A jury in Louisiana needed less than one hour to convict Misty Roberts, the 43-year-old former mayor of DeRidder, of having sex with her son's 16-year-old friend at a 2024 house party where the minor was drunk. Roberts was found guilty on two felony counts: carnal knowledge of a juvenile, which carries up to ten years in prison, and indecent behavior with a juvenile, carrying up to seven.
Roberts resigned as mayor of DeRidder just days before her arrest in 2024. She will return to the courthouse on April 17 for sentencing and will be required to register as a Tier 1 sex offender.
She walked out of the courthouse on Tuesday on a new $100,000 bond.
According to Breitbart, the 16-year-old took the stand and told the jury he was drunk when the sex occurred. Roberts' own son and nephew both testified that they saw Roberts and the boy together at the party, though both said they did not know whether sexual intercourse had transpired.
A photograph sat at the center of the prosecution's case. It showed Roberts and the minor together, partially hidden by furniture. Prosecutor Charles Robinson opened his closing arguments by pointing the jury back to it:
"I told y'all at the beginning of the trial that a lewd and lascivious photo is worth a thousand words."
Robinson then showed the jury what KPLC 7 News described as "rapid-fire exhibits of evidence" that he said confirmed Roberts' guilt.
Then there was the DoorDash driver. A local driver testified that he delivered Plan B emergency contraception to Roberts' residence after the incident. The defense offered no rebuttal to this detail in the source reporting. It simply sat in the record, doing exactly the work you'd expect it to do in a jury's mind.
Perhaps the most revealing testimony came not from the teenagers or the prosecution's evidence exhibits, but from Jill Weaver, who described herself as one of Roberts' best friends.
Weaver testified last month that she told the juveniles who claimed to have witnessed the sex act to lie about what they saw. She admitted that she texted her own son, Roberts' nephew, instructing him to "lie 'til you die."
She also testified that she overheard Roberts' teenage son make a declaration about what his mother had done to his best friend. The language was blunt enough to leave no room for ambiguity.
Weaver described the night of the party in four words:
"That whole night was a lot. It was chaos."
It is worth noting that the source reporting does not indicate whether Weaver faces any charges for her admitted efforts to coach minors into lying about a sex crime. An adult who texts a teenager to "lie 'til you die" about the sexual abuse of another teenager has, at minimum, earned some scrutiny from law enforcement. Whether that scrutiny is coming remains an open question.
Roberts' defense attorney, Adam Johnson, argued that the investigation was incomplete. He claimed authorities failed to examine surveillance footage from Roberts' own home, potential DNA evidence, and additional witness testimony. The jury was unmoved. Less than sixty minutes of deliberation tells you everything about how persuasive that argument was when weighed against a photograph, a DoorDash receipt for Plan B, and the testimony of the boy himself.
Strip away the legal terminology and the courtroom procedure, and what remains is plain. A 43-year-old woman in a position of public trust had sex with a 16-year-old boy at a party where he was intoxicated. The boy was her son's friend. Her own child was present. Alcohol was flowing among minors under her roof.
The cultural conversation around female-perpetrated sex crimes against minors has shifted in recent years, but not fast enough. Cases like this still generate a fraction of the outrage that an identical fact pattern would produce if the genders were reversed. A 43-year-old male mayor who got a drunk 16-year-old girl intoxicated at a house party and had sex with her while his own daughter was present would be discussed in every segment on every cable network for a week. The language would be harsher. The sentencing expectations would be higher. The public fury would be louder.
Roberts faces up to seventeen years if sentenced to the maximum on both counts. Whether the court treats this with the gravity it deserves will say something about how seriously Louisiana takes the sexual exploitation of minors when the perpetrator is a woman.
The boy told the jury he was drunk. He was sixteen. The mayor's best friend tried to get the witnesses to bury it. The jury took less than an hour to see through all of it.
Sentencing is April 17.