American Teen Arrested for Changing Classmate’s Surname in Yearbook to ‘Masturbate’

An American teenager was arrested on 14 May after she was accused of having altered yearbook records to change a classmate's last name to "masturbate".

Kaitlyn Booth, 17, is a junior at Hickman High School in Columbia and according to the Huffington Post she changed Raigan Mastain's last name. The change was reportedly registered across all 720 published yearbooks and the online version as well.

Reprinting the published books would have cost the school $41,000. Instead, school authorities recalled all the books and pasted stickers over the altered name. The online version was, however, corrected swiftly.

Yearbook advisor Kim Acopolis said: "I do not think [she] had any sense of the consequences that would come."

Mastain told CBS News she knew of no problems between herself and Booth and, in fact, hardly spoke to her at school. On the whole though, Mastain remains unaffected by the prank. She told the Columbia Daily Tribune: "I was kind of annoyed. It was stupid, but I wasn't that upset."

She added, on the question of punishment: "At some point, when someone makes a mistake, there needs to be a consequence".

"I understand the legality ... but I was definitely pretty shocked," she told the Columbia Daily Tribune, adding, "When you're in high school, you do stuff that is not necessarily the smartest, and this was an example of that."

Booth has been charged with first-degree property damage (a felony) and harassment.