OKLAHOMA CITY — The Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Office is investigating allegations that pictures of naked women were seen last week on a television in State Superintendent Ryan Walters’ office.
The Office of Management and Enterprise Services referred the matter to Oklahoma County Sheriff Tommie Johnson, said Aaron Brilbeck, a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office, on Monday.
Last week, Senate President Pro Tem Lonnie Paxton, R-Tuttle, announced that an investigation was underway and that he had tasked the Office of Management and Enterprise Services with looking into the “bizarre and troubling situation” where two state Board of Education members reported seeing naked women on the television screen in Walters’ office during a July 24 executive session
The Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Office has assigned an investigator to the case who will determine if anything illegal happened, Brilbeck said.
The probe is “very much in the preliminary stages,” he said.
An Office of Management and Enterprise Services spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Friday, The Oklahoman and NonDoc reported that State Board of Education members Ryan Deatherage and Becky Carson reported seeing the images.
Board members have said Walters was confronted about the images during the closed door meeting and has not apologized.
Walters has been a vocal critic of pornographic materials and other sexualized content in public schools and sought to ban some books that he said contained it from school library shelves.
“Any suggestion that a device of mine was used to stream inappropriate content on the television set is categorically false,” Walters said in a statement released Sunday. “I have no knowledge of what was on the TV screen during the alleged incident, and there is absolutely no truth to any implication of wrongdoing.”
He has called the allegations “politically motivated attacks” by a broken establishment afraid of real change.
The board has questioned Walters’ actions in recent months, including his authority to require schools to provide free lunches to all students and about a controversial test he wants to require California and New York teachers to take.
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This story originally appeared on Oklahoma Voice on July 28, 2025. It is published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-ND 4.0).
Oklahoma Voice is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.
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