Ex-Student Testifies About Affair With Teacher : Camarillo: Some of the instructor’s current pupils tell the court that he showed no sexual intent toward them. The judge drops two charges.

A red lace negligee and adolescent love letters became evidence Wednesday in the child-molestation trial of a Camarillo High School drama teacher as a 22-year-old Orange County woman testified that she had an affair with him when she was his student seven years ago.

The woman testified in Ventura County Municipal Court that she was a 15-year-old student at Woodbridge High School in Irvine when she had a sexual relationship with William Fisher.

The prosecution ended its case Wednesday, and Fisher’s defense began, with some of Fisher’s current students testifying that he showed no sexual intent toward them or their classmates.

Megan Miller, 16, described Fisher’s classes as “fun and easy . . . friendly. Everybody loved him, everybody felt comfortable around him.” She also disputed another girl who testified for the prosecution that Fisher had offered her extra credit to clean his house in a French maid’s costume.

Fisher, 42, is on trial in Ventura County Municipal Court on misdemeanor charges filed under a law that makes it illegal to “annoy or molest a child under 18.” He was suspended last November and arrested after eight female students complained that he inappropriately hugged and made sexual comments to them.

The girls have testified that Fisher often complimented them, asked them to dress in revealing costumes and photographed them. Two testified that he offered them extra credit if they would clean his house while wearing a French maid’s costume, and one testified that he invited her to work out with him.

Judge Herbert Curtis III Wednesday dismissed two of the eight charges initially filed against Fisher after defense attorney George Eskin argued that evidence presented during the prosecution’s case was too thin to support any of the charges. The judge, however, ruled against Eskin’s motion on six counts.

Also over Eskin’s objections, Curtis allowed Fisher’s former lover to testify to give clues about Fisher’s intent in the Camarillo High School incidents.

The woman testified that during her sophomore year in 1983, Fisher often counseled her after school on family problems and complimented her on her looks. He began giving her frequent, friendly pats on the back as she entered his English class, but the touching became more serious, she testified.

“In the beginning, he’d just hold my hand,” she said. “He eventually went on to massaging my upper back, and eventually the hugs were more aggressive and it would be a long press up against his body.”

Eventually, she said, she and Fisher had sexual intercourse, sometimes in his apartment and once at a private gymnasium where he invited her to work out with him.

The girl testified that during her sophomore year at Woodbridge High School, Fisher took photographs of her nude and wearing a red negligee. He later said he burned them, but she stumbled across the nude photos in his apartment and found that they were “worse than I thought they would be, they were close-ups,” she testified.

The woman said Fisher told her to pose as his niece if anyone saw them together outside school. And he told her to hide their romance because his career was at stake, she was under 18 and “people wouldn’t understand,” she testified.

Under cross-examination by Eskin, the woman said she thought she was in love with Fisher and often exchanged intimate letters with him, some of which were introduced into evidence.

However, she said, “I cared about him because I trusted him. I looked up to him. But I wasn’t in love with him. . . . I can say that now today.”

After about two hours of testimony, the woman was excused and the prosecution rested its case.

As Eskin began Fisher’s defense, he called Camarillo High School senior Megan Miller as the first of an expected 15 defense witnesses. Miller discounted testimony from one of the alleged victims, saying that she was present at a conversation at which Fisher allegedly made his French maid costume proposal and never heard him make the overture.

She also described the prosecution witness as “not always truthful.”