Ryan Walters may not have watched nude women at work. But he still slandered his colleagues.

Ryan Walters may be off the hook for what people saw on his TV, but his smear campaign against colleagues remains unforgivable

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Is it possible that Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters is not, in fact, a connoisseur of retro adult films that he secretly watches during work meetings?

There’s now reason to believe it really was just an accident (!) but even that would raise a number of additional questions.

First, a reminder of how we got here: Walters is a Christian Nationalist education leader who has done everything in his power to shove Jesus into public school classrooms.

But a couple of weeks ago, during a closed door meeting of the State Board of Education, two of the board members, Becky Carson and Ryan Deatherage, said they noticed something unusual on Walters’ office TV:

… Deatherage said he noticed the video first while a parent was speaking about her appeal of a district transfer denial. As Deatherage weighed his options about how to bring the video to the room’s attention, Carson noticed the nudity.

“I was like, ‘What am I seeing?’ I kind of was in shock, honestly. I started to question whether I was actually seeing what I was seeing,” Carson said. “I was like, ‘Is that woman naked?’ And then I was like, ‘No, she’s got a body suit on.’ And it happened very quickly, I was like, ‘That is not a body suit.’ And I hate to even use these terms, but I said, ‘Those are her nipples.’ And then I was looking closer, and I got a full-body view, and I was like, ‘That is pubic hair.’ Even right now, I couldn’t even tell you what I was watching.”

As Carson processed what she was seeing, she said “the mama bear and teacher in me came out” and she “stopped the meeting cold” by confronting Walters.

“I was so disturbed by it, that I was like — very loudly and boastfully, like I was a parent or a teacher — I said, ‘What is on your TV? What am I watching?’ He was like, ‘What? What are you talking about?’ He stood up and saw it. He made acknowledgment that he saw it,” Carson recalled. “And I said, ‘Turn it off. Now.’ And he was like, ‘What is this? What is this?’ So he acknowledged it was inappropriate just by those words. And he was like, ‘I can’t get it to turn off. I can’t figure out how to turn it off.’ And I said, ‘Get it turned off.’ So he finally got it turned off, and that was the end of it. He didn’t address it. He didn’t apologize. Nothing was said.”

It wasn’t obvious what he was watching in part because both board members said it wasn’t explicitly sexual; there wasn’t penetration involved. But there were definitely naked women on the screen. Deatherage told the website NonDoc that there were “multiple nude women” along with some kind of “chiropractic table.” Carson said in an interview that the video looked like it was made in the 1960s.

Walters later said that when he noticed what was on the screen, he saw “a doctor and a nurse and… a white lab coat.”

He couldn’t explain any of this, though. His director of communications told reporters it was “embarrassing” for them to “write a junk tabloid lie.” He blamed the incident on a “hostile board” that would “say and do anything except tell the truth.”

Walters later claimed this was some sort of conspiracy: “Some of these board members are blatantly dishonest and cannot hide their political agenda. It is disappointing that they are more interested in creating distractions than getting work done for Oklahoma families.”

He also said in a separate news conference:

"These board members have a lot to answer for, and so does the governor of the state of Oklahoma. Did he direct these board members to lie about me? Did he direct his board members to go in and disrupt everything in these board meetings? Did he have the board fight against bringing private schools into the state for families to have school choice?"

In the meantime, investigations were launched by the state’s Office of Management & Enterprise Services (OMES), and the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Office, and the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. (This was obviously an emergency situation…)

OMES hired a company called Alias Cybersecurity to do the investigation and they released a preliminary report last week that said that “no definitive evidence could be established to either confirm or refute the viewing of particular content on the television during the timeframe in question.”

But there was one interesting note in their report: “When initially powered on, the television displayed Samsung TV Plus Channel 1204 (Movie Hub Action).“

All those investigations are still ongoing, but it now appears that there’s a plausible explanation for what happened that centers around Channel 1204. It’s not coming from any of the investigators, though. It’s coming from the Republican leader of the Oklahoma State House, Kyle Hilbert.

As Hilbert explains it, yes, the TV was showing adult content. But not because of anything Walters did. It’s just the default setting for those TVs when you turn them on.

Walters recently had a Samsung TV installed in his office that, when powered on, automatically displayed the ​​Samsung TV Plus Channel 1204 (Movie Hub Action), House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, R-Bristow, said in a news release.

Hilbert said he learned Tuesday morning from Samsung that the channel was airing the 1985 film “The Protector” followed by the 2017 film “The Foreigner” during the timeframe when two members of the Oklahoma State Board of Education reported seeing the explicit images during a private portion of their July 24 meeting.

