An Oregon father is facing charges of misdemeanor child neglect after allegedly neglecting his two-year-old son, who tragically drowned last year. The incident reportedly occurred while the father was engrossed in binge-watching television, allowing the child to leave the home unnoticed.

Aaron Paulsen has been charged in connection with the death of his young son, Dane Paulsen. According to court documents accessed by KATU, the boy’s mother, Cha Met Jackson, had informed Aaron that Dane would be under his supervision when she departed their Siletz home on March 1, 2025.

Prosecutors allege that Aaron observed Dane exit the house through a sliding glass door without intervening. Instead, he later informed police that he was preoccupied with binge-watching TV at the time of the incident.

In a separate account, Cha Met Jackson reportedly told authorities that she heard her son knocking on the door of a trailer on the property. Her immediate reaction was one of alarm, realizing, “Oh no, the baby’s outside.”

Meanwhile, Cha Met allegedly told authorities she had heard her son knocking on the door of the trailer she was in on the property and thought, ‘Oh s**t, the baby’s out.’

However, prosecutors say, she did not open the door to the trailer and instead continued to ‘clean up inside.’ 

In total, District Attorney Jenna Wallace said, 15 minutes passed before the parents noticed he was missing, according to the Lincoln Chronicle. 

As authorities searched for the young boy, they found a toddler’s footprint at the edge of the river near the couple’s house and a toy his parents said he had been playing with prior to his disappearance. 

Dane Paulsen, two, went missing from his home in Siletz, Oregon on March 1, 2025

Prosecutors now claim his father, Aaron Paulsen, watched as the young boy walked through the sliding glass doors but did not intervene

Court documents also allege that the boy’s mother, Cha Met Jackson, told authorities she had heard her son knocking on the door of the trailer she was in on the property and thought, ‘Oh s**t, the baby’s out’ but did not open the door to the trailer and went back to cleaning

Nearly 100 certified search and rescue members were then enlisted to comb the Siletz River and acres of forested land for the toddler. 

Several law enforcement agencies joined the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office in the investigation including the Oregon State Police, the Lincoln City Police Department, Newport PD, the FBI, and Siletz Valley fire. 

In total, four watercrafts were used in the search along with 13 divers, four drones, six canines and 40 investigators before Dane’s remains were found by volunteer diver Juan Heredia in the Siletz River, about three miles downstream of the boy’s home.

Court documents now claim both Aaron and Cha Met were ‘aware that Dane loved the water, was not fearful of the water, but did not know how to swim.’

Aaron was ultimately indicted by a grand jury in October, and pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor charges of child neglect the following month.

He was then released under the condition that he is restricted from being present around unsupervised children under the age of five.

Aaron and Cha Met also have an older daughter who was nine at the time of the court proceeding, and was not included in the restriction.

Aaron is now facing misdemeanor child neglect charges, to which he has pleaded not guilty

But the court documents obtained by KATU also detail how one of Aaron and Cha Met’s previous neighbors once called police to report that the elder daughter was also the victim of child neglect.

The neighbor ‘reported that it was not uncommon’ for Dane’s older sister ‘to be left outside playing in the yard or street unsupervised for 30 to 60 minutes as a toddler,’ the court documents allege.

Another report was also filed by a teenager, who came across Dane standing on Highway 229 in September 2024.

The teenager told police the toddler was ‘only wearing a diaper and a blue sweater,’ and brought the young boy back to his house until his parents could be notified.

Prosecutors now plan to call 20 witnesses at Aaron’s upcoming trial. 

In a dramatic turn of events, allegations of rape made against former Google CEO Eric Schmidt by his ex-mistress have been declared “false,” resulting in her owing him over $10 million in damages, according to an arbitration decision revealed by Page Six.

Arbitrator Beth Andrus, a retired judge from Washington State, concluded that Michelle Ritter engaged in defamation by falsely accusing Schmidt of sexual assault and harassment with malicious intent. Andrus highlighted that the 32-year-old Ritter took extensive measures to avoid testifying under oath regarding her accusations.

In an interim ruling, Andrus stated, “I find that Ritter’s statement claiming she was raped by Schmidt to be false. Schmidt has firmly denied any allegations of sexual assault or physical abuse under oath.” The arbitrator emphasized the lack of credibility in Ritter’s accusations during the proceedings, as reported by Page Six.

