Waffle House Sex Tape Saga Comes to an End

For years, Waffle House has enjoyed a reputation as an excellent 24-hour spot that no culinary tour of the South is complete without visiting. But at the same time as it’s become a favorite celebrity hangout and the kind of place where you can cook your own food while employees nap, a pretty salacious scandal involving the company’s chairman has worked its way through the upper reaches of Georgia’s court system.

This week, housekeeper Mya Brindle and her two lawyers were found not guilty of unlawful surveillance. The charges stemmed from a sex tape involving Brindle and her employer, Waffle House Chairman Joe Rogers Jr., that was recorded in 2012. Brindle’s lawyers, David Cohen and John Butters, were included as co-defendants because they had advised Brindle to record the encounter as part of a civil suit she wished to bring against Rogers.

Rogers described the sexual activity, which started with massages six months after Brindle’s hiring in 2003, as consensual. But Brindle would go on to testify that she felt coerced, and feared losing her job as a housekeeper for the Waffle House executive if she refused his advances. “I tried every way in the world not to do it, but I didn’t think I had an option,” Brindle said during her emotional testimony a few days before the trial’s conclusion.

This week’s ruling in Fulton County Superior Court marks the end (for now, at least) of six years of twisting and turning legal drama. After Rogers refused to comply with Cohen and Butters’ $12 million demand to settle the civil suit, a criminal case kicked off that would eventually escalate to Georgia’s Supreme Court in early November. That decision reinstated the charges against Brindle and her lawyers that had previously been dropped, citing Rogers’ constitutional privacy rights.

That ruling led prosecutors filed a last-ditch motion to instruct the jury that Georgia’s “one party consent” law, which allows for individuals to be taped without their consent, does not apply in this particular case. However, the motion was denied by the Fulton County Superior Court judge presiding over the case. Shortly thereafter, all three were acquitted.

It’s unclear what—if anything—will happen to Rogers beyond the harm that the ongoing legal drama has done to his reputation. For the rest of us, it’s an unfortunate reminder that not even Waffle House is exempt from alleged incidents of sexual harassment perpetrated by those in power. Reckoning with that certainly doesn’t taste very sweet.