Bridget Ziegler celebrates her victory for school board at a GOP party on Tuesday August, 23, 2022 Photo: THOMAS BENDER/HERALD-TRIBUNE / USA TODAY NETWORK/IMAGN
Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler is suing police and prosecutors in Sarasota, Florida to stop them from releasing investigation records related to rape allegations against her husband.
In their lawsuit filed last Friday, the Zieglers ordered the Sarasota Police Department (SPD) and the State Attorney’s Office (SAO) to commit to “the permanent destruction” of the investigation records, arguing that their public release could “cause great humiliation and harm to their individual reputations.”
Police eventually cleared Christian Ziegler of the rape charges. However, during their investigation, they retrieved all of his messages, call logs, images and videos, web browser history, and emails from his personal phone, The Daily Beast reported. The phone records include full-text conversations between the married couple as well as “the video of Christian Ziegler and his [rape] accuser engaging in sexual intercourse,” the lawsuit claims.
“To say that someone’s entire life is contained on one’s cell phone is an understatement,” the couple’s lawsuit states. “The Zieglers are concerned that other individuals and media outlets will most likely make, or have already made, similar public records requests with either SPD or the SAO now that the investigation has concluded.”
Bridget Ziegler was widely criticized since the organization she co-founded, Moms for Liberty, opposes LGBTQ+ content and inclusive policies in public schools. She later lost her position at the conservative Leadership Institute, and her husband was voted out of his Republican party chairmanship.
In some of the couple’s text messages obtained by police, Christian Ziegler tells his wife to “stop and pick up [the other woman] to play again and be crazy.” In another, Bridget Ziegler appeared to express concern about the woman, writing, “I just don’t want to feel like we ever take advantage of anyone (I know it’s always been consensual) but she seems… ‘broken’ or like she’s going through some [expletive].”
In his interview with police, Christian Ziegler said that he’d had consensual sex with the alleged victim “approximately one dozen times since they first met” and that she had participated in threesomes with him and his wife twice at the couple’s home.
Students, parents, and community members have called for Bridget Ziegler to resign from the Sarasota County School Board. One local youth activist, Zander Moricz, told her during a board meeting, “You deserve to be fired from your job because you are terrible at your job, not because you had sex with a woman.”
“[You] change our district lines for political gain, remove books from schools, target trans and queer children, erase Black history, and elevate your political career – all while sending your children to private schools because you don’t believe in the public school system that you’ve been leading,” Moricz added.
The board voted unanimously in favor of her resignation last December, but she refused since the vote was non-binding.
