Shelli and Pat answered the door of their Canyon Country home last year to find an unexpected visitor: their 16-year-old daughter’s pole-vaulting coach and co-worker.
For nearly a half-hour, he told them their daughter was a liar and a troublemaker. She hasn’t been showing up to work, he said, and she even stole his cell phone and sent sexual text messages to other girls on his contact list.
He explained he was just trying to help out a troubled teen.
They believed him. After all, the coach, Johnny Pride, was an adult, and he seemed convincing.
When the parents confronted their younger daughter, she told them Pride had asked her via text message to have sex with him. They thought she was lying and punished her for it.
Then their older daughter, a 17-year-old high school cheerleader, told them Pride had once invited her to a party at his Valencia apartment.
Pride, 26, told the girl’s parents his cell phone had been stolen and someone else had sent the text messages.
If nothing else, Mr. Pride has endured a series of unfortunate identify thefts: the “stolen cell phone” explanation was also used in the earlier allegations involving text messages, and Pride’s father insisted the whole thing was a frame up. In response to scrutiny of some racy content, Mr. Pride also claimed that his website and MySpace account were “hacked.” The MySpace page was revised to exclude some vulgarities, and his web site went completely dormant.
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