NEW YORK
Slate

By Nora Caplan-Bricker

Fordham Preparatory School, a prestigious Jesuit boys’ school in the Bronx, has deemed a former student’s allegations that a teacher sexually abused him in 1984 “credible,” the New York Times reported Monday.

The assault took place shortly after graduation according to the former student, Michael Meenan, who says that he decided to spend the night at a house where he’d been celebrating with peers and awoke to find religious studies teacher Fernand Beck performing oral sex on him while he slept. Meenan says he reported the assault not long after it occurred with no apparent effect.

He was inspired to do so again, at least in part, by some of the real-life people behind the Academy Award-winning movie Spotlight—and by the conversation about sexual abuse that the movie, about the Boston Globe’s early 2000s exposé of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests,…