Ciara Kilburn had received plenty of praise from film professor Bill Simmon, yet the encouragement did not seem to translate into good grades. So, when Simmon offered a somewhat unconventional way for her to earn extra credit, the 19-year-old college student took him up on it.
Simmon wanted Ciara to star in a promotional video for what was then known as Vermont Community Access Media, a public-access television station in Burlington that he helped run. He explained that the spot would feature Ciara in a variety of outfits meant to show that VCAM was “good for any occasion.”
Then a respected local filmmaker, Simmon had taught at local colleges for years and had produced several well-received documentaries, such as a retrospective look at the beloved yet short-lived band the Pants, which was popular in the Burlington music scene in the mid-1990s. Ciara, a University of Vermont student, had enrolled in Simmon’s Community College of Vermont filmmaking class on a whim and had found him to be a kind and knowledgeable professor.
She was a little nervous about coming to the studio alone, though, so she asked to bring her 17-year-old sister, Brona. Simmon agreed, and on the evening of November 10, 2012, he steered the teens toward a cluttered storage closet where they changed outfits between takes of silly dancing and goofy faces.
The shoot would later feel to the sisters like nothing more than a slightly awkward way to spend a Saturday night, and they forgot all about it. But years later, they learned that the professor had betrayed them in ways that could never be undone.
In September 2018, Ciara was at work when her phone lit up.
A close friend had texted a link to a porn website that featured a screenshot of the two sisters half-undressed. Ciara, then 25, went numb as she watched a video showing her 19-year-old self and an underage Brona unwittingly reveal themselves to a hidden camera again and again. Ciara instantly recognized the VCAM storage closet. She frantically called the station to ask for Simmon, who returned her call later that day.
Someone from the station — one of your colleagues, maybe even a former intern — secretly filmed us during our shoot, she told Simmon. She expected him to be horrified. Instead, he was oddly quiet, as if not quite sure what to say.
She told Simmon that she planned to go to the Burlington police. Within the hour, she was describing for two detectives the 2012 shoot and the secret recording. When she mentioned she’d called Simmon, the detectives perked up.
“You spoke with him?” they asked. “What was his affect? What did he say?”
Slowly it began to click for Ciara: Simmon had staged the shoot. He was the one who suggested they change in the storage closet. He must have filmed them. And because Ciara had trusted him, he knew they were onto him.
By then, the video of the sisters had spread across the internet, amassing hundreds of thousands of views while placing them among the untold number of girls and young women who have been secretly filmed in private moments. This modern form of sexual exploitation has become so entangled with the commercial porn industry that some of the most popular videos on free websites such as Pornhub and XVideos were produced through criminal means.
Victims often don’t learn what happened until years later, making these cases difficult to investigate. In recognition of this — and of the permanent nature of the internet — Tennessee lawmakers recently passed a state law pinning the statute of limitations for voyeurism to the date the videos are discovered, rather than when they are filmed.
In Vermont and many other states, however, the clock starts ticking the moment the perpetrator stops recording. By the time the Kilburns found out what Simmon had done, it was already too late.
Simmon eventually had no choice but to admit to creating the video: Detectives later discovered a longer, uncut version that captured him setting up the camera before the Kilburns arrived.
But he was never criminally charged, and his conduct would continue to fly largely under the radar for years, even after the Kilburns filed a lawsuit against him and VCAM in 2020. He was able to continue finding jobs in the video field, too. As of just a few weeks ago, he was employed as a digital specialist for the state Agency of Education, a job that involved filming in schools.
It was only when the Vermont Supreme Court issued a ruling on the lawsuit in June that Simmon’s conduct spilled into public view.
Nearly 13 years after their privacy was first violated, Ciara and Brona have decided to tell their story. In an interview with Seven Days this week, the sisters, now in their early thirties, described how Simmon’s betrayal continues to follow them.
“It’s affected our relationships with each other, with our partners, with our friends,” Ciara said. “It’s the feeling like we can’t talk to anyone about this, because no one understands it.”
“Our privacy, our sense of safety,” Brona added. “He took everything.”
During their 2018 investigation, detectives quickly determined that the video had been posted first to a membership-only porn website as part of a series that included voyeuristic clips of women filmed in private spaces such as changing areas or bathrooms.
