A Chicago police officer was disciplined for posting pornographic images of her child’s father online after she found him on a date with another woman while she was pregnant, newly released records show.
A police supervisor agreed last month to suspend officer Diana Valentine for five days and noted that her case “should be reviewed for a potential criminal referral.”
But the supervisor also acknowledged the three-year statute of limitations had lapsed for bringing revenge porn charges, the records show.
Valentine confronted her child’s father as he and the other woman were leaving a movie theater in the Loop in November 2022, according to a report by the city’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability. Valentine stood in front of their car and repeatedly told them she was pregnant before striking the driver’s side window with a roller skate, the report says.
“Officer Valentine was not planning to roller skate around the parking garage on one foot,” Kimberly Edstrom Schiller, COPA’s director of investigations for special victims, says in the report.
“Rather, it is reasonable to infer from the circumstances and nature of the encounter that Officer Valentine’s decision to grab the roller skate was an expression of her emotional agitation in the moment.”
Weeks later, Valentine accessed the man’s cellphone and screen-recorded his private videos and photos, which included sexually explicit footage of him and the other woman, according to the report.
She then posted the screen recordings on Instagram without their permission, the report says. Followers notified the other woman, who told Valentine she was going to make a report to COPA, prompting Valentine to remove the post.
COPA sustained nearly every allegation against Valentine, including that she threatened the pair and posted the explicit images — even though Valentine had told investigators that it was “not her intent to post publicly.”
The COPA report notes that disseminating pornographic images and videos without permission is against state law, but it makes no mention of any referrals to law enforcement. A spokesperson for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office said prosecutors never received a referral.
COPA recommended up to a 10-day suspension. Kelly Schnoor, a supervisor in the police department’s Bureau of Internal Affairs, ultimately agreed with COPA’s disciplinary findings and handed down the five-day suspension.
Valentine didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. She joined the police department in 2018 and has been named in at least two other disciplinary cases, according to city records. The allegations in those cases weren’t sustained.
She’s currently assigned to the Gresham District.