This story was originally published by Based in Lafayette.
By Dave Bangert
Based in Lafayette
June 24, 2025
Jennifer Teising, forced from office as Wabash Township trustee in 2022 when she was convicted on 21 felony counts of theft tied to questions about her residency, is suing township officials for more than $800,000 in backpay and damages, accusing them of defamation and wrongly spreading a narrative that she’d abandoned her elected office by moving away.
Convicted in January 2022 after a three-day bench trial, Teising claimed vindication when the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled later that year that the trial court got it wrong and that prosecutors hadn’t made their case. The Indiana Supreme Court backed that up in a February 2024 ruling, saying that if there were reasons Teising should have been booted from office, the prosecution hadn’t presented it.
In a complaint filed June 17 in Tippecanoe Circuit Court, Teising laid out her own narrative, detailing what she characterized as deliberate attempts to track her movements, sharing those with media and conspiring to get rid of her in ways that drew protesters to an address she had in West Lafayette and other moments in “a malicious effort to humiliate” her.
Teising’s lawsuit asks for:
All in, that would be nearly $820,000.
That’s 20 times more than the $39,992.41 the Wabash Township Board approved in August 2024 as a proposed settlement for backpay to Teising.
Teising – listed in the complaint under her middle name, Rae – signaled earlier in 2025 in a tort claim filed with the township that she planned to sue.
The Wabash Township Board has scheduled a meeting for 7 p.m. Wednesday about paying the legal fees to defend Ed Ward, the township’s fire chief who is named in Teising’s complaint in an official and personal capacity. That meeting will be at the Wabash Township offices at 2899 Klondike Road in West Lafayette.
Teising on Monday directed questions about the lawsuit to Thomas Little, her Frankfort-based attorney.
Angel Valentin, the current Wabash Township trustee who was on the township board when Teising was charged, tried and convicted, said township officials wouldn’t comment on pending litigation.
“Our team at the township continues to be laser-focused on supporting residents in need of financial assistance and continuing to build up the Wabash Township Fire Department to meet the needs of a growing community,” Valentin said.
As of Monday, Wabash Township officials had not filed a formal response in court, according to online records connected to the case. No hearings had been set, either.
In a January 2022 ruling, Tippecanoe Superior Judge Kristen McVey agreed with the prosecution, writing that after Teising sold her West Lafayette home in June 2020, tried to recruit a replacement as trustee and told people she planned to move to Florida, Teising’s pursuit of “a nomadic RV lifestyle” for the rest of 2020 and parts of 2021 was the same as forfeiting the position. McVey ruled that forfeiting the position while collecting a paycheck was the same as theft, as she’d been charged.
In her ruling, McVey referenced a police investigation of Teising’s phone records that indicated she’d spent only 27 nights in Wabash Township over the course of nearly 10 months. The bulk of the rest were in an RV park in Panama City Beach, Florida, camping on the driveway of friends in Anderson, at a friend’s property on the other side of Tippecanoe County or on the road.
Teising’s sentence, delayed during the appeals process, would have put her in jail for 124 days, community corrections for another 124, followed by more than two more years on probation, in addition to more than $27,000 in restitution.
Two higher courts agreed that the lower court didn’t get right.
In December 2022, the Indiana Court of Appeals overturned her conviction, ruling that prosecutors hadn’t made their case that she’d abandoned residence in the township and therefore shouldn’t have been removed from office.
The Court of Appeals agreed with Teising’s arguments that what she’d done equated to remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown in a bubble of friends and campsites. The Appeals Court ruled what she did was roughly the same as what snowbirds do when they winter in Florida with every intention of moving back to Indiana.
Writing for the three-member panel on the Court of Appeals, Judge Robert Altice said: “Our task on appeal is not to determine whether Teising was derelict in her duties as trustee while camping outside the township and working remotely for many months during the pandemic. Indeed, her constituents may have compelling cause for concern. The question before us, rather, is whether her acts constituted theft. We conclude that the evidence presented in this case does not support the twenty-one convictions of theft, as the state failed to establish that Teising ceased being a resident of Wabash Township.”
In 12-page unanimous decision issued in February 2024, Indiana Supreme Court justices ruled that prosecutors might have found civil options to remove Teising from office during a tumultuous time when she sold her home and went absent from the West Lafayette-based township for long stretches.
But they ruled that Teising didn’t believe she quit meeting residency laws for township trustees, so she didn’t have intent to steal money by cashing trustee paychecks – which cut to the core of grand jury indictments and an ultimate ruling from the December 2021 bench trial.
“The state rests its case entirely on the fact that Teising was aware of both the requirement to reside within the township and her own nomadic lifestyle,” Justice Derek Molter wrote in a ruling for the Supreme Court.
“And, the state argues, that lifestyle produced a chain of legal consequences: by leaving the township indefinitely, she stopped residing in the township as a matter of law; then by not complying with the constitutional requirement to reside within the township, she forfeited her office; and then by forfeiting her office, her paychecks became ill-gotten gains,” Molter wrote. “But even if we assume Teising stopped residing in the township and therefore forfeited her office as a matter of law (questions we do not decide), the State didn’t prove Teising knew she forfeited her office, nor, more importantly, that she knew her paychecks had become ill‐gotten gains.”
The complaint Teising filed last week accuses township officials of being out to get her, eventually leading to the criminal charges.
Teising, a Democrat, was elected township trustee in 2018. When she was indicted in May 2021, Teising was already a fixture in media coverage for her absences and handling of the Wabash Township Fire Department. She was portrayed as a villain during often tense meetings in summer 2021 in the Wabash Township Fire Station bays as firefighter layoffs she authorized loomed and the trustee refused to back down or consider other solutions.
That summer, Teising was the subject of a Statehouse meeting called by local General Assembly members who called on her to step down and looked for ways to force her to cooperate with the board and firefighters. Teising later was offered as a poster child for a law passed in 2022 that allows township boards to initiate a process to remove a trustee from office.
Before that, Ward had been fired by Teising in December 2020 for insubordination, after questioning her decisions about the fire department and raising questions about where she was for much of that year. He testified during the December 2021 trial that Teising had given him the ability to track her phone at one point. Ward had provided the Journal & Courier access to phone tracking for Teising’s number, which led a photographer assigned by the paper to the Panama City Beach, Florida, campgrounds where the trustee had been staying. That essentially opened the door to eventual grand jury proceedings that produced an indictment.
Teising argued in court and again in the new lawsuit that she did not give Ward consent to track her phone. She contends that Ward kept a log of where Teising was for months.
“Hundreds of articles were later published portraying Teising as being absent from the township and implying misconduct or dishonesty, relying in part on the location data obtained by Ward without her consent,” the lawsuit argues.
Ward, who was rehired as fire chief after Teising was out of office, didn’t immediately respond to the accusations in the lawsuit.
Teising’s lawsuit accuses:
Beyond lost wages and attorney’s fees during her trial, the lawsuit claims defamation, civil conspiracy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Dave Bangert retired after 32 years of reporting and writing on just about everything at the Lafayette Journal & Courier. He started the Based in Lafayette reporting project in 2021. To learn more about subscribing to Based in Lafayette, click here.
