RHODE ISLAND
Vanity Fair
Yet another elite New England prep school is plagued by scandal—this time the picturesque seaside campus of St. George’s, which has only recently confronted a largely concealed, decades-long history of sexual abuse by predatory teachers, staff, and students. Benjamin Wallace interviews survivors, parents, and the headmaster to see how its search for healing brought fresh anguish.
BY BENJAMIN WALLACE
AUGUST 2016
High-school reunions are fraught occasions under the best of circumstances. Hairlines and waistlines are appraised, marriages and careers compared, insecurities awoken, changes in status noted, old wounds poked: normally solid citizens regress to their adolescent selves.
Then there are the worst of circumstances. Since December, when it broke into the open with a Boston Globe article and a televised press conference, St. George’s, an elite boarding school in Rhode Island, has been engulfed by a scandal over alleged sexual abuse spanning decades, with at least 40 alleged victims and a dozen alleged staff and student perpetrators. In this, St. George’s is only one among a snowballing list of prominent prep schools recently shaken by accusations of abuse, as one after another is forced to reckon with a shameful past. They include Groton, Horace Mann, Deerfield, St. Paul’s, Hotchkiss, Pomfret, Pingry, and Exeter. “Elite boarding schools turn out an outsize number of societal leaders,” says Whit Sheppard, a Deerfield graduate who has written about being a victim of abuse there and now advises schools on handling similar crises (including, for a short time, St. George’s). “This is the part of the story that no one wanted to talk about.”
Now they are being forced to talk about it. Across the archipelago of prep schools clustered mainly in the northeastern United States, a truth-and-reconciliation process is fitfully unfolding as school after school sends letters to alumni acknowledging past abuse and asking if they, too, were abused. At St. George’s, the process has been especially tumultuous, with a vocal, mobilized contingent of alumni calling for the headmaster to resign amid a polarized atmosphere of mistrust. As the school’s annual reunion weekend approached in May, all-out bedlam threatened to erupt.
In a private Facebook group, various St. George’s alumni put forward suggestions to hold “actions,” perhaps cordoning off locations where abuse had taken place with yellow police tape. One alumna proposed bringing a gun and burning the place down, upsetting fellow graduates; the alumna said she’d been joking. There was further talk of chaining themselves to the school’s front gates. After headmaster Eric Peterson sent a letter to alumni in April announcing that the school would hold a “Hope for Healing” event during reunion weekend to acknowledge the abuse that had taken place at the school, some survivors reacted angrily that Peterson hadn’t consulted with them beforehand. Two days later, the school backtracked and sent out another letter. This one, signed by board chairman Leslie Bathgate Heaney, said the event would no longer be held and that the school would consult with survivors about jointly organizing an alternative event.
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