We’ve all heard it by now — the awkward, high-school-sophomore-level saga of finger-pointing over nudity on a TV in State Superintendent Ryan Walters’ office. What started as a closed-door State Board of Education meeting on July 24 has spiraled into a taxpayer-funded investigation costing well over $10,000 — and counting — all to determine what was playing on a television screen.
The Allegations Board members Becky Carson and Ryan Deatherage say they saw full-frontal nudity on a large television during the meeting. Walters quickly turned it off without explanation. Walters denies wrongdoing and calls the claim “the nastiest, biggest lie ever lodged in the history of Oklahoma,” accusing political enemies — including the board members and Governor Kevin Stitt — of orchestrating the incident. Stitt’s office has told Walters to “take responsibility” and cooperate.
The New Development House Speaker Kyle Hilbert says Samsung confirmed that the free “Movie Hub Action” channel was streaming The Protector (1985) during the meeting timeframe — a Jackie Chan film whose U.S. cut contains a massage-parlor scene with brief nudity. The film was followed by The Foreigner (2017). While forensic experts from Alias Cybersecurity could not retrieve playback logs to prove what was displayed, their findings align with the channel and timing Samsung reported.
THE PRICE TAG
Alias Cybersecurity’s rates for this kind of forensic review run $7,000–$8,000 or more, depending on devices and analysis time. Add investigative hours from the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Office and OSBI, and the total could already be between $15,000 and $30,000 — public money, spent at a time when the Department of Education says it doesn’t have enough for classroom basics. That’s the equivalent of funding a year’s worth of essential supplies for several classrooms or providing new laptops for dozens of students.
THE BIGGER QUESTION
Even if this was nothing more than an accidental autoplay of an old action flick, was it worth tens of thousands in taxpayer money to get here? The next State Board of Education meeting is August 28, but until then, the investigation continues — consuming dollars that could be serving Oklahoma students instead of chasing down the backstory of a 40-year-old movie clip.
Maybe it’s a big deal. Maybe it isn’t. But somewhere along the line, we stopped allowing room for honest mistakes — and stopped expecting leaders to simply say, “That one’s on me.” We’ve been lied to so often that the moment someone points a finger, we brace for the worst. And yet, if this really was a case of a TV channel auto-playing an old Jackie Chan movie, it’s hard to see it as anything more than an embarrassing accident. Technology glitches. People fumble. Half of us grew up in houses where the VCR blinked 12:00 for decades. The real question is whether spending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to untangle it helps students — or just proves we’ve forgotten how to tell the difference between a scandal and a slip-up.
