After a 17-year-old checked out a copy of Jennifer L. Armentrout’s Storm and Fury from a high school library, two members of the right-wing group Moms for Liberty called the police to report “pornography given to a minor in a school,” the online newsletter Popular Information reports.
Jennifer Tapley and Tom Gurski made the police report in Santa Rosa County, Florida. The two are active in Moms for Liberty, a group well known for challenging books they see as objectionable in schools.
Armentrout’s novel, published in 2020 by Inkyard Press, is a romance fantasy novel about an 18-year-old woman who is losing her vision and can communicate with ghosts. The book contains a sex scene, Tapley said.
In an interview with a deputy sheriff, Gurski said the librarian who let the student borrow the book had committed a “third-degree felony.” Tapley said, “The governor says this is child pornography. It’s a serious crime. It’s just as serious as if I handed a Playboy [magazine] to [my child] right now, right here, in front of you. It’s just as serious, according to the law.”
The sheriff’s office referred the case to the school district, then closed it, according to Popular Information’s Judd Legum.
Kasey Meehan of the literary nonprofit PEN America told Legum, “To see the orchestrated campaign to remove books from schools escalate to a police station is shocking. Professional librarians apply sensible measures to curate their collections for diverse audiences of readers, and they should not be punished for making knowledge accessible to students that falls well short of the well-established legal standards for obscene materials.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
