Convicted ex-Kell HS teacher subject of true-crime series

After her husband was arrested, pleaded guilty and sentenced to prison for sexually assaulting a Kell High School student, Jen Faison started a true-crime podcast to process what had happened. Spencer Herron

That podcast has expanded into a new documentary series adapted by ABC News and that begins a streaming run Tuesday on the Hulu platform.

“Betrayal: The Perfect Husband” explores the saga of Spencer Herron, named a Kell Teacher of the Year, who engaged in multiple extamarital affairs and eventually was accused by a female student of sexual assault.

In 2019, he pleaded guilty in Cobb Superior Court to five counts of sexual assault on the Kell campus and was sentenced to serve five years in prison and 15 more on probation.

The documentary is a three-part series that explores, from Faison’s perspective, what she thought was a “storybook romance” that went badly wrong.

The series finale includes an interview with Rachel, the Kell student who accused him of assaulting her when she was 16. According to court filings, Herron admitted to having sex multiple times with a student on campus from early 2016 through the end of the 2017-18 school year.

Faison and Herron were sweethearts at Berry College and married more than two decades later, after he was teaching video production at Kell. He also was a member of the Cobb County School District’s Superintendent’s Teacher Advisory Council shortly before his arrest.

She was a television producer who moved to Georgia to be closer to him as their relationship deepened.

He had been previously married and divorced, but it wasn’t until his 2018 arrest by Cobb Police in connection with the Kell allegations that Faison began to learn about her husband’s double life.

The Hulu series includes material first presented in the podcast about Faison discovering photos of naked and scantily clad women on his e-mail server.

Herron was released from prison on June 1, according to the documentary, but the Georgia Department of Corrections has no further information since he was incarcerated as a first-time offender.

A review of “Betrayal” by the Daily Beast concludes that the documentary “is stretched thin for maximum melodramatic purposes, lowlighted by cheesy drone shots and songs whose on-the-nose lyrics seem designed to inspire eye-rolls and guffaws. Yet its core tale remains compelling, especially when, during its closing chapter, it lets a sexual abuse survivor detail the step-by-step means by which she was groomed into participating in a criminally inappropriate relationship.”