

Prosecuting attorney Julia Wilkins was able to prove that the messages were not sent out of concern.

The fact that the online information was sent from anonymous numbers was key. According to Spone’s daughter, her mother had that contact information on at least three families and could have contacted them from her own number.

Another action of Spone’s tripped her up as well. She originally messaged the teens’ cheer coaches first, then parents.