Confronting Abuse: Victims Want Independent Investigation after St. George's School Apology for Systematic Sexual Assault

By Jacqueline Tempera
Providence Journal
January 1, 2016

http://www.providencejournal.com/article/20160101/NEWS/160109861

On a sprawling hilltop overlooking the Atlantic sits St. George’s School, an elite private Episcopal boarding school established more than a century ago. Known for its prestigious alumni and oceanic views, the preparatory school has been a coveted location for the country’s youth since 1896.

But recently revealed accusations of systematic sexual assault at the school during the 1970s and '80s have cast a shadow on the bucolic campus’ glowing reputation.

St. George's School has publicly apologized for sexual abuse by several former staff and students during that period. Administrators at the time fired three staff perpetrators, but never reported the matters to state authorities as Rhode Island law required.

Headmaster Eric Peterson and board chair Leslie Heaney wrote that apology in a Dec. 23 report to alumni that followed a nearly year-long investigation begun earlier in 2015. Among the factors: "the evolving landscape of best practices" by peer institutions that have faced similar issues.

"The School underscores its regret, sorrow and shame that students in our care were hurt," Peterson and Heaney wrote in the 11-page report. "We commit ourselves to taking responsibility; to healing those wounds, and to making every effort to mend the fabric of the St. George's community."

The school, which has offered reimbursement to victims for counseling, acknowledges the victims' stated personal suffering, from depression and shame and difficulty with relationships to attempted suicide. Based on "credible first-hand accounts," the investigation identified 26 victims of abuse by staff. Twenty-three were abused by three school employees, and three others were assaulted individually by three other employees, according to the report.

Only one of the perpetrators, former athletic trainer Al Gibbs, has been publicly identified. Gibbs was fired in 1980 by former headmaster Tony Zane, after multiple reports of inappropriate encounters with students; "regrettably, the school did not report misconduct by Gibbs to any state agency at the time," the report states. Gibbs was 86 when he died in 1996.

The school has forwarded information to Rhode Island State Police about six former employees and three former students who were reported to have sexually assaulted students. State Police Col. Steven O'Donnell said this week that an investigation, which was opened on Nov. 1, is in its early stages.

But since the story broke in The Boston Globe last month, two lawyers, Eric MacLeish and Carmen Durso, representing some of the victims, say they've identified at least 39 people with credible allegations of sexual abuse, with more stepping forward.

MacLeish and Durso are working with three of Gibbs' victims, Anne Scott and Katie Wales Lovkay, who both graduated in 1980, and Joan Reynolds, class of 1979, as well as multiple other victims. MacLeish, of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, law firm of Clark, Hunt, Ahern & Embry, represented hundreds of people in the Boston clergy abuse cases.

The women are not pursuing money or a lawsuit at this time; they want an independent investigation.

In an online petition for it, they criticize the school's hiring of Will Hannum as an "independent investigator" when he is a law partner of the school's legal counsel.

As of Thursday, nearly 700 people had signed, from Singapore and San Francisco, to Black Rock, Wisconsin, and Simon's Island, Georgia, from Westerly, Rhode Island, and South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Their comments register anger and anguish; some report abuse independent of the school's investigation. Some rue that they knew of the abuse, "and did nothing."

Many express the hope that the school can recover from the crisis and move forward. "The past and present failure in moral courage by SG's leadership is tragic; we can mitigate that tragedy by helping the victims and pushing for a change."

In a phone interview from Virginia, where she runs a nonprofit organization, Anne Scott said she was among the many people who cooperated with the school's investigation. "Only afterwards did we learn that the investigator (Hannum) was the law partner of school’s legal counsel ... This was not mentioned in Peterson's letter informing alumni about the investigation. We felt very betrayed as a result."

Scott added, "It's important that those investigations are independent, and look in a very thoughtful and reflective way at actions of school leadership."

The school defends hiring Hannum as a veteran investigator who "is regarded as an expert for his work in this area." It notes that Hannum's role "is strictly as a collector of information, and he has not, nor will he, provide any legal advice to the School."

MacLeish disagrees.

"We want the facts and the responsibility," he says. "The board report was a sanitized version of the truth. And did not state anything about the failures of the current school leadership, which will be documented in our full response," to be presented at a news conference on Tuesday.

"Over the last 10 days, we've gotten 33 telephone calls from victims," said MacLeish. " ... That's pretty remarkable, from victims. And we've gotten another 70 to 80 calls from witnesses and friends of victims and alumni.

