Extortion trial underway for Johnston Co. school board member accused in blackmail plot
READ MORE
Sex, blackmail and local politics: The extortion trial of JoCo school board member Ronald Johnson
Expand All
A sitting member of the Johnston County school board faces trial this week on multiple felony charges, accused of trying to blackmail a candidate for U.S. Congress and stifle reports of his affair with a school teacher.
Ronald Johnson, a Republican and former Smithfield police detective, won re-election in November despite his indictment for extortion, obstruction of justice and willfully failing to discharge duties.
He took office in District 7 with slightly more than 50% of the vote, but he missed a school board work session Tuesday while in court for jury selection in his trial. As of midday Wednesday, nine jurors had been seated.
Opening arguments in the trial are expected to start Thursday.
What is Ronald Johnson accused of doing?
First elected in 2016, Johnson was censured by the school board twice in 2022, drawing ire for secretly recording conversations during closed-session meetings and for sending texts during board meetings commenting on the appearance of female school employees.
Johnson’s indictment in 2023 accused him of threatening to release a recording with defamatory information about DeVan Barbour, involving his 2022 unsuccessful run for Congress as a Republican in District 13.
He would release this negative information, the indictment said, unless DeVan Barbour pressured a Johnston County teacher, Angela McLeod Barbour, to withdraw statements that she and Johnson had an affair.
DeVan Barbour and Angela Barbour are not related.
Court documents in the case said Johnson met Barbour the candidate in a pickup behind a Clayton gym where he kept an office and wanted a signed statement the teacher had lied.
“Mr. Barbour told Mr. Johnson that this sounded a lot like blackmail and the two engaged in a heated conversation,” wrote an investigator with the Johnston County district attorney’s office in his application for a search warrant. “Mr. Barbour then asked Mr. Johnson, ‘How do I know you’re the only one with a copy?’ ... The conversation became heated, and Mr. Barbour chose to de-escalate it because ‘he didn’t trust his head space.’”
A protective order and an alleged affair
Johnson has yet to comment publicly on the case, and his former attorney Walter Schmidlin also previously declined. The school board member has a new attorney for this week’s trial: Amos Tyndall.
In June of 2022, Johnson filed a protective order against Angela Barbour, the teacher, seeking to stop unsolicited text messages and phone calls, court records said.
When the investigator then interviewed her, she described having a sexual relationship with Johnson almost two years ago, including trips to hotels in Charlotte and Virginia.
Angela Barbour also told the investigator that Johnson had previously asked her to record other people “for leverage or to give him an advantage” in the future. She also told the investigator that in October of 2021, she communicated with DeVan Barbour via Snapchat and FaceTime, describing him as partially clothed and intoxicated, according to the warrant application.
Johnson, in turn, asked Angela Barbour to record DeVan Barbour or have sex with him, giving her a prepaid phone to use, according to court records released in 2023. In those documents, the investigator described finding multiple non-work-related recordings on Johnson’s Smithfield police computer, including those of past Johnston County school superintendents and board members.
The investigator wrote in his warrant application that he later went to Clayton Fitness, the site of Johnson’s late-night meeting with DeVan Barbour, to ask about video surveillance recordings.
When he left to get a search warrant, he asked Clayton police to stand watch, court records said. Johnson arrived at the gym less than an hour later and then left carrying a large white box, the investigator wrote.
Johnson was a police officer for 17 years before being terminated from the Smithfield Police Department
Johnson would go on to file a federal lawsuit against multiple parties, including the special prosecutor in the case, Johnston County District Attorney Susan Doyle, school board members and Angela Barbour. Most of the defendants were dismissed by a judge, but Johnson was allowed to proceed with his allegations against Smithfield about wrongful termination.
T. Keung Hui contributed to this report.
This story was originally published January 8, 2025 at 2:11 PM with the headline "Extortion trial underway for Johnston Co. school board member accused in blackmail plot."
