MINNESOTA
Washington Post
He was abused by a female teacher, but he was treated like the perpetrator
By Simone Sebastian January 9
Simone Sebastian is an assistant editor of Outlook.
Cameron Clarkson was a 16-year-old football player when he suddenly landed in the middle of a sex crime investigation at his St. Paul, Minn., high school. Lawyers grilled him on the details of his sexual history. School officials, in a statement to the press, cited him for not invoking the school’s sexual harassment policy and said he “bragged to fellow students about what had happened.” His car was vandalized with red-dyed tampons and smeared with peanut butter, to which he is fatally allergic, by an unknown assailant. The shape of a penis was burned into his front lawn with bleach.
“People kept reminding me that I ruined that poor girl’s life,” Clarkson says.
The “poor girl” was a teacher at his school. Gail Gagne, a 25-year-old basketball and lacrosse coach, was a full-time substitute teacher at Cretin-Derham Hall High School and a couple of months away from becoming a regular physical education instructor. One day, she offered to give Clarkson a ride home after he left the school gym, leading to what he describes as the first of a series of sexual encounters between them in 2008 — in Gagne’s car, in their homes, in hotels. He says their relationship ended two months later; another student told school officials about it the next spring.
Gagne was fired and charged with two felony counts of criminal sexual conduct with a student. But in the investigations that followed, Clarkson was treated more like the perpetrator than the victim. Gagne, meanwhile, faced an easier path in some ways. She denied any sexual contact with Clarkson but entered an Alford plea, in which a defendant does not admit guilt but recognizes that prosecutors have enough evidence to convict her. The deal reduced her charges to a fifth-degree gross misdemeanor with a one-year sentence, which was suspended — a far lighter punishment than the possible four-year prison sentence for the felony charges she faced. (Gagne’s lawyer still says there was no sexual contact.)
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