Maurice Washington III, a former San Jose football standout who played running back at the University of Nebraska pleaded no contest to a charge that he texted a sex video of a former girlfriend to her in an act of retaliation.
Let’s repeat: he sent the video to the person in the video.
Washington, 20, pleaded Thursday to a misdemeanor count of distributing a private sexual video to cause emotional distress, a violation of what is commonly known as California’s “revenge porn” law.
As part of the plea, prosecutors dropped a felony child pornography charge they initially filed against him. The video was taken when the woman was a minor.
Washington was taken into custody to immediately begin serving a 30-day jail sentence, after which he will be on probation for two years. He is expected to serve only 15 actual days in part because he has no criminal history.
“I think he was remorseful for what was an adolescent and immature act,” said Chris Yuen, the deputy public defender who represented Washington. “I think the negotiated plea with the District Attorney’s Office was fair, for him to take full accountability with the facts of the case.”
The Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office began investigating Washington in March 2018 after a woman told detectives she reached out to Washington on Instagram congratulating him on his football scholarship at Nebraska and that he responded with online sexual advances, which she rejected. The two had previously dated while attending high school at The King’s Academy in Sunnyvale.
Washington later allegedly sent her a text that had a short video from two years earlier, showing her being sexually assaulted by two male schoolmates in a minivan when she was 15, along with a sexually crude message, according to investigators.
Maurice Washington did not make or appear in the video, which was shared among students at The King’s Academy in 2016. School administrators made known recipients of the video delete it, and the then-teen girl reported the assault to Campbell police; one of the boys in the case was prosecuted in juvenile court, for which records are not public.
According to an investigative report from the Nebraska Department of Justice, Washington denied the allegations. It remains unclear how much the university and the athletic department knew when it allowed him to play his freshman season in 2018. The DOJ report indicated the department was informed early on about the allegations, though officials said they did not know the full scope until the charges were filed.
In January, he was released by Nebraska football program, though by that point his participation with the team was on and off, owing in large part to the criminal case.
