MASSACHUSETTS
Daily Hampshire Gazette
By BERA DUNAU
@BeraDunau
Saturday, April 07, 2018
SOUTH HADLEY — In a move inspired by an Oscar-winning film, a Manhattan woman has paid for messages on three billboards — including one in Chicopee off the Massachusetts Turnpike — to draw attention to a South Hadley man she claims sexually abused her while she was a student at a boarding school years ago in New York.
On the billboards, Katherine “Kat” Sullivan, 38, a pediatric nurse, also calls for changes in New York state’s child sexual abuse laws.
As a condition of her contract with the billboard company, the digital messages do not name or depict the man, and his name is not mentioned on the website it directs people to visit.
In an interview, however, Sullivan identified the man as Scott Sargent, who taught at the all-girls Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, while she was a student there in the late 1990s. Until recently, Sargent served on the South Hadley Historical Commission.
Sargent also is named in a 127-page report commissioned by the school in 2017, following an investigation by the Boston Globe of sexual abuse at Emma Willard and other preparatory schools. The report states that Sargent was asked to leave the school due to an “inappropriate” relationship he had with a student. Though Sullivan is not named, she said that she is the “complainant” referred to in a lengthy section of the document that concerns Sargent.
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