In the first full day of a trial involving her son and nephew testified that Roberts provided them and their friends with alcohol during a July 2024 house party before having sex with one of their friends.
Roberts faces of a juvenile and indecent behavior with a juvenile. A panel of six jurors was seated late Thursday in the case, which has
The jury hearing the case against Roberts on Friday listened to testimony from Child Advocacy Center interviewers Patra Minix and Annelise Eaglin, along with Roberts’ minor son and her nephew who both attended the house party. The jury also heard from a Door Dash driver who said he delivered emergency contraceptives to Roberts’ house after the alleged incident.
Her son, who The Acadiana Advocate is not naming because he is a minor, said during a March 20, 2025, interview with Minix that aired to the jury through video that his friends were celebrating his birthday at their house, swimming and drinking alcohol his mother provided.
Later during the party, he said his mom and his friend were upstairs alone. When they came downstairs, everything escalated, he told Minix. His friends left.
Minix asked in the interview what his mom and friend were doing upstairs.
“They were — just, like — they were having sex,” he said.
He and his mom argued, with him saying “that she was in the wrong.” He said his mother was intoxicated and did not remember the incident.
He described it as a “one-time mistake” and asked Minix what was going to happen to his mom.
In addition to the video testimony, Roberts’ son also took the stand Friday. Prosecutor Charles Robinson asked him to review a photo taken that night that depicts Roberts wearing a bikini top while facing a teen boy in the home’s upstairs game room. The bottom half of their bodies is obscured by furniture in the photo.
A defense attorney for Roberts, Adam Johnson, asked her son if he actually saw his mother having sex with his friend.
Her son said he could not confirm they had sex from what he saw, but in his “human mind” it looked like it.
When asked by Robinson if he wanted his mom to be found “not guilty,” her son said yes.
Roberts’ nephew, who was also a minor at the time, said during an Aug. 13, 2024, interview with Eaglin at the Child Advocacy Center in Alexandria that he saw his aunt and friend “doing stuff” on the couch in the game room.
“From what I gathered, they were f-------,” he told Eaglin. When Eaglin asked how he got that impression, since he said he couldn’t see what Roberts was or wasn’t wearing, he said “just the motion.”
Later, when Roberts and the friend came downstairs, he said his aunt was “going crazy.”
On the witness stand, Robinson asked Roberts’ nephew to review text messages with his aunt in the days after the alleged incident.
Roberts’ nephew wrote that he would always stand behind her, no matter what, and told her not to do anything stupid because she has people who love her.
“That shouldn’t have happened,” Roberts wrote to him. “I’m scared to death.”
She also asked her nephew to “Please make sure he doesn’t say anything.”
Robinson asked Roberts’ nephew if he recalled getting a text message from his mother instructing him to “lie till you die” about what happened at the party. The teen said he remembered the message.
Roberts’ nephew said he and his cousin went upstairs out of instinct to see what Roberts and his friend were doing. Roberts’ nephew said he took a video through Snapchat of the scene from the top of the stairs but didn’t save it.
The nephew told another defense attorney for Roberts, Todd Clemons, he had never seen Roberts in such a state as she was that night. He described during cross examination how his aunt had been through a divorce and was later in an abusive relationship with another man who took his own life a few months before the night in question.
His aunt had “kind of spiraled” since then, he said.
Clemons pointed out that at no point in his text exchange with his aunt did Roberts explicitly refer to having sex with the teen.
The Door Dash driver who testified Friday said he delivered Plan B emergency contraceptive for a customer named Misty who lives at the address of the former mayor.
The driver, Paul Smith, said he was familiar with the house because he and his wife take their children trick or treating in the neighborhood. A few days after the delivery, Roberts was arrested and accused of having sex with a teen boy.
“That was the talk around town,” Smith said. “And here we are now.”
Judge Kent Savoie, who sits on the Third Circuit, is acting as an ad hoc district judge for the case because of the recusals of the other district judges. He declared a mistrial last month before a jury was seated after an appeals court threw out one of the felony charges against Roberts.
Roberts was re-indicted on both charges earlier this month.