Jason Alan Marian, the 31-year-old Mission
Viejo dance instructor previously blogged about here, faces up to nine years in state prison following his conviction for having an
unlawful sexual relationship with a 16-year-old dance student and
secretly videotaping several other teen girls after a pool party at his
home as they changed in a bathroom.
In April 2007, Marian invited several female dance students from Mission Viejo Dance and Performing Arts Center–where he and his wife worked as instructors–to his home for a party. They were encouraged to wear bathing suits as a Slip 'N Slide had been set up for the 12- to 14-year-old girls at a nearby park, and there was a pool at the Marians' Mission Viejo abode.
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After slipping and sliding in the park, the girls were encouraged to come back to the Marian
house for a barbecue and swimming. They were instructed to slip out of their wet bathing suits at a certain bathroom inside the home.
One girl noticed a secret camera had been set up, removed it and gave it to her parents, who turned it over to the Orange County Sheriff's Department.
A subsequent investigation determined the dance insutrctor had not just set up the surreptitious taping system for sexual gratification but that from December 2005 to June 2006, he had groomed a 16-year-old Mission Viejo Dance and Performing Arts Center student for an unlawful sexual relationship.
The girl was not one of his dance students, but Marian offered to help her with a school science project by taking her to his other job at the
Ocean Institute in Dana Point. She was given alcohol and the subject of provocative photos he snapped before he fingered her and had oral sex with her, at his home and on the beach.
Marian was found guilty by a jury of five felony counts of using a minor
for sex acts, two felony counts of sexual penetration by foreign object
of a minor, two felony counts of oral copulation of a minor, one felony
count of possession and control of child pornography, and one
misdemeanor count of secretly filming another with the intent to arouse.
He is scheduled to be sentenced July 16 in Santa Ana.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.