After pornographic 'Zoombombing,' Jackson Town Council changes meeting rules

JACKSON — A person virtually attending a public “Chat with Council” session in mid-August briefly displayed pornography before town staff closed down the Zoom meeting room.

The “Zoombombing” incident has caused the town to reconsider how members of the public will be allowed to virtually participate in meetings.

While community members will still be able to attend town meetings online, they will have to be given permission to speak and will not be allowed to share video.

Bruce Moats, an expert in Wyoming public meeting law, doesn’t have an issue with the policy, and likes the idea of the Chat with Council sessions broadly. They make the council more approachable. But he does worry about one “unfortunate” incident limiting public access to public business.

“I have seen over my time where a single incident maybe led to a more restrictive policy than was necessary,” Moats said.

An earlier such disruption occurred during a Town Council meeting in January 2024, when a virtual public commenter shouted racial slurs before then-Mayor Hailey Morton Levinson shut down the Zoom room. A similar incident had happened at a Victor City Council meeting shortly before that.

Broader Town Council meetings, which are regularly scheduled for Monday evenings and in which all five councilors are usually present, are held as Zoom webinars. People who wish to give public comment during Town Council meetings need to be given permission to speak, and are not allowed to share video. That policy won’t change.

However, the Chat with Council sessions will now be altered. In those meetings, which are designed to be informal, councilors meet with the public to discuss current issues. They had been structured as a normal Zoom meeting with open participation and video sharing.

The sessions will now use a webinar format matching the Town Council meetings.

At the Aug. 11 Chat with Council session when the incident occurred, the topic was the town’s water restrictions. During the meeting, a virtual participant who had been in the meeting for 10 or 15 minutes changed their Zoom profile picture to a moving image displaying “graphic pornography,” Susan Scarlata, the town’s director of external affairs, said.

Scarlata was managing the Zoom link with a colleague and immediately closed the online meeting room.Town staff consulted IT and police but could not track the participant down.

This story was published on Sept. 3, 2025.