"There are now four reports from students who were raped by other students"; in two of the cases the rapes "were public," he said. "We think that figure is going to be much higher. We've received commitments from three of them to cooperate with state police."

Noting that there is no statute of limitations on first-degree rape in Rhode Island, MacLeish added, "All we can say is we are going to completely cooperate, and then it's up to state authorities" to decide how to proceed.

Neither Peterson, the current headmaster, nor board chairwoman Heaney were available for comment this week. St. George's School has retained the firm of O'Neill and Associates of Boston and Washington to represent it, including handling media inquiries.

Andy Paven, the firm's senior vice president, said the school's investigation and report "was a conscious effort by the headmaster to not avoid the past and to try to grapple with it. This was a genuine attempt by the current leadership at St. George’s School to deal honestly and directly with its past, to learn what had happened and to do anything it could many years later to try to help."

Paven added, "Where the school is focused at this point is trying to help anyone who was hurt, while they were on campus."

Though the revelations only recently came to light, Scott and Katie Wales Lovkay said they tried to take action decades ago. They spoke with The Providence Journal about the damage wrought by their experiences with Gibbs.

"Mr. Gibbs was an athletic trainer ... I attended a few years after the school went co-ed," Scott said. "He had access to a locked training room, which was inside the boys’ locker room. He was able to bring girls in there and lock us in there without any adult supervision.

"What’s emerging, is that when girls got injured in sports — and I was one of those girls — we would be sent to see him, and that’s when he would begin to abuse us ... I was 14 or 15 at the time. I was raised to obey authority, so I was terrified and never told anybody about it."

"He raped me, and so I don't know how many girls were raped as well," she said. "In my case it went on for about 18 months to two years ... . I really kind of unraveled."

Scott brought a "Jane Doe" lawsuit in 1988, and says the school’s tactics then "were very very aggressive against my family, and I was not too strong at the time. I was hospitalized four or five times — for an eating disorder, anxiety, depression ... I said, 'I can’t do this anymore' — I actually dropped the case."

Back then, now-Rhode Island Supreme Court Justice William P. Robinson III was the school's legal counsel, Scott and MacLeish said. "He made a motion to have me use my name. We obtained the court documents. ... I was 15 and Gibbs was 67. That was the kind of arguments being used. I can’t tell you the pain and the damage that litigation strategy caused ... ," Scott said.

Robinson could not be reached for comment.

Scott eventually left the country, but recently re-connected with MacLeish, her original lawyer, who also attended St. George's. The two began to press the school on the issue.

"I’m a private person and I think, we tried for 9, 10 months to talk to the school leadership," Scott said. "I do feel that if I could have seen concrete actions through private means, it never would have gone public."

Lovkay, who now lives in Connecticut, said Thursday, "I've been fighting this since 1979, when I went to the headmaster [Mr. Zane] to tell him that Al Gibbs had taken nude pictures of me in the training room and then showed them to the boys.

"When I realized that, I went to Tony Zane about it and was persecuted ever since. He told me I was making it up, I was mentally unstable, and I should see the school psychiatrist," she said. "I did — and I realized the psychiatrist was reporting back (confidential information) to Tony Zane."

Zane, now in his 80s, declined comment when reached by phone in New Bedford on Wednesday.

Lovkay said she is heartened by the overwhelming response to the petition: "It's amazing how many people came forward — different teachers, different students ...

"The school went through 45 years of denying all this. Nothing was ever done to the perpetrators."

Durso, co-counsel with MacLeish, said Wednesday, "This is the most articulate group of survivors of abuse we’d ever seen, and the most articulate group that’s supporting them. It's the largest group of people who’ve spontaneously come forward to support them when they were not directly affected.

"I don’t think this would have happened 40 years ago. It says to me that we’re slowly getting people’s consciousness raised about sexual abuse; that the non-victims are able to feel this level of empathy for people who have been victimized this way. Maybe we're making some progress."

MacLeish and Durso said their law firms are acting as "triage points" for victims.

"Our focus has been on getting people treatment," MacLeish said.

To that end, they have retained Paul Zeizel, a psychologist who treated victims of the Boston Marathon bombing. "There are many alums right now who are crying out for help, and they’re not getting it."

Rhode Island State Police Col. Steven G. O'Donnell said that anyone with information about sexual assault at the school — whether to themselves or others — should contact state police Capt. Matthew Moynihan at (401) 444-1012.

With reports from Journal staff writer Mark Reynolds