Former Ohio high school girls’ basketball coach arrested, accused of having sex with student

WORTHINGTON — A former Ohio girls’ basketball coach has been arrested for having sex with one of the students on his team.

Jason Dawson, 35, has been charged with two counts of sexual battery involving a minor and one count of pandering sexually oriented matter involving a minor in Franklin County, our news partners in WBNS in Columbus reported.

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The alleged actions started when Dawson was the head coach for the girls’ basketball team at Worthington Christian High School.

In December 2023, a woman was interviewed by a Columbus Division of Police detective. She claimed to have been in a relationship with Dawson from her sophomore year in 2019 through September 2023.

She also told the detective that the relationship became sexual in January 2021 when she was 16 years old and that the pair had sex about 100 times, WBNS reported.

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The woman said Dawson, who was also a teacher at the school, recorded them having sex multiple times. He would then send the videos to her.

Three of the videos were able to be extracted from her phone by the Columbus Digital Forensics Unit. Two of the videos showed the woman and Dawson having sex when she was 17 years old, according to court documents obtained by WBNS.

Dawson was the coach at Worthington Christian from 2019 to 2022. He then moved to North Carolina, where he was arrested on Monday. He’s currently in custody at the Mecklenburg County Jail.

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