NEW HAMPSHIRE
Boston Globe
By Jenn Abelson GLOBE STAFF SEPTEMBER 07, 2016
Years before the school minister at Phillips Exeter Academy encouraged a student to bake bread as an act of penance for allegedly groping another student, the Rev. Robert H. Thompson played a questionable role in two other sexual assault cases at the New Hampshire boarding school, according to a former student and a former faculty member.
Thompson wrote a favorable review in 1993 for an advisee who had molested another student at Exeter and “misused his authority as the faculty advisor and school minister” to delay the student from getting kicked off campus, according to a letter written at the time by former assistant school minister Carl Lindemann to school leaders.
Less than two years later, Thompson and his wife, Nadine, who worked as Exeter’s dean of multicultural affairs, allowed a boy who had confessed to sexually assaulting five students within a few hours to stay the night in their faculty apartment and the school didn’t call police until two days later, according to a February 1995 article in The Exeter News-Letter. One victim, Julia Callahan, told the Globe that Nadine Thompson asked her the night of the attack to accept an apology from the troubled teenager who was visiting from New York.
Now, two decades later, in the wake of a Spotlight Team report, Phillips Exeter placed Thompson on administrative leave and prohibited him from talking to the media after disclosures in July on a 2015 sexual assault case, according to Nadine Thompson, who no longer works at the school. The minister came under scrutiny for brokering a deal in which the alleged victim received weekly bread deliveries from the student athlete who allegedly groped her in the church basement.
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