The former principal at the center of a new lawsuit filed against Davis School District has had his teaching license suspended and cannot work in education until 2029 after state investigators found he had intimate relationships with two employees.

In the federal lawsuit filed late Thursday, Jed Johansen, the ex-principal of Syracuse High School, is accused of doing little to respond when female students reported sexual harassment and exploitation.

Two girls, identified as Jane Does 1 and 2, say they repeatedly asked Johansen and other administrators at their school and at Davis School District for help when male students were circulating nude and fake images of them. That occurred, according to the lawsuit, in a private Snapchat group and on a public Instagram page, and frequently during school hours.

At the same time they were reporting the misconduct, during their senior year starting in fall 2023, Johansen later told investigators he had been engaging in physical relationships with two women at Syracuse High, also during school hours.

He had served as principal there from 2017 until he resigned in January 2025.

The first official report of allegations against Johansen came from Jenny Hadley, who had been running the teen center at the school. She reported in spring 2024 that the principal was sexually harassing her, according to documents.

She also spoke to The Salt Lake Tribune about her account, saying that Johansen repeatedly came to her office and talked about personal things, including his sex life with his wife and their pending divorce. She says he later retaliated against her for filing that.

By November 2024, Hadley said she felt forced to resign, citing a hostile work environment.

In the same month she left, another person emailed the district’s superintendent, alleging Johansen had inappropriate sexual relationships with the two school employees.

The district started an investigation, led by its Title IX office. The Tribune fought and won an appeal to obtain records documenting how the district handled that investigation.

A series of emails includes an exchange in which Johansen asked if the investigation would end if he resigned, and the Title IX coordinator said “yes,” which is what happened.

The district’s human resources director, Suzi Jensen, pushed back on that notion, the messages indicate. She explained it’s proper procedure and “good practice” to continue an investigation, which federal law supports. The emails show she was overruled.

Despite the closed district investigation, Jensen later said she still had a “legal obligation” to report the allegations to the state’s Utah Professional Practices Advisory Commission, or UPPAC, the board that formally investigates alleged teacher misconduct and oversees teaching licenses. She did so in January 2025 after Johansen resigned.

Jensen told UPPAC that during an initial interview with district officials, Johansen had “admitted to the alleged inappropriate conduct,” as well as to “having pornographic images on his district-issued cell phone,” according to documents obtained by The Tribune in a public records request.

She said district Superintendent Dan Linford agreed to wipe Johansen’s district devices without examining what was on them if Johansen agreed to step down. Jensen told the state she found that strange and “outside of normal district protocols.”

Johansen could not be reached for comment; The Tribune attempted to reach him multiple times. The attorney who represented him in the state investigation said he was not representing Johansen in the new lawsuit.

The state investigation findings, issued later in 2025, were also obtained by The Tribune.

In a statement this week, Davis School District didn’t comment directly on Johansen’s case or Linford’s reported actions but said that the allegations from the lawsuit “conflate separate matters involving student misconduct and employee conduct, each subject to distinct investigative processes and legal requirements.”

The findings

The first relationship Johansen had with an employee started in 2019 and lasted several years, according to the documents.

The employee said it started when Johansen made comments about her clothes being tight. He later touched her legs below her shorts and allegedly told her, “You know you wanted that” because of what she was wearing.

It grew more physical from there, she said. The two at times had sex on campus, sometimes in the middle of the day, the employee told investigators. They’d find a private place, including an office back closet, the auditorium sound booth and storage areas.

She also said she would send Johansen nude photos of herself and video-call him while she was naked; she said that did not happen during school hours.

Johansen told investigators the relationship was consensual and ultimately ended it.

That employee later moved to a district-level position. When Johansen also applied for a position with the district, the employee said he reached out again. She said Johansen asked her to keep their previous relationship quiet and offered to pay her money to do so.

Johansen told investigators he was “never going to pay her” and that was misunderstood.

His relationship with the second employee, which started in fall 2022, was ongoing at the same time, according to UPPAC’s findings.

That employee told investigators they had kissed at school but “refused to answer if she had sex with Mr. Johansen at school and stated she is not admitting to having sex with him period.”

It started similarly, she said, with him sharing personal details about his life, including other affairs he’d had, and then moved to him touching her. She said he specifically looked for women who were feeling “vulnerable and unhappy.”

Johansen later told UPPAC that he was “ashamed, embarrassed and has lost everything” over the two relationships.

“Johansen said leading up to his divorce and following his divorce he exercised poor judgment,” according to the report.

He also said he didn’t realize the state would investigate after he resigned, the report notes. He had recently been hired by Ogden School District, he said, and was fired when leaders there learned of the UPPAC case.

He also had applied to a job a Wyoming school district. UPPAC investigators say they later learned Johansen wasn’t honest in that application about the accusations made against him.

During the process, he said he “knows of a lot of similar cases in the district that the district has not done anything about,” according to the UPPAC report “He said it is hard to be the guy getting punished.”

UPPAC ultimately suspended his license for four years, documents show, after concluding “Johansen showed a pattern of harassment and inappropriate conduct.”