GREENSBURG, Pa. — Parents are demanding answers after learning that a registered sex offender worked as the Easter bunny at a Pennsylvania mall.
He was fired after three days on the job, and now he’s speaking out about what happened.
“I can understand, you know, where they’re coming from, about them being upset. But what a lot of people need to realize is, you know, I wasn’t put in jail for touching little kids,” said Michael Paul Jacobs.
Jacobs, spoke about his jobs here at Westmoreland mall as the Easter bunny and his conviction as a Megan’s law violent child sex offender.
“My case — it revolved around having consensual sex when I was a teenager myself, with another teenager,” Jacobs said.
But records show that Jacobs was convicted in two different cases of having sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 19.
An adult having sex with a minor is a crime, no matter how you slice it.
“Because I’m on Megan’s Law, everybody looks at me different, and this is where I have trouble getting a job. And just, didn’t touch no kids or anything like that,” he said.
Jacobs said he never hid his convictions when he applied for the Easter bunny job.
It just never came up.
“They didn’t ask for my background on the application that I filled out. It didn’t say anything about a criminal background,” Jacobs claimed.
So who dropped the ball?
A spokesman for Westmoreland mall tells us Cherry Hill Photo Enterprise leases space to take Easter photos in the mall and said. “It is regrettable that one of their local employees failed to follow their stringent background screening procedures.”
As for Michael Paul Jacobs, he’s out of work again.
“I think it’s messed up that people judge me for me just being on that site, basically,” Jacobs said.