Andrus further noted, “Either her accusation of rape was knowingly false, as confirmed by her own declaration, or Ritter was prepared to make a false declaration in exchange for $14 million and an additional $1 million payment to her parents.”

This statement referred to a declaration Ritter had previously signed in a settlement with Schmidt, in which she affirmed that all interactions with him were “entirely consensual” and “never coerced or compelled.”

The arbitrator found Ritter liable to pay $10.7 million to Schmidt — a number that will likely escalate upon on her final decision in a few weeks.

Andrus also slammed Ritter for making her claims on social media, writing, “Ritter chose to use a very public forum to manipulate this system for her own personal benefit — not for the benefit of victims at large …

“Ritter’s shameful false claims of sexual assault, advanced to extort and punish Schmidt, undermine and impair the pursuit of justice by legitimate victims.”

The findings were made on April 29, but are now being made public because Ritter filed a federal lawsuit in California where she attached the arbitrator’s ruling to a sworn declaration.  The federal lawsuit is to challenge the arbitration award and to assert various other claims. 

Ritter had also accused Schmidt, who served as Google’s CEO from 20021 to 2011, of stalking and building an insider “backdoor” to Google servers to spy on her and other employees.

She started dating Schmidt in 2021 — and the tech titan helped fund her AI startup Steel Perlot with $100 million — but they were reportedly on the outs by May 2024.

She filed an explosive lawsuit in in Los Angeles County Superior Court last September, in which she alleged Schmidt. 71, assaulted her on a yacht off the coast of Mexico in 2021 and again at the 2023 Burning Man festival.

“He followed me into a shower, slammed me against the wall, and forcibly raped me,” Ritter previously alleged. “I begged him to stop and cried out that he was hurting me, but he ignored my pleas. The next morning, Schmidt attempted to convince me that I enjoyed the assault.”

She similarly alleged that in August 2023, at the Burning Man festival in Nevada, Schmidt initiated sex while she slept.

“I clearly told him ‘no’ and tried to get him to stop, but I had learned that attempting to resist physically would be futile and make things worse,” she added in the same legal filing.

Ritter further accused Schmidt of unwanted voyeurism and pressuring her with sexual fetishes.

“On multiple occasions, Schmidt surreptitiously photographed me without my consent while I was nude, including entering the bathroom to take photographs while I was showering,” she stated.

The relationship ended after photos surfaced in early 2024 of Schmidt with a 22-year-old woman, according to court documents. Post-breakup, Ritter claimed that the surveillance escalated.

Schmidt has been married to his wife, Wendy, since 1980. He was recently linked to Gloria-Sophie Burkandt, a 27-year-old model, economist and PhD candidate who is the daughter of Bavarian Minister-President Markus Söder, but he is currently not seeing anyone seriously, we’re told.

in her filing, Ritter claimed she had not been allowed to give evidence and called the judge’s statements “false, disparaging, and defamatory.”

Ritter said she was the vicim of an “abuse-of-process pattern,” insisting the arbitration proceedings were “not used to adjudicate a genuine dispute on the merits but to manufacture a damages judgment against a pro se sexual-assault reporter through procedural mechanisms she could not effectively contest.”

Schmidt’s attorney Craig Marcus declined to comment. Page Six has reached out to Ritter for comment.

The South Carolina Supreme Court has ordered a retrial in the high-profile murder case against Alex Murdaugh, signaling the beginning of what could be another prolonged legal saga in the state’s Lowcountry.

A recent entry in the court records, labeled as a “Remittitur” for Richard Alexander Murdaugh, was filed on May 29, officially directing the case back to the trial court level.

This remittitur means that the trial court will now take the reins, with prosecutors, defense attorneys, and the court preparing to embark on a new trial process. This phase is expected to involve scheduling hearings, revisiting prior motions, resolving disputes over evidence, and potentially setting a new trial date.

In March 2023, Alex Murdaugh was escorted out of the Colleton County courthouse in Walterboro, South Carolina, during his trial for the murder of his son, Paul, and wife, Maggie, in June 2021. (Photo credit: Mark Sims/News Media)