Ashlee Evans

Now 22, Ashlee Evans said she knows many still believe she blew benign comments from the teacher out of proportion, or maybe even made up the whole thing.

But even after weathering the fallout of a scandal played out in the newspapers and the gossipy hallways of her sprawling high school - even after facing open hostility from other teachers who thought she sabotaged their colleague's career - Evans insists she was right, and doesn't regret coming forward.

As a freshman at the Orland Park school, Evans didn't hesitate to serve as a student assistant for Peter Follenweider, an English teacher and coach of the girl's varsity soccer team.
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"I didn't ask for this," Evans recently said in her first time speaking publicly outside of court about the incident.
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"It was such a delicate case," Evans said.
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"If I was going to lie about something, it wouldn't have been in a gray area," Evans said.
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One day Follenweider pulled Evans aside in the hall and said he'd heard she'd been to a party with a boy he declared a "jerk" and a troublemaker.
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Evans initially wrote off the encounter as weird.
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According to Evans, he even tried to ply her with a pilfered line from the then-hit movie "Good Will Hunting."

"It doesn't matter if someone is perfect," he told her.
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"I was 15, and I'd never been in a situation like that before," Evans said."I didn't want to blow the whistle if I was just being super-sensitive - I didn't want to come across as being that girl."

Not long afterward, Evans reluctantly complied when Follenweider allegedly asked her to write him a letter after deciding she might be afraid to talk about her true thoughts.

"I'm not quite sure what I'm trying to say or what you are trying to say," Evans began the note.
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Evans would later tell police that while sitting in the stands with her coach, he rubbed her back under her shirt and briefly touched her leg.

Later that month, Evans relented to her mother and told a Sandburg guidance counselor about the Follenweider situation.Within hours, district administrators were told.
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"He would get more and more angry," Evans said.
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The courts also have found Evans more believable than her teacher: They note Evans' story, devoid of any overt sexual action, has remained consistent during several days of testimony at the criminal trial and Follenweider's dismissal hearing.
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"I lost everybody," Evans said."Some people were mad at me for coming forward.But a lot of people just thought that I was lying."

In the aftermath of the firing, several Sandburg teachers wore buttons professing their support for Follenweider before they were reprimanded by the administration, Evans said.
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Despite the ensuing angst and attention, Evans turned down offers from administration officials to transfer to another school within District 230 and from her parents to switch to a Catholic school.

"I didn't do anything wrong, so there was nothing for me to run away from," Evans said."I had no reason to be ashamed."

Evans long ago ruled out filing a civil lawsuit against the district because she and her parents had no complaints with how the administrators handled the matter.

She now lives in Chicago and is a part-time student at Northwestern University.The February appellate court decision upholding the District 230 firing pushed the ugly episode back into the lives of both Evans and Follenweider - but Evans said the ruling also provided yet another vindication.
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"It wasn't easy for me to do what I did," Evans said.