A woman has given an account of how her fairytale marriage was shattered after she discovered her ‘Teacher of the Year’ husband was a compulsive cheater and sexual predator who targeted his teenage students.
For over seven years, Jenifer Faison thought she was living in a fairytale romance with her college sweetheart, Spencer Herron, until one afternoon in June 2018, when police turned up at their Georgia home.
Faison found out that the man she knew and loved was living a double life as her man was living a web of lies, had multiple affairs and carried pit criminal sexual assault against one of his high school students.
She made the revelation in “Betrayal: The Perfect Husband,” a new docu-series from ABC News Studios.
Faison and Herron first met when they were students at Berry College in northwest Georgia. Faison, a communications major, walked into her first meeting at the school’s television station, where Herron was the station manager. The two started dating and fell in love..
But as Faison approached her senior year, she said she didn’t want to be tied down to a boyfriend even though Herron was a year older and had already graduated.
Herron was devastated when they broke up. But he appeared to move on, eventually got married and had children of his own. He got a job teaching video production at Kell High School in Marietta, Georgia.
Meanwhile, Faison was making a name for herself as a television producer, landing jobs with “Judge Judy” and “Extreme Makeover.”
Faison and Herron ended up reconnecting on Facebook when Faison commented on a photo from Herron’s 20-year college reunion.
Herron told Faison that he and his wife had split up a few years prior. After meeting in New York on work trips, the former college sweethearts fell in love again. She moved to Georgia to be closer to Herron, they got married and eventually opened a wine bar together.
“Little did I know I was married to a man who had done something so horrible that it would devastate our lives and change us forever,” Faison said.
Two days after Herron was arrested and charged with three felony counts of sexual assault by a teacher or school administrator, a bewildered Faison got access to her husband’s Facebook account to take it down.
From there, she got access to his email account and clicked on a folder labeled “photos.”
“I start scrolling down and all of a sudden there’s a photo of a woman half naked. And then there’s another one and then there’s another different woman naked. And I just kept looking and it was woman after woman after woman. And then I found emails and messages between him and these women. He was living a double life. Who was this predator that I was married to? I never would have imagined the scope of what he had done,” Faison said.
“I was just looking for all the answers. Like, I needed a timeline. I needed to know when did this start, when did this end? If it ever ended, I had to see was it anything that I had done at any point?” Faison said.
Meanwhile, Herron’s victim, a 16-year-old student named Rachel, was dealing with the aftermath of the sexual abuse and victim blaming.
As an adult, Rachel would later come forward and reveal her name on the Betrayal podcast and shared her story with Faison.
“I went from a happy, carefree, and hopeful teenager to a cynical, angry, and depressed one. I completely shut myself out from people. I withdrew from my family and my friends and by the time I was a senior, I had no communication with anyone that I was involved with at school. I felt like I wasn’t deserving of anything good in my life,” Rachel said.
Herron pleaded guilty to the sexual assault charges in January 2019 and was sentenced to five years in prison and 15 years of probation. He was granted parole in the summer of 2022 and required to register as a sex offender.
“The healing’s not over yet. I’m not out of the woods yet. It’s only been four years. I am still clawing my way back out of this deep dark hole that I fell into,” Faison said, adding that she is “grateful” to Rachel for bravely coming forward.
