Midlands school board member sues district over ‘edited’ security video
A member of the Lexington-Richland 5 school board is suing her own school district over an altercation with another board member.
Catherine Huddle is suing the district, claiming it has edited or altered security footage from a hallway outside the board’s meeting room, which she sought in a Freedom of Information request.
Huddle made a complaint to the Richland County Sheriff’s Department after the Oct. 28 board meeting, where she says fellow board member Mike Satterfield shouted at her about a flier that was mailed out ahead of the 2024 school board election criticizing his daughter, Chapin High School teacher Mary Wood. Huddle was a candidate at the time and was endorsed by the flier from a group called the Defeating Communism PAC.
Huddle’s suit claims that the footage from the security camera in the Center for Advance Technical Studies, situated outside the room where the confrontation occurred, was edited and certain footage removed before it was released to her.
When reached by The State, the district declined to comment on pending litigation.
Huddle sought out the video after the altercation, which happened in a separate hallway to a private restroom on the other side of the room where the board members were meeting in executive session.
“The assault was not captured on video, however, the noise from the assault was so loud and intrusive that multiple people who were waiting in the waiting area across the hall came into the hallway to see what the disruption was about and attempted to see into the conference room to determine the source and/or explanation for the disruption,” the lawsuit filed by attorney Desa Ballard says.
Later in the video, a copy of which was also provided to The State by the school district, Satterfield can be seen leaving the meeting room and quickly walking out of frame, followed by a security officer who had previously entered the room as other district staff gathered in the hallway outside. He apparently gathered his belongings from the public meeting area, and then can be seen on the video moments later walking with the officer back down the hall and out an exit door.
Huddle said she and fellow board member Elizabeth Barnhardt reviewed “what was presented as the original unedited security footage of the hallway” with security about a month after the meeting.
“The video viewed by Ms. Huddle and Ms. Barnhardt appeared to be complete, although it had no sound,” the lawsuit says. “The video bore time stamps throughout, and the time stamps were uninterrupted.”
But when Huddle later received a copy of the video via her FOIA request, she noted an approximately seven-second jump in the on-screen time stamp at the time Satterfield is leaving the building.
“The video produced pursuant to FOIA has clearly been edited to delete that portion of the video where Satterfield was escorted out of the building, which Ms. Huddle and Ms. Barnhardt had already seen.”
That isn’t the only jump noticeable on the recording, the lawsuit says:
“In another portion of the produced video, ... a female enters the hallway from the waiting room on the right and promptly disappears from the scene recorded hallway as if by magic.”
When Huddle contacted the district, the gaps in the recording were blamed on the camera’s motion-activation feature, the suit says:
“This was clearly false, as the video produced had multiple minutes, some as long as four minutes, where the video continued to record with no motion whatsoever taking place.”
On Dec. 12, Huddle’s attorney wrote to district Superintendent Akil Ross asking that the original video recording be preserved. Huddle also hired her own video analyst who “concluded that the metadata of the file produced by the District had, in fact, been truncated,” the lawsuit reads.
However, when Huddle received a reply from the school district’s attorney on March 31, she was told “the original video had inadvertently been destroyed.”
The suit claims the altered video was produced so that “Mr. Satterfield can rely upon [it] in his defense to the civil claim to be filed against him,” the suit said. It asks for “the appointment of an independent forensic video consultant, at the District’s expense, to determine as much as possible whether the District’s explanation is credible, to attempt to locate the original video, and if a redaction occurred, how, when and why.”
Huddle’s altercation with Satterfield came after a mailer was sent out in the district ahead of the November election, featuring a photo of Wood and headlines from local and national publications about Wood’s lesson teaching the memoir “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which brought widespread attention to Chapin High School when she was told to stop teaching the book in the spring of 2023 because of fears it violated a state budget proviso prohibiting the teaching of concepts associated with “critical race theory.”
Satterfield learned of the mailer during the October board meeting and confronted Huddle about it.
“He was less than a foot from my face,” Huddle wrote in a statement she gave to law enforcement afterward. “He was yelling in my face ‘you did this! This is your fault! This is on you!’” as Satterfield held up a cell phone with an image of the election mailer.
Huddle denied having any knowledge of the flier or the group behind it, and later posted on Facebook that “I have no relationship with the PAC and don’t control what they do.” She wrote in the statement that “I was so frightened that I burst into tears,” and retreated into the women’s restroom to escape the confrontation.
When Huddle later raised the incident at the next month’s board meeting, Satterfield denied saying anything inappropriate, but felt he needed to say something about the mailer that attacked his daughter.
“I said that it was completely inappropriate and I was worried about my daughter’s safety,” he said at the time.
This story was originally published May 7, 2025 at 10:33 AM.
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