Jill Fertel

Jill Fertel is a Philadelphia lawyer who, as an assistant district attorney in the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, prosecuted the pornographer R.C. Horsch for approaching a nine-year-old girl in Kensington in March 2009. She spent eleven years in the office, leaving in 2018, and later taught evidence and trial advocacy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and practiced privacy and technology litigation.¹²

The Horsch Case

In 2010 Horsch was convicted in Municipal Court of luring a child into a motor vehicle and corrupting the morals of a minor. Fertel learned of the drug raid on his house in Bucks County, where police had found disturbing pornography, guns, and explosive materials, made it part of her case, and asked for the maximum sentence of five to ten years; Judge Roger Gordon imposed two and a half to five. She said the conviction triggered a sexually violent predator assessment and that the psychologist who performed it was "horrified" by Horsch's pornography. The conviction was vacated when the girl and her mother were too afraid to testify at a new trial, and the case was expunged in 2015. In September 2026 she said the court file likely still held the notes of testimony, psychological examinations, and letters from Horsch's lawyer: "His conduct and his films and video were part of the sentencing. That record is important to have, if we're to prevent this from happening again." "He was able to treat women in this fashion for decades and no one has stepped up to protect them," she said. "No one was getting arrested for what Raymond Horsch was doing."¹