A Chester County jury delivered a split verdict in an ex-teacher’s sex assault trial

A former Chester County charter school teacher was convicted of sexually assaulting a former student in a hotel room, but acquitted of grooming another former student into having a sexual relationship with him.

The verdict against Seth Reich, 42, was delivered by a jury in West Chester on Tuesday afternoon after seven hours of deliberation over two days.

Reich, who met the victims while working as a theater teacher at Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School Center for Performing and Fine Arts in West Chester, was convicted of sexual assault, indecent assault, simple assault and furnishing liquor to minors. The crimes arose from a 2019 encounter in a hotel room in which the jury found that he undressed one of the women and forced himself on her after she passed out.

But in a split verdict, jurors acquitted Reich of felony institutional sexual assault, unlawful contact with a minor, and corruption of a minor for his monthslong sexual relationship with another student that prosecutors say began when she was a 17-year-old senior.

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Throughout the six-day trial, prosecutors cast Reich as a master manipulator, blurring the line between authority figure and friend to lull the teens into a sense of security. The younger victim testified that she and Reich began texting frequently, initially about his class.

Those texts gradually became more personal, she said, and the two began to share flirtatious banter. Shortly before the student graduated, she said, Reich initiated a sexual encounter in his classroom.

They continued to have sex after she graduated, she said.

Investigators and the now-22-year-old woman insisted that she had sex with the teacher while she was a student, before her 18th birthday.

However, Reich’s lawyer, James Funt, presented evidence from text messages indicating that the two first had sex after she graduated. Because of that timing, he said, the criminal charges brought by prosecutors didn’t apply.

The other woman told the jury she met Reich when she worked on a play he was directing in the summer of 2019. As a former student who had graduated a year earlier, and a close friend of the other teen, she said she was interested in helping with theater production.

The teens and Reich exchanged texts frequently, they said, and joked about meeting up at a hotel room after the play ended. The messages included references to buying condoms and filming a pornographic movie, but the two women testified that they had been sent in jest.

When the three later met up at the hotel, prosecutors said, Reich plied the teens with tequila, to the point where the older teen passed out.

She told police she awakened to find Reich and her friend — who she didn’t know was having a relationship with him — being intimate. When she protested, she said, Reich slapped her and began to undress her against her will, then sexually assaulted her.

Funt said the jury’s verdict of partial exoneration came as no surprise to him, given the “overwhelming” evidence of his client’s innocence. Still, he said, he believed Reich should have been acquitted of all charges.

“We certainly acknowledge how hard the jury and the judge worked over the past two weeks,” he said. “But I maintain that what occurred in the hotel between the three adults was consensual. The jury found otherwise, and we have to respect their decision.”

After the verdict was read, Reich’s bail was revoked, and he was taken into custody. He will be sentenced in the coming days by Chester County Judge Analisa Sondergaard.