A student in Florida claims her life was 'destroyed' after she was accused of tampering with the electronic votes of a homecoming queen election.
An attorney on behalf of Emily Rose Grover has revealed just how detrimental the false allegations were for her life.
Grover attended high school at the Tate High School in Cantonment, Florida - of which she was subsequently expelled from.
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The 19-year-old was falsely accused of interfering with the electronic votes for her school's homecoming queen race back in October 2020.
Something that seems right out of an episode of Mean Girls was unfortunately a very real situation for the student to deal with.
Speaking of the events' effects on the teenager, Marie Mattox, Grover's attorney, told The New York Post: "She has had horrific emotional pain and suffering, as you can imagine.
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"Her life has been destroyed. She is trying to get back to a semblance of normalcy. Her life has literally been put on hold.
"Her life literally stopped for almost two years. She then had to reevaluate her life, put a hold on everything and had to come back from this horrible experience and work her way into living a regular life."
It all began when an anonymous ethics complaint was submitted, the Post reports.
The complaint in question was reported to have been filed approximately a month after the student, who was 17 at the time, won her crown.
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It had been alleged that Grover used the school-district employee account of her mother, who worked as an assistant principal at a nearby elementary school, to cast the false voting ballots, Mattox states.
The Escambia County School District contacted FDLE officials in November 2020 to report the news and begin the investigation.
Officials found nearly 250 phony votes hailing from accounts that were reportedly accessed by devices inside Grover's home as well as mother Carroll's mobile phone, per the FDLE.
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Over a handful of students also alleged that Grover often opened up about using her mother's school account and some of those even reported to have seen her do it in front of them, the outlet states according to obtained court documents.
“I have known that Emily Grover logs into her mom's school account in order to access grades and test scores since freshman year when we became friends,” one student told authorities.
“She looks up all of our group of friends’ grades and makes comments about how she can find out our test scores all of the time."
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Grover and her mother, Laura Rose Carroll, 52, were arrested approximately 5 months after the homecoming event and were charged with unlawful use of a two-way communications device and criminal use of personally identifiable information, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
They faced up to 16 years in prison if convicted, but Carroll was ultimately freed on a $6,000 bond and Grover on a $2,000 bond.
Grover has since accepted her place the University of West Florida and has joined the school's Alpha Delta Pi sorority after all charges were dismissed following a a pre-trial diversion program earlier this year.
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Rhiannon Ingle