Decades of Harm: New York Schools Named in Nearly 2,000 Child Sex Abuse Claims

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This article was co-published with The 74, a nonprofit news outlet covering education in the US.

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Warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of child sexual abuse.

Going to high school in Dutchess County, New York, in the 1960s, there was no late bus. For one star athlete at Our Lady of Lourdes High School, that meant regularly hitchhiking the 25 miles between school and home after practice.

It was during those lonely treks, he said, that his new coach and gym teacher, Vincent Dutkowski, would stalk him in his car, offering to give him a ride, trying to coax him back to his apartment. By this point, Dutkowski had already sexually molested him multiple times, he said, grabbing his buttocks and his testicles in pickup basketball games in the school gym, plucking out his pubic hair. A few times, when he was alone with Dutkowski in his office, the coach would pull down his gym shorts and his jock strap and fondle him.

“I’d be walking down Market Street in Poughkeepsie and he’d pull up next to me,” the man, in his 70s, told The 74 in March, asking not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of his story. “He called me Irish. ‘Irish. Get in the car.’ And I’m a 17-year-old kid trying to maintain my varsity status, starting status, and he’s the coach. Also he is — was — 6’3”, 240 pounds. At the time, I’m barely 6 feet and 160. So he’s a huge man.”

Once trapped in the car, he said, Dutkowski’s hands were everywhere, groping his genitals through his clothes and “talking all sorts of really filthy sexual talk.” The young athlete started altering his route home, taking different downtown streets so his coach wouldn’t find him. But sometimes he did.

The last ride he took, he said, Dutkowski turned left toward his own apartment instead of right toward the bridge and flipped open his coat to expose his penis. The student yelled at the 36-year-old man to stop the car and let him out and he scrambled away.

After that, he said Dutkowski benched him, even though it was his senior year and he had started every game of his high school career. He was humiliated and couldn’t understand why no other adult ever asked him what happened. When he tried to quit the basketball team, he said, the coach told him he wasn’t going to play him but if he stayed, “I’ll leave you alone and you can pitch (baseball) in the spring time—and we keep this between the two of us.”

That’s where it sat for 39 years until the alleged victim, by then a successful lawyer and civil litigator, decided to confront it. He said he deposed himself for two hours on videotape and sent a verified statement to the Archdiocese of New York and Our Lady of Lourdes. It was 2004 and he got a letter back from the archdiocese’s general counsel telling him the statute of limitations had run out on his complaint.

It was too late.

An ‘insane’ number of cases

In 2019, New York state passed the Child Victims Act, which allowed any living survivor of childhood sexual abuse to bring a civil case during a two-year lookback window and permanently extended the statute of limitations from age 23 to 55 for future civil cases.

That opening resulted in 10,787 cases being filed by 14,592 plaintiffs. Among them is the former Our Lady of Lourdes student, one of at least five who named Coach Dutkowski, a convicted sex offender who died in 2012 at age 83, as their abuser.

Elements of the complaints against Dutkowski—an alleged serial predator who moved among schools, using his power and authority to coerce and silence his victims—run throughout the Child Victims Act cases. To understand the full scope of the role schools played in those nearly 11,000 lawsuits, The 74 searched all 62 New York counties and combed through thousands of court documents, identifying at least 1,973 complaints that accuse a school, educator or other district personnel.

That means that more than 18 percent of all the New York state cases—or nearly 1 in 5—attest that a child was sexually abused, assaulted or raped by an adult who had access to them through their school.

In many counties, that share was even higher: In Suffolk County, for example, 36 percent of all cases involved schools and in the Bronx, nearly 40 percent. And in Franklin County, on New York’s far northern border, survivors in an overwhelming 75 percent of the CVA cases filed accused school employees of abuse.

The numbers from The 74’s analysis are considerably higher than the 13.4 percent of cases attributed to K-12 schools in a more narrowly focused review of the New York Child Victims Act cases done by the advocacy organization Child USA. They also provide greater context to the frequently cited estimate that 1 in 10 K-12 students will be subject to sexual misconduct by an adult by the time they graduate, according to and mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act.

“That’s an insane number for one period of time where a window was open,” said Kathryn Robb, director of the Children’s Justice Campaign at the advocacy organization Enough Abuse. “And how many possibly couldn’t file after the window had closed.”

