Lawyer: KY teacher gave boy in detention center explicit pics, but no sexual contact
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- Teacher Elena Bardin gave explicit photos and letters to detained 17-year-old boy.
- Prosecutors allege Bardin solicited boy to kill her husband; her lawyer denies that.
- Security video shows Bardin entering boy’s cell, but no footage of sexual contact.
The attorney for Elena Bardin, the Adair County teacher charged with having an illegal sexual relationship with a 17-year-old boy in a state-run juvenile detention center and soliciting him to kill her husband, said Wednesday she committed only one of the crimes with which she’s charged.
Bardin, 27, did give nude and scantily clad photographs of herself to a boy held at the Adair Youth Development Center, attorney Steve Romines of Louisville told jurors during the first day of Bardin’s trial in Adair Circuit Court.
And Bardin and the boy exchanged explicit letters where Bardin spoke about kissing him and looking at and touching his penis, Romines said.
But that doesn’t mean any sexual contact actually happened outside of the dreamlike fantasies committed to pictures and paper, the lawyer said.
“She wrote him letters — like, ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ fan-fiction type stuff,” Romines acknowledged. “And they’re inappropriate.”
Kentucky State Police arrested Bardin on April 2 following a search of the teen boy’s cell that turned up the incriminating photos and letters. The boy — who faces an unrelated murder charge in Jefferson County — told investigators he was in a secret relationship with Bardin, and she wanted him to murder her husband.
Bardin is charged with three counts of first-degree sexual abuse, three counts of first-degree unlawful transaction with a minor, solicitation to commit murder and distribution of obscene material to a minor.
The trial continues Thursday.
On Wednesday, Commonwealth’s Attorney Brian Wright told jurors that Bardin, an English teacher recently hired at the juvenile detention center, sent the boy a sympathy letter last September after a relative’s death, saying he could reach out if he needed to talk to someone.
While that contact violated the professional boundaries that juvenile justice staff are supposed to observe with youths in custody, it wasn’t wildly inappropriate, Wright said.
However, Wright said, Bardin followed with a stack of letters, into March of this year, where she spoke to him candidly about her daily life, her unhappy marriage and her explicit sexual desire for him. In the letters, Wright said, Bardin recounted her graphic sexual encounters with the boy inside the detention center.
As Bardin seduced the boy, also providing him with explicit photos, she encouraged him to arrange for her husband’s murder, using his friends back in Louisville, Wright said. When the boy asked her why she didn’t just get a divorce, she replied: “Because I don’t want to share anything. I want to have it all.”
“She solicited that young boy to kill her husband,” the prosecutor said. “She was serious about it.”
Elena Bardin’s husband, 49-year-old Michael Bardin, filed for divorce May 7 after six years of marriage. He’s seeking sole custody of their 5-year-old daughter.
On Wednesday, while cross-examining the prosecution’s witnesses, Romines attacked the state’s case.
Despite security cameras being located throughout the detention center, Romines said, there is no known video of Bardin and the boy having sexual contact.
As for the “garbage” claim that Bardin wanted the boy to kill her husband, Romines said, nobody in Adair County would be in a worse position to arrange a murder. The teen was already held behind bars on a murder charge, on a $500,000 bond, he said. His one weekly phone call was monitored, and his mail was opened and read, Romines said.
In response, Wright presented state records showing that — despite security rules — some of the mail coming from and going to youths held at the juvenile detention facility is not actually opened and read.
Wright arranged for the jury to view several extended security video clips from January and March that showed Bardin walking into the boy’s housing pod and entering his cell with him while nobody else in the area appeared to be paying attention to them.
Under no circumstances should a teacher have gone into a youth’s cell alone, witnesses testified.
There are no security cameras in most individual cells at the juvenile detention centers, so it’s impossible to know what happened inside them except for what the participants say, Wright said.
Shortly before the boy’s cell was searched in March, some of Bardin’s former colleagues testified Wednesday, they were growing suspicious of the special attention she paid to the boy, hanging around him constantly. They had the boy transferred to a different housing unit in order to move him away from her, they testified.
Security at the detention centers run by the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice sometimes has been lax.
The Herald-Leader reported in July on three state workers who lost their jobs at the state’s juvenile detention facility in Graves County amid investigations into employees who apparently had sex in the control room on multiple occasions and who allowed an alleged fight club for youths in a classroom closet.
And at the same Adair County facility where Bardin later worked, there was a riot in 2022 where youths escaped their cells, took control of the facility and raped a teen girl housed there at the time.