The detectives drove to VCAM and confirmed that the storage room matched the background in the video. They also spoke to Simmon, who recalled the 2012 promotional shoot but denied secretly filming the sisters during it.
Detectives knew any incriminating footage would likely be stored on Simmon’s devices. But seizing the equipment without his consent would require police to establish probable cause. They felt they couldn’t, because the three-year statute of limitations for the underlying crimes — voyeurism and the disclosure of sexually explicit material without consent — had already expired.
The state’s child pornography laws have a much longer statute of limitations: 40 years. But they apply only to victims 15 and under. Brona was 17 when she was filmed.
In discussions with the local state’s attorney’s office, investigators determined that they needed more recent evidence of wrongdoing in order to charge Simmon with a crime.
So, with VCAM’s consent, they searched his work devices and found more concerning videos. One had been taken in 2013 and showed an unknown college-age woman changing in what appeared to be a restaurant bathroom.
Investigators also found videos Simmon had taken with a VCAM GoPro while serving as a chaperone for a Burlington College class trip to Austin, Texas, in 2015. Simmon, who also taught classes at the now-defunct college, can be seen setting up the camera above a toilet, then using a plastic cover to hide the lens, before three Burlington College students are seen changing and showering.
Again, these videos fell outside the statute of limitations. But further evidence of Simmon’s pattern of behavior helped convince a judge to grant a search warrant for Simmon’s Burlington apartment. In May 2019, investigators seized his cellphone, thumb drives, hard drives and a computer.
Police found the Texas video and another on the external hard drives. But they were unable to get past the encryption on Simmon’s personal computer. They eventually sent the device to a forensic lab in Massachusetts, which ran a program that tried 90 billion possible passwords, to no avail.
Over time, the sisters heard from more people who had stumbled on the video. Most were sympathetic, aware that what they had seen was wrong. But one day, Ciara opened her Facebook account to find a message from a former high school classmate who had sent her a link to the video along with a photo of his genitals.
In early 2020, Ciara was notified by a friend of a friend that the video had been reposted on Pornhub, one of the most popular websites in the world, after the site had previously removed the clip. The video began with a montage of photos that Ciara had posted on her private Facebook page in 2017.
Investigators concluded that the person who uploaded the video this time not only knew the Kilburns personally but was friends with Ciara on Facebook — a group that included Simmon. Police subpoenaed Pornhub in an attempt to track down the uploader but eventually hit a dead end.
Without further leads, detectives closed their criminal investigation in June 2020. In an affidavit outlining his findings, then-Burlington detective Thomas Chenette wrote that it was clear Simmon had “lured” Ciara to the station, taken the video and distributed it online.
“Unfortunately, due to the viral, global nature of the distribution, it is impossible to remove the video entirely from the internet,” wrote Chenette, who recently retired. “It will exist forever.”
Simmon was fired from VCAM shortly after the nonprofit learned about the allegations against him, according to court records, but he soon found a job at another public-access station, Mt. Mansfield Media.
As the reality set in that Simmon had gotten away with what he’d done to them, the Kilburns decided to sue Simmon and VCAM, seeking damages for the emotional stress they’d endured.
The claims against Simmon were straightforward. But to prove that VCAM should also be held liable, the sisters needed to show that the media company knew or should have known that Simmon posed a risk. They pointed to a disclosure from one of Simmon’s colleagues, who, in the early days of the criminal investigation, went to police to get something off his chest.
The employee recalled how Simmon had returned a hard drive in 2011 that contained about 40 gigs of data still in the trash bin. When the employee opened the first file, he said, he saw what appeared to be a girl of about age 12 sitting naked. When he opened a second image and found a girl who appeared to be even younger, the employee panicked, he said, and cleared the drive’s trash bin.
The employee told police that he was “dead sure” Simmon had placed the images on the drive but could not prove it. (Simmon has consistently denied the allegation, saying the hard drives were also used by the public.)
Rather than report the incident, the employee decided to subtly raise the issue at a staff meeting, describing how he had found some “disturbing images” on a recently returned flash drive. He told detectives that, in hindsight, he deeply regretted not reporting the photos to the police.