Robb, who spent over a decade helping to draft and pass the New York bill, added that because so few survivors ultimately report their abuse, the tally of school-based complaints is likely a significant undercount. But the number who did come forward, she said, “allows a justified alarm to be sound[ed] for both the public—parents, grandparents, people, guardians—and also our lawmakers and leaders.”

The 74’s investigation reveals the sheer magnitude of cases involving New York educators although the vast majority of teachers, administrators and school personnel do not sexually harm the children in their care. At the same time, the cases present a rare level of visibility for the former students whose pain and trauma went unrecognized when they were young.

By delving into scores of cases, The 74 was also able to glean what it is about schools themselves—their physical structure, their institutional practices, the dynamics among the adults who work there—that contributes to children being preyed upon, year after year and decade after decade, in a place where they are legally required to be.

The alleged abusers in these cases held an array of roles across all types of schools—public, private, residential and religious. The accused were classroom and special education teachers, bus drivers, school psychologists, priests, maintenance workers, coaches, principals, school doctors and occupational therapists. Victims ranged from pre-schoolers in a special needs program in New York’s Catskill Mountains to high schoolers in a drama class on Long Island.

In the most egregious cases, alleged perpetrators assaulted students for decades, amassing hundreds of victims. Multiple teachers were credibly accused of sexual abuse in one school, and then permitted to quietly move on to a new one.

The abuse detailed in the complaints spanned nearly 70 years, with some reported incidents dating as far back as the 1950s and others as recently as 2018. In many cases, school leaders had reportedly been told of previous or ongoing abuse and turned a blind eye, allowing it to continue unchecked, The 74 found.

Numerous students alleged their teachers facilitated their abuse by allowing their adult perpetrators to regularly pull them out of class and take them to a private office, empty classroom or other secluded area in the school where they were sexually assaulted.

Complaint after complaint describes how the physical abuse came after periods of
grooming, some that lasted years. This included encouraging students to stay back after school for extra help, offering rides home and finding ways to get enmeshed in young people’s personal relationships. “He crawled into your life. He got complete trust,” one survivor told The 74 of his alleged abuser.

In extreme cases, the students either babysat for or lived with their abusive teacher or principal.

All the complaints state that the victims suffered lasting harm from what they endured as children. A key underpinning of the Child Victims Act is that those who are subjected to sexual abuse at a young age are often unable to speak of it publicly until well into adulthood and long after the civil statute of limitations would have lapsed.

“The number one (pattern) is that they all feel it was their fault. That they feel guilt. That they feel that they caused this. They feel they can’t trust anyone in authority,” said attorney Cynthia LaFave, who is handling some 470 Child Victims Act cases in partnership with the firm Jeff Anderson & Associates. “It has given them so much depression, anxiety. A lot of them now have substance abuse disorders because that’s their way of escaping it.”

The former Our Lady of Lourdes student, a grandfather of five, passed away in late August without seeing his case resolved. He told The 74 earlier this year, that he had yet to share what happened to him in high school with his adult sons, and the way he told his wife was to have her watch his self-made deposition. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and traced addiction issues he developed in his 40s to his teenage years.

“Somewhere along there, towards the 1990s, I became an alcoholic and that affects your marriage, your kids and my job,” he said. “(The abuse) was the impetus. If I was on the edge of a cliff, genetically or whatever, those events pushed me off to become an alcoholic.”

The New York archdiocese declined to comment on the allegations against Our Lady of Lourdes or Dutkowski. The coach’s accuser did note that the church offered to pay for therapy sessions after he first notified them of his complaint in 2004.

At least have passed similar lookback windows or age limit revival laws for child sexual abuse claims in the last 20 years, including California and West Virginia. But New York, which is now looking to strengthen its laws against school-based child sexual abuse, has produced by far the greatest number of cases. Seven years later, the vast majority still await resolution.

Of the 10,787 CVA cases filed in New York courts, roughly 8,000 had progressed beyond the initial filing as of February 2026. Of those, just under 3,000 had been settled or otherwise disposed of, leaving nearly 63 percent still pending, according to The 74’s analysis of public records obtained from the New York State Office of Court Administration. That means victims, who may now be in their 60s or 70s and have waited most of their lives to seek justice, are still waiting.

Marci Hamilton, a University of Pennsylvania professor and Child USA’s founder, sees great value in the civil cases. They get at not just the alleged perpetrator, she said, but the institutions, like schools, that protect the abuser and their own reputations. That creates an opportunity to change a deep-seated culture of secrecy and self-preservation.