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“In my opinion, the most plausible explanation for what occurred that day is that the television, which had only been in the superintendent’s office for fewer than two months, automatically launched Samsung’s free streaming service and began playing a film that contained explicit content, without anyone in the room realizing it at the time,” Hilbert said. “This information seems to vindicate both the state superintendent as well as the two board members.”

Samsung hasn’t confirmed that the TV automatically launches its free movie channel when you turn it on, and this explanation hasn’t been confirmed by any of the actual investigations that are still taking place.

But let’s suppose the excuse checks out.

Do either of those movies have scenes that correspond with what the board members saw?

Yes they do. The Protector is a 1985 movie starring Jackie Chan that includes plenty of nudity. Is there full frontal nudity by several women along with a “chiropractic” table, even if there are no actual depictions of sex? Yes to all of that.

The movie includes scenes in which Chan and his co-star are being hunted down by a crime boss and go to a massage parlor to evade capture. It happens to be an adult-themed parlor where a masseuse performs sexual favors... (but there’s a twist! Those women are working with the enemy and a fight scene ensues!)

What about the doctor and nurse and lab coat that Walters said he saw?

There’s another scene in the movie that takes place in a drug lab where there are people in white coats. The “adult” version of the film (and not the fit-for-broadcast television version that happens to be available on YouTube) shows several nude workers putting on those lab coats and other workers taking off their lab coats only to reveal there’s nothing underneath. (Is any of the nudity necessary to advance the plot? Not even close.)

Hilbert added:

Additionally, it does not appear that Samsung’s internal movie channels list streamable content days in advance so a planned conspiracy would be highly unlikely. Instead, the available evidence points to a bizarre accident involving a newly installed television defaulting to a pre-programmed channel.

For what it’s worth, neither Carson nor Deatherage have confirmed that the scenes from that movie were what they witnessed, though that would be the easiest way to verify this theory.

I’m willing to admit all of this exonerates Ryan Walters. Barring some other revelation, I no longer think he was purposely watching adult content during a work meeting. There are plenty of reasons to despise Walters; this doesn’t appear to be one of them.

Now, where the hell is his apology?

He accused those board members of lying because they were “hostile.” His communicators director said the accounts of the incident were a “junk tabloid lie.” Walters claimed his colleagues were “blatantly dishonest” and unable to “hide their political agenda.” He implied that Gov. Kevin Stitt, who appointed those two members to the State Board of Education, was “direct[ing] these board members to lie about me.” There’s still an open petition calling for those board members to resign because they were allegedly engaging in “reckless conduct rooted in personal or political vendettas.”

If Walters wants everyone to believe that The Protector just happened to be on TV when he turned it on, then that also means accepting that those board members were accurately describing what they saw.

So how come Walters isn’t saying he’s sorry for accusing Carson and Deatherage of conspiring against him?

In a statement made after Hilbert’s explanation went public, Carson and Deatherage didn’t confirm the theory but said Walters’ conduct remains appalling:

"What we saw on TV is content that would get the certificate of any teacher in this state revoked had it showed up on a classroom TV," they said. "Now we have to ask the question: Why did Superintendent Walters lie about the TV being connected to the internet and what he saw on the TV that day? He… repeatedly called the board members liars and attempted to destroy our reputation."

Walters hasn’t said anything as of this writing. But he did post this image on X/Twitter featuring a scene from the 1993 movie Tombstone in which the character suggests he’s going to bring hell upon those who wronged him.

Not sure it’s wise for him to share scenes from decades-old movies right now, much less one where an angry guy threatens everyone with a gun, but Walters isn’t known for his intellect or subtlety.

His refusal to say he’s sorry for spreading lies is more than just political arrogance. It reveals the rotting foundation beneath his carefully constructed Christian Nationalist persona. This is a man who demands moral purity from educators—to the point where he wants to institute an “America-first assessment” for all new teachers coming from “woke” states. (Despite Oklahoma’s teacher shortage, those potential hires will have to pretend America is exceptional and deny the existence of transgender people.) Yet when Walters was at the center of a humiliating scandal—which, even if accidental, confirmed the basic truth of what his colleagues witnessed—he lashed out with lies, smears, and conspiracy theories. He bore false witness against his fellow board members, violating one of the very Commandments he wants posted in classrooms across the state.

The movie theory may explain the nudity, but it doesn’t excuse Walters’ conduct.

His behavior in the aftermath tells us everything about his leadership. If The Protector was indeed what everyone saw on that TV, then the real scandal isn’t what was on the screen. It’s how quickly Walters tried to throw everyone else under the bus when they were telling the truth. And now, instead of owning up to any of it, he’s quoting Tombstone and promising to rain down fire and fury like some wannabe cowboy god.

It’s authoritarian theater. And it’s an insult to every educator who’s ever been held to higher standards than the man supposedly leading them.

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