Teacher Out at Fordham Prep After School Says ’84 Sexual Abuse Claim Is Credible

By Colin Moynihan
New York Times
August 08, 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/nyregion/teacher-out-at-fordham-prep-after-school-says-84-sexual-abuse-claim-is-credible.html

The gathering, in June 1984, was like many others involving recent graduates of Fordham Preparatory School, a Jesuit all-boys secondary school in the Bronx. It took place at a home in Westchester County, where many of Fordham’s students lived. Most of those at the party drank and several ended up spending the night, according to a former Fordham Prep student, Michael Meenan.

That night, Mr. Meenan said, a Fordham Prep teacher who had driven him to the party performed oral sex on him while he slept in a room along with others. When he woke up and pulled away, sliding beneath a coffee table, Mr. Meenan said, the teacher grabbed his leg and tried to drag him back.

Mr. Meenan said that he had told the school’s headmaster about the episode not long after it happened, but that it appeared no action was taken. The teacher remained on the faculty.

Now, 32 years after the episode, Fordham Prep has acknowledged Mr. Meenan’s account of abuse as credible and said the teacher he accused would not return to the school.

“We received an allegation from a Fordham Prep alumnus of the class of 1984 that religious studies teacher, Mr. Fernand Beck, sexually molested him shortly after he graduated,” the school’s president, the Rev. Christopher J. Devron. wrote in a letter dated Aug. 5. “While Mr. Beck has denied this allegation, an investigation led by an independent counsel retained by Fordham Prep determined that the allegation is credible.”

Mr. Beck could not be reached for comment on Monday. Although Father Devron did not identify the person who had lodged the complaint, Mr. Meenan said that it was him and that he had also recently reported the 1984 episode to the Westchester County district attorney’s office. (This reporter also attended Fordham Prep during the same period but did not then know Mr. Meenan or have classes with Mr. Beck.)

“What Beck did was criminal,” Mr. Meenan said during a recent telephone interview. “The school should have fired him long ago and he should have gone to prison.”

After having been initially rebuffed, he recently approached Fordham Prep with the encouragement of a former classmate, Neal Huff, who played an abuse survivor in the Academy Award-winning movie “Spotlight,” which chronicled The Boston Globe’s investigation of sexual abuse by priests and its cover-up by the Boston archdiocese.

Mr. Huff introduced Mr. Meenan to Mitchell Garabedian, a lawyer in Boston who had represented some of the victims there.

Mr. Garabedian said that he contacted Fordham Prep in March and that lawyers for the school had interviewed Mr. Meenan in June. Although it is too late to file a lawsuit, he said he planned to ask whether the school would “do the right thing” and compensate his client for the pain he had suffered.

“Fernand Beck groomed the victim for months by gaining his trust, socializing with him and giving him alcohol before sexually assaulting him,” Mr. Garabedian said.

Over the past several years, multiple accusations of sexual abuse have surfaced at private schools, including Horace Mann in the Bronx and Poly Prep in Brooklyn, which have both acknowledged past abuses. The Globe recently detailed at least 90 claims around 67 schools in New England.

Mr. Meenan, who served as class president, went on to Brown University and later worked as an educator and a journalist. He said he first reported the assault in fall 1984 when he visited the school while on a break. At that time, Mr. Meenan said, he told the headmaster, Neil McCarthy, that Mr. Beck, a widely admired teacher, had assaulted him.

Dr. McCarthy told him that he would address the issue, Mr. Meenan said, but also asked him if he was a “faggot.”

Mr. Huff and another classmate, Brian Kennedy, said they remembered Mr. Meenan telling them in 1984 that Mr. Beck had assaulted him. Mr. Huff said Mr. Meenan had also told him about his exchange with Dr. McCarthy.

Dr. McCarthy, who is no longer at the school, said in a telephone interview that he did not remember Mr. Meenan but strongly denied that he would have brushed off an accusation of sexual abuse.

“I can assure you that I never ignored that kind of behavior and I never called anybody a faggot,” he said. “That word is not in my vocabulary.”

In a written statement, Father Devron said that after hearing Mr. Meenan’s accusations this year the school arranged for an investigation by the law firm and suspended Mr. Beck. The school would not say whether Mr. Beck was fired or resigned.

“Other than the complaint received in April 2016, investigators found no other recorded complaints against Mr. Beck in his 47 years at Fordham Prep,” Father Devron wrote, adding, “We treat seriously any allegation of harm against any student, whether present or past.”

In the years following the episode, Mr. Beck remained at Fordham Prep, where he presented himself as a cultured figure with a sly, almost subversive, sense of humor. He also cultivated relationships that extended beyond the campus, former students said, inviting some to his home in Riverdale and arranging outings in his Volkswagen van that sometimes included drinking.

One such student, Terry McKiernan, who graduated from Fordham Prep in 1971, said he had visited Mr. Beck’s house and had accompanied him on outings that involved drinking. Mr. McKiernan, a director of the website Bishopaccountability.org, which documents abuse by priests, said he experienced a moment of unease when they visited a water-filled quarry in Tuckahoe, N.Y., and the teacher urged him to swim naked. When Mr. McKiernan declined, he said, Mr. Beck became irritated.

Although some of Mr. Beck’s behavior was clearly wrong, Mr. McKiernan said, the teacher was also capable of kindness and had helped him move on from a life at home that was often troubled.

“Generally, despite the underage drinking and the experience at the quarry, Beck was a net positive influence in my life,” Mr. McKiernan said in an interview.

But Mr. Meenan said Mr. Beck’s influence was corrosive. After college, Mr. Meenan worked as a dean at a public school in the Bronx, as an education reporter for the cable news channel NY1 and as a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. (He also was an occasional contributor to The New York Times’s City Room blog.) Despite those accomplishments, he said, his life had periods of chaos. At times, he said, he had nightmares about being raped. At other points, he said, he became depressed and had difficulty paying electrical bills or putting food on the table.

“There have been very vigorous psychiatric consultations that have focused me on the damage that sexual abuse has created in my life,” Mr. Meenan said.

He said Mr. Beck began extending invitations to meet outside of school during his senior year. At the time he was taking a religion class taught by Mr. Beck that required students to submit weekly essays. Mr. Meenan said he began writing about a romantic attachment to a fellow student, and believes now that Mr. Beck read in those essays signs of vulnerability that he set out to exploit.

Mr. Meenan said he visited Mr. Beck’s home and often rode in the van with him. Almost always, he added, Mr. Beck provided alcohol. On one occasion, Mr. Meenan said, he and another student drove with Mr. Beck to a desolate area near a railroad station in Spuyten Duyvil and drank together.

All of those outings, Mr. Meenan said he believed, were meant to pave the way for an eventual assault. He added that he is convinced that Mr. Beck chose the night of the party because the school year had just ended.

“He would not have any more chances to do what he had certainly been planning for a long time,” he said. “Everything he did, from the trips to the drinking to the ultimate assault was very calculated.”