Last December, the Vermont Agency of Education hired a local filmmaker for a web design and copy editing job that included shooting footage in schools.
Bill Simmon had previously worked at Vermont Community Access Media, now called the Media Factory, for 18 years and, according to his LinkedIn profile, taught film classes at Community College of Vermont, Burlington College and Champlain College. He also produced a documentary on one of Burlington's most beloved ’90s bands, The Pants.
Criminal background checks aren’t part of the agency’s standard hiring procedure, said agency spokesperson Toren Ballard, and it didn’t conduct one on Simmon. In fact, state policies don’t allow the agency to conduct one for the role he was hired for, Ballard said. The state does allow all prospective employees to self-report any criminal history within the last 10 years.
What the agency didn’t know, according to Ballard, was that in 2018, Burlington police found evidence that Simmon had, years earlier, secretly filmed two teenage girls in a changing room. Police say he posted the video online, where it was ultimately viewed millions of times. And in February 2024, a jury in a civil lawsuit ordered Simmon to pay the women millions of dollars for invading their privacy and causing severe emotional distress.
Simmon was never charged with a crime, said Tom Chenette, the Burlington Police detective who handled the case, because the statute of limitations had passed by the time police learned of the videos.
Chenette, in a recent interview, said he had the evidence to file charges, but “the hurdle that I had was getting by the statute of limitations.”
Simmon, in a brief phone call, declined to comment. In response to an emailed request for comment, Simmon’s attorney, Jeffrey Messina, said that Simmon “greatly regrets his actions and the harm he caused.”
The Agency of Education, in a statement to Vermont Public, said it became aware of Simmon’s “troubling conduct” after the Vermont Supreme Court published a decision related to the civil case on June 20.
“Once the information came to light, the Agency took immediate precautionary steps and escalated concerns to the Department of Human Resources, which initiated a due process review as required by the collective bargaining agreement,” Ballard, the agency spokesperson, said in an email.
Simmon resigned from the department on July 14, Ballard said.
“The employee’s behavior found in the civil case has no place at the AOE and will not be tolerated. In collaboration with the Department of Human Resources, I am working to understand what policies could be changed or strengthened to prevent something like this in the future.”Education Secretary Zoie Saunders
Simmon’s work involved filming at schools, but “only to the extent directed by the Agency and only when supervised and accompanied by other Agency staff,” Ballard said.
The agency did not say how many shoots he participated in or which schools he worked at. AOE was not aware of any inappropriate footage and said it will alert individual schools if there is any cause for concern, Ballard said.
The agency conducted a security sweep of its restrooms and didn’t find any video devices and, out of an “abundance of caution,” is working with Vermont State Police to review Simmon’s state-issued devices. The agency is also briefing school leaders where Simmon worked, said Education Secretary Zoie Saunders in an email to agency staff last week.
“The employee’s behavior found in the civil case has no place at the AOE and will not be tolerated,” Saunders wrote. “In collaboration with the Department of Human Resources, I am working to understand what policies could be changed or strengthened to prevent something like this in the future.”
Burlington police opened their investigation into Simmon in September 2018 after a young woman reported that a video of her and her sister undressing was on a pornographic website. The woman had only learned about the video because a friend of a friend had found it online, according to a police report obtained by Vermont Public.
The woman told investigators that she recognized the location of the video as a storage room at Vermont Community Access Media, or VCAM, that she and her sister used as a changing room during a 2012 video shoot organized by Simmon.
The woman was 19 at the time the video was filmed, and her sister was 17. Vermont Public generally doesn’t identify victims of alleged sexual or domestic abuse.
Simmon, who had been the woman’s film professor at Community College of Vermont, in an email included in the police investigation, asked her if she’d help film a commercial for VCAM that would require at least 10 “completely different outfits head-to-toe.”
When police interviewed Simmon in 2018 at VCAM, he told them he never used the 2012 commercial footage and that while the project was “VCAM related” he didn’t think he officially had permission to do it. The officers also looked at the VCAM storage room and said it was “clearly” the space in the video, but no cameras were found, according to the police investigation.
VCAM fired Simmon in 2018 after it conducted an internal investigation, the police report says.
Police eventually found more evidence connecting Simmon to the 2012 video. In 2021, an employee at VCAM, which had been renamed The Media Factory at that point, found a small “pin hole” camera and SD card in Simmon’s old office. The SD card contained the original uncut footage of the 2012 video, including images of Simmon installing two cameras in the storage room that the two women used as a changing room, the police report says.
At that point the case was “nearly airtight,” said Chenette, the Burlington police detective.
But the statute of limitations for the charges Chenette had evidence for — voyeurism and disclosure of sexually explicit images without consent — is three years. The alleged crimes weren’t reported until six years after they occurred.
