Las Vegas sculptor Joshua “Ginger” Monroe, who created the “Emperor Has No Balls” series of five naked Donald Trump statues in 2016, says his 3-year-old daughter was the victim of physical abuse by a teacher at her school. That teacher has since been arrested and “assigned to home.”
On Friday, the Clark County School District Police Department arrested schoolteacher Melody Carter, 58, on felony charges of child abuse after receiving several “substantiated” allegations against her, including one from Monroe, KVVU-TV reported.
Carter taught a pre-kindergarten class for special needs kids at Harmon Elementary School in Las Vegas.
“To find out that my child’s being treated this way—it’s appalling, it’s disgusting, and it’s infuriating,” Monroe told KVVU-TV. “She’s been coming home with bruises on her arms and deathly afraid of going to school, and we thought it was just paranoia, not wanting to go to school. Come to find out it’s because she was being tormented by somebody that we trusted.”
Monroe said he and his wife placed their daughter in the program to help with her speech development and socialization with other kids. But they became concerned with Carter’s physical handling of their daughter and brought it up to school administrators, who Monroe says “swept it under the rug.”
“It makes me wonder how many other kids did she abuse?” Monroe said.
Monroe moved to Las Vegas in 2012 to work as the director of Eli Roth’s Goretorium, a year-round haunted house, according to Newsweek. In 2016, around the time Trump received the Republican nomination, the activist art collective Indecline asked Monroe to create five life-size “monster” sculptures of Trump, to be placed in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Cleveland.
Vice described the statues as “saggy, old-man ass and a micro-peen the size of an acorn.” Newsweek said, “That’s all it takes to make a shriveled reproduction of Donald Trump’s penis go viral.”
Monroe, who said he had never previously attempted such a vast project, described the work he put into it as “an extremely difficult thing to do.”
The statues didn’t last long, though. As Vice notes, “within a few days, the masterworks were decimated—ripped down, spray-painted, and otherwise torn to shreds by folks who just couldn’t stand the sight of our future president’s rotund, naked bod.”