The lawsuit offered a chance for the sisters to confront Simmon directly and hold him to account. It also drove a wedge between the siblings at times.
Ciara, fueled by anger and a nagging sense of guilt, leaned into the process. She couldn’t help but blame herself for getting her younger sister involved. Working to hold Simmon and the station responsible felt like one way to take back control.
“Me, I just completely shut down,” Brona said.
The younger Kilburn had been living for years with the constant fear that friends, family and even people she bumped into on the street might have seen her in that vulnerable state. She learned to cope by pretending that it had never happened, but the lawsuit forced her to acknowledge the video’s existence. She avoided their attorney’s calls, much to Ciara’s frustration, and she had recurring nightmares.
The depositions added a new layer of trauma. Opposing attorneys asked questions that the young women felt insinuated that they secretly liked the video and hoped to get famous, and that the then-teenagers should have known better.
“To have these two powerful men come at us like that was really hard,” Ciara said.
Simmon had no choice but to admit he had taken the video when it came time for his own deposition in late 2022. A year prior, someone he’d worked with at VCAM had discovered an uncut version of the video clearly showing he’d set up the camera.
Simmon said under oath that he had stored the video on his personal computer — the one police were never able to crack. But he maintained that he did not post the video online. Instead, Simmon claimed he sent the footage to someone he had met in an online forum in exchange for other voyeuristic images.
Simmon said he stumbled on the Kilburn video a few years later while browsing a pornographic website, at which point he decided to delete the video from his computer.
“It became clear that I was not in control of the video images,” he said when asked why he deleted the video. “And it made me decide to stop having any material like that in my life.”
“Did you delete any other similar material at that time?” asked the sisters’ attorney, Stephanie Greenlees.
“Yeah, I — I deleted a whole bunch of stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Other material that I had collected from, you know, the web and so on.”
He said he did not recall whether any of that deleted material included other footage that he had taken himself.
Any nerves Ciara felt in the days leading up to the February 2024 trial gave way to rage upon seeing Simmon walk into a Burlington courtroom. Twelve years had passed since she’d seen him.
She resisted the urge to tell him off from the stand, and when he tried to apologize during his own testimony, she shook her head in disgust.
Brona, meanwhile, stared him “dead in the eyes” as he testified, she said, thinking to herself the whole time: You fucking look at what you did. Own it.
The sisters wanted to shelter their family and friends from the trial, so they chose not to invite anyone. Their mother came each day anyway.
The 10-person jury needed just a couple of hours to rule in their favor. Simmon was ordered to pay $7.5 million in damages, while VCAM would need to pay $3.5 million for its failure to properly supervise him.
Defense attorneys asked that the jurors be polled individually to ensure the announced verdict matched what they felt — a common tactic from the losing party in a civil case. Many of the jurors looked at the sisters as they affirmed the verdict one by one. Each time, Ciara nodded and mouthed, “Thank you.”
VCAM’s attorneys appealed the decision, resulting in the recently published Supreme Court decision. The nonprofit, now known as the Media Factory, is now waging a complicated legal battle with its insurance company over who should pay. The nonprofit declined an interview request.
Simmon, who rents an apartment in Burlington, likely has nowhere near enough money to cover the damages he personally owes.
He was fired from Mt. Mansfield Media after he informed his supervisor of last year’s verdict but went on to land a job with the state Agency of Education. He was hired in December 2024 and worked there until last month, when education agency officials were notified of the Supreme Court decision and placed him on leave. He has since resigned.
Simmon declined to be interviewed for this story. A statement provided by his attorney said he “greatly regrets his actions and the harm he caused to the Kilburns.”
The Agency of Education, in a statement of its own, said it was unaware of Simmon’s conduct when it hired him. State policies prohibit the agency from conducting background checks for the role he was hired for, the statement said. A criminal background check likely wouldn’t have turned up anything anyway, because Simmon was never charged with a crime.
For years, the Kilburn sisters said they have been reluctant to speak publicly about what happened to them, in part because any attention drawn to the case could lead more people to the video.
“We’ve spent all these years living in shame because of something that somebody else did to us,” Brona said, wiping away tears during an interview.
“I’m done being ashamed.”