Married Conservative Louisiana Politician Outed with 17 Yr Old Boy
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| L) Mike Yenni R)Alex Daigle and he’s 19 now |
A married conservative politician from Louisiana has been outed for allegedly dating a 17-year-old boy he met at a Catholic high school.
The FBI is currently investigating allegations that Jefferson Parish President Mike Yenni sent sexually explicit texts to the teenager he first met at a Catholic high school function last year. The encounter, which happened in the middle of Yenni’s successful 2015 campaign to become Jefferson Parish President, was confirmed by the teenager. Yenni, 40, was the mayor of Kenner at the time.
WWL-TV reports that FBI agents have interviewed at least four individuals about the sexually explicit text messages between Yenni, 40, and a young man who was 17 at the time and is now 19.
The teen tells WWL-TV that a mutual friend, who was 19 at the time, helped Yenni connect with him.
The teen says they began texting and talking on the phone, but soon after, the politician came to visit him at his job at a mall food court. Yenni, who is married and has a young child, arranged to meet the teen in a mall bathroom where he gave him some designer underwear to try on. They kissed briefly.
The texting progressively became more explicit over time.
WWL-TV adds:
The youth provided WWL-TV what he says are copies of the text exchanges that were recovered after they were deleted, on the condition that the station not directly quote from them. Printouts of the messages appear to indicate they came from a cell phone account linked to Yenni in multiple online search engines. WWL-TV called the number in June and got the same outgoing voicemail message, featuring Yenni’s voice, as could be heard on Yenni’s official parish cell phone at the time.
The phone listed on the printouts of the text messages is not billed to taxpayers.
According to printouts of those texts, Yenni tells the teen he wants him naked.
Days later, Yenni writes to ask the 17-year-old if he’s worn the underwear Yenni bought him. Yenni says he wants to see him model it.
Then Yenni texts the teen to say he wants to perform a sex act on him that night.
The youth, who is openly gay and is now in college, said in an interview with WWL-TV that he wants to expose Yenni’s behavior because he finds it disturbing.
While the youth was initially flattered and intrigued by Yenni’s overtures, he said the texts and phone conversations began to make him uncomfortable, such as one proposing three-way sex with him and the 19-year-old mutual friend.
“He asked me to go with him to his house in Oxford (Mississippi),” the youth said, where records show Yenni owns an apartment there. “Also, the way he would describe the sexual things he wanted to do to me. And he asked me to be a secretary or assistant in his office; that way I could be with him and not be questioned.”
Just a few weeks after the sexting began, in June 2015, the teen says he broke off communication and blocked Yenni’s number.
Yenni has not been charged with a crime, but WWL-TV notes that Yenni could face federal charges:
Under Louisiana law, the age of consent is 17, meaning Yenni would have committed no crime if he had had sex with the youth – something the youth said did not happen. But ironically, one question is whether Yenni’s texts proposing such activity could violate a federal law designed to protect children under 18 from obscenity.
The federal law bars the use of a telecommunications device for “the transmission of any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication which is obscene or child pornography, knowing that the recipient of the communication is under 18 years of age, regardless of whether the maker of such communication placed the call or initiated the communication.”
Former U.S. Attorney Harry Rosenberg speculates that may be the law the feds have been looking into.
The law has been challenged in the past, and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, Rosenberg noted. Still, it’s rarely invoked, both because obscenity can be hard to define – and is often defended as free speech under the First Amendment – and because it’s hard to prove the sender knew the recipient was under 18.
As to whether Yenni knew how old the youth was, the teenager says he established his age in one of his first phone conversations with Yenni.
“It was the phone call where he told me who he was, and I told him I was 17,” the youth said.
Yenni’s response, according to the teen, was: “I know the laws.”
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