AP reports the following.
Johnathan Montgomery spent the past four years in a Virginia state prison saying the same thing a lot of inmates do: He was innocent. Convicted in 2008 of molesting a 10-year-old girl outside her grandmother’s Hampton home when he was 14, he insisted the alleged 2000 assault never happened. Turns out, he was telling the truth.
Coast is being identified because authorities say she admitted fabricating the story and because she has been charged with perjury. According to media reports, prosecutors say that Coast told investigators that her parents caught her looking at pornographic websites in 2007 when she was 17, so she concocted a story of prior sexual abuse to explain her behavior. When the alleged assault occurred, Montgomery lived across the street from Coast’s grandmother in Hampton, Va. The two had previously played together.
When she devised the assault story she didn’t think anything would happen to Montgomery because he had moved with his father and stepmother to North Carolina in 2004, Virginia prosecutors said. But based on her testimony, he was convicted of aggravated sexual battery and other charges and was sentenced to 7 ½ years in prison.