“What we’re trying to do with these windows is catch up: catch up to all those victims that were abused and were given no access to justice,” she said. “But the real goal is to make sure it doesn’t happen again, so that we’re not just seeing a wave of thousands of lawsuits, (one) after another.”

‘Where’s the justice?’

James Marsh is a leading attorney in child sex abuse cases whose clients include survivors of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. His Manhattan-based Marsh Law Firm has represented roughly 1,000 of the Child Victims Act plaintiffs.

“The fact that there were so many cases in so many different places really illustrates the scope of this problem, both historically and ongoing,” Marsh told The 74, referring specifically to school-based abuse. “This is a problem that has not gone away.”

In July, the Trump administration launched what it called “a national K-12 initiative to crack down on sexual predators in schools,” citing instances where schools failed to investigate credible reports of abuse or allowed accused perpetrators to change roles or transfer schools. The administration, which recently gutted the office within the U.S. Department of Education that investigates sexual abuse claims, said it was targeting 20 districts it suspected of falling short. None are in New York.

The 1,973 CVA cases involving New York schools were spread over 54 counties with the largest number in Manhattan, or New York County, with 345; the Bronx with 256 and Brooklyn, or Kings County, with 227.

When looking at all the CVA cases, the highest volume can be found in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Nassau counties. Those places also have among the most cases that were still unresolved. Nearly 80 percent of all complaints that were at one point active in Brooklyn were still pending, as were 79 percent of those in Manhattan and three-quarters of those in the Bronx, according to The 74’s analysis.

The exception is Nassau County on Long Island where the courts have cleared more cases than anywhere else in the state, resolving 606 of 681 cases, leaving just 11 percent still pending. Over 100 of the Child Victims Act cases brought in Nassau name schools.

Attorneys and advocates say the long delays are due to a backlog created by the pandemic, a dearth of judges, battles between defendants and their insurance companies over who is liable for payment and an otherwise overwhelmed court system.

That’s of little comfort to Bob Druger, who first filed his case against the Syracuse City School District in 2019, alleging years of abuse by a counselor and track coach nearly 40 years earlier. Over the past seven years, he said, his case has dragged on, cycling through numerous judges.

He gave the first part of his own deposition—a grueling process for many survivors—two years ago, and is still waiting to complete that critical pre-trial step.

“I’m so disappointed in the legal system,” he said. “They made these laws to get some kind of justice—whatever that is—but where’s the justice?”

Druger’s case is one of 26 school-based complaints filed under the Child Victims Act in Central New York’s Onondaga County. Of the 163 total number of cases that had moved forward there by February 2026, 74 percent remained outstanding.

Serial predators and serially abusive schools

Of the school-based abuse cases, 1,003 involve public schools, 179 nonsectarian private schools and 791 religious institutions. The last category is dominated by Catholic schools, which account for 724 of those complaints. Twenty-three accuse Protestant schools and 44 name Jewish schools.

One man alone figures in at least 64 of the Catholic school cases, all of them filed against Our Lady of Mount Carmel School in the Bronx. Rudy Tremaroli first ran a church- and school-affiliated community center in the 1960s and then moved over to Mount Carmel school where he was given a private office and worked as a janitor and basketball coach.

Tremaroli is accused of abusing hundreds of children over three decades. Several of the CVA complaints describe him as “one of the most prolific pedophiles in the history of the Archdiocese of New York.”

Other court documents recount: “In the middle to late 1980s, in an effort to convince a victim that his repeated sexual assaults were appropriate, Tremaroli bragged that he had seen the penises of most of the male students at Our Lady of Mount Carmel School for the past thirty (30) years.”

In his various roles, he would allegedly befriend and groom students who were using the gym before and after school and on weekends, ask them about their interest in girls, isolate them from their peers and sexually assault and abuse them. The abuse ranged from groping and kissing to forcing children to perform oral sex and sodomizing them with a cigar holder, a sports trophy and a screwdriver handle, according to court records. It took place on school and church grounds, at the community center and at Tremaroli’s home.

