A former Jeopardy! champion who up until a month ago taught math at an elite private school in New York City was on Thursday charged with soliciting sexually explicit images of minors, The New York Times reported.
Winston Nguyen, 37, was dramatically arrested in front of his students outside $60,000-a-year Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn last month, the Daily Beast first reported, but was released days later as authorities launched an investigation into the matter.
Using two different Snapchat accounts, he is alleged to have attempted to catfish at least six children into sending him “images of nudity and sexual performances” between Oct. 2022 and May 2024, prosecutors said.
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His lawyer, Frank Rothman, told the Times that Nguyen had surrendered to Brooklyn authorities on Thursday morning.
“We arranged for his surrender with the prosecutors and detectives,” Rothman said. “He showed up and will be processed like any other defendant.”
To the New York Post, the lawyer added, “We always expected this day to come.”
Nguyen previously tangled with the law in 2017, charged with stealing more than $300,000 from an elderly couple he’d been caring for as a home health aide on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Prosecutors accused him of spending his ill-gotten gains on luxe Florida vacations, as well as tickets to the ballet and Broadway shows.
He pleaded guilty to the charges the following year, and was sentenced to six months behind bars and five years of probation. Nguyen served about five months on Rikers Island before being freed.
“It’s a terrible thing I did that will live within me,” he told a writer for the National Food Museum after his release.
Nguyen explained in the interview that his students at Saint Ann’s knew about his checkered past. “I think because of this being so public, students know what I did and feel comfortable coming to me with their own poor choices,” he said.
“I keep thinking ‘what can I make of this for the greater good?’ Helping my students helps me.”
His legal troubles began well after his time on Jeopardy!, on which he won more than $11,000 across two appearances in 2014.
Saint Ann’s, a $60,000-a-year institution that boasts alumni like Lena Dunham, Maya Hawke, and Jennifer Connelly, was similarly rocked by scandal last year when the family of a 13-year-old former student sued the school, alleging his rejection from re-enrollment led to the teen’s death by suicide in 2021.
Read it at The New York Times