“That was very frustrating,” Chenette said.
The police investigation, which spanned several years, found other past instances of troubling conduct by Simmon. In 2015 Simmon, an adjunct professor at Burlington College at the time, was chaperoning a student trip to the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.
Investigators found images and video from a VCAM GoPro camera showing several college-aged students in the bathroom of the house they were staying in. According to the police report, the images showed three different women and one male changing, using the toilet and two of the females can be seen showering fully nude. Simmon is in separate images placing the camera on top of the toilet and manipulating the lens area, the police report says.
According to the Vermont Supreme Court and the Burlington Police report, another VCAM employee told police during the investigation that in 2011, Simmon gave him a company hard drive that contained hundreds of images, including ones that appeared to be of naked 11- or 12-year-old girls. The employee deleted the pictures and didn’t report them. The employee did tell his colleagues at a staff meeting he’d found disturbing images on a hard drive and recommended that when hard drives are returned, staff should fully clear the drives without looking at them.
The employee told police he regretted not reporting what he found and that he was “dead sure” the pictures he found were from Simmon, the police report says.
Messina, Simmon’s attorney, said in a written statement that Simmon “has always denied that any such images were his.”
“Importantly, even assuming Mr. Simmon was in the chain of custody, countless others were also in the chain of custody for that particular drive as it was constantly signed out to - and used by - the general public in the regular course of VCAM’s offerings,” Messina said in the statement.
"Critically, the police found no evidence of anything illegal or otherwise inappropriate on any item removed from Mr. Simmon’s home. In addition, no criminal charges were brought."Jeffrey Messina, attorney for Bill Simmon
After interviewing the VCAM employee, police searched Simmon’s home and seized his computers and hard drives, Messina said.
“Critically, the police found no evidence of anything illegal or otherwise inappropriate on any item removed from Mr. Simmon’s home,” Messina wrote in the statement. “In addition, no criminal charges were brought and all of Mr. Simmon’s property was returned without further comment.”
According to the police report, investigators couldn’t unlock Simmon’s personal iMac computer. They tried 90 billion possible passwords but were unable to beat the encryption, the report says.
While Simmon didn’t face criminal charges, the two women in the 2012 video sued him in civil court for causing them emotional distress and invading their privacy. The women said in their lawsuit they both suffered from PTSD, depression and anxiety as a result of Simmon’s actions. One of the women had cut herself because she “couldn’t handle her emotions,” according to the Vermont Supreme Court ruling.
Last year, a jury ruled that Simmon should pay $7.5 million in compensatory and punitive damages.
“I think that the verdict was very important to their healing process,” said Stephanie Greenlees, an attorney at Kaplan & Kaplan who represented the two women. “It was some semblance of justice and vindication for how they felt, and what this has done to them.”
“I think that the verdict was very important to their healing process. It was some semblance of justice and vindication for how they felt, and what this has done to them.”Stephanie Greenlees, an attorney who represented the two women.
The women also sued VCAM, and the jury found the company didn’t properly supervise Simmon. VCAM, which was renamed The Media Factory in 2021 after a merger, was ordered to pay $3.5 million in compensatory damages to the women.
In a written statement, Stephen Ellis, an attorney for the Media Factory, said the company “is vigilant in its efforts to prevent misuse of Media Factory’s facilities” and declined further comment on the lawsuit or Simmon.
Chenette, who recently retired after 20 years with the Burlington Police Department, thinks the statute of limitations for these types of crimes should be longer than three years.
“The state law on this type of thing is extremely antiquated, and it doesn't account for these images being online,” Chenette said. “Once an image or video is online, it never goes away. It's copied, it's reproduced.”
The top prosecutor in Chittenden County also thinks that it’s troubling that the internet has made it nearly impossible to remove these kinds of videos and images from the public eye — but she’s not sure of the right approach to address the issue.
“I don't know if the fix to that would be that the statute of limitations is six years starting from a particular time, and that time be when the material is no longer available online,” said Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George. “But it is super problematic that somebody could commit a crime, and if they're not caught within the statute of limitations time the crime continues to harm the victim.”
But some defense attorneys say changes to statutes of limitations could bring unintended consequences.
“Outlier cases can make bad law,” said Jessica Burke, a Burlington-based attorney. “We have to think about what the implications of changing the law might be more broadly.”
Burke, speaking generally and not about Simmon’s case, said statutes of limitations are important for preserving a defendant’s rights during criminal proceedings.
“If we are not charging a crime close in time to the point that the crime is alleged to have occurred, we risk losing critical evidence for both sides that could either corroborate or exonerate,” she said. “And that is a real consideration that may make someone's defense very difficult down the road.”
This story was updated to include additional information about state hiring procedures provided by the Agency of Education.