He also forced his victims to pose for naked photos, creating a substantial collection of child pornography, which the complaints allege church officials removed from Tremaroli’s apartment after his death. He was later accused of distributing the images to Mount Carmel’s principal, James Irwin, who allegedly helped Tremaroli photograph his victims. In the CVA cases, Irwin is accused of sexually assaulting one of his students, a second grader in 1991. He was arrested in a separate sting operation in 2000 in Westchester County and criminally charged with seven felony counts of promoting an obscene sexual performance
by a child. He later pleaded guilty, according to court records.

Court documents allege that both the school and the New York archdiocese were aware of Tremaroli’s ongoing abuse, yet they did nothing to stop it. The complaints say Tremaroli’s “reign of terror” did not end until his death in 1992. Lawyers for Mount Carmel and the archdiocese denied any wrongdoing in their court filings.

The archdiocese declined to comment on the Tremaroli cases for this story. The sprawling entity, which encompasses Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island and seven counties north of New York City, in May offered to pay $800 million to settle claims filed by 1,300 survivors under the Child Victims Act.

Accused serial abusers like Tremaroli can be found across all types of schools in the CVA cases. According to court records, they include:

• Arthur Werner, a fifth-grade teacher in Erie County’s Kenmore-Town of Tonawanda Union Free School District, who was named in 35 Child Victim Acts cases, accusing him of sexually abusing dozens of boys from 1962 until 1992. Werner’s behavior was allegedly so bold that his 11- and 12-year-old victims said they and their classmates had to “regularly and repeatedly” watch as he assaulted boys in the classroom. At least one survivor recounted another teacher walking into the room, seeing him being fondled by Werner and walking out. Without the benefit of insurance money, the district paid $17.5 million to settle the cases in 2022, borrowing $10 million of that sum. It acknowledged that the alleged misconduct by Werner, who died last year at age 91, “is reprehensible — both now and back then.” They said multiple administrators from 30 years ago testified that if they had known about their colleague’s alleged abuse, they would have acted. A district spokesperson told The 74 no witnesses could identify evidence that the district was notified about Werner’s alleged misconduct prior to the CVA lawsuits being filed and it was a “business decision” to settle given the “extreme costs” of facing 35 separate trials. Chris O’Brien, the plaintiffs’ attorney, said a former PTA mom gave a sworn deposition where she recounted telling Werner’s principal around 1973-74 that the teacher had molested her 11-year-old son and being assured by him that it wouldn’t happen again. The principal died in 2015, according to The Buffalo News.
• Vincent Festa a child psychologist at a New Hyde Park middle and high school on Long Island whose sexual behavior toward students was so blatant that both kids and teachers openly referred to him as “Festa the Molester.” More than 20 former male students brought cases naming Festa and the Herricks Union Free School District and multiple complaints assert that in 1978, ’79 and ’81, students and parents separately reported sexual abuse and assault by Festa to school administrators, but nothing was done. Festa remained in his job for a dozen years,
  allegedly abusing multiple students, until his 1993 arrest and indictment in
  separate case involving 11 child sex-abuse charges. Festa, who died in 2011, pleaded guilty to three counts of sodomy. The district, which denied any wrongdoing in court filings, declined to comment on the Child Victims Act allegations.
• Thomas Bernagozzi, a third-grade teacher, was the subject of 44 complaints filed against him in Islip’s Bay Shore Union Free School District. Bernagozzi is accused of abusing male students in the classroom and when he would take them on outings to baseball games, local beaches and Broadway shows. In February, he was convicted in a separate criminal case of sexually assaulting three former students, with the Suffolk County district attorney describing him as “one of the most prolific serial pedophiles of our time.” In May, the 77-year-old Bernagozzi was sentenced to 33 ⅓ to 50 years in prison. As of January 2025, the Bay Shore district had paid out just over $55 million to settle 17 of the CVA cases naming the former longtime teacher. It has since settled an additional 24 cases for an undisclosed amount, according to the plaintiffs’ attorneys. A case that went to trial resulted in a $25 million verdict against the district in November 2024. In March 2025, a judge threw out that award; his ruling is currently being appealed.

Bernagozzi is one of a number of predatory teachers accused of leveraging his charisma and connections to garner a reputation among families as “the teacher to get,” as one victim, L.J., recently described him to The 74.

L.J., who had Bernagozzi as a teacher in the mid-1980s, requested to be identified only by his initials, saying his children don’t know what happened to him as a boy. L.J. recalled his initial excitement to learn he’d be in Bernagozzi’s third-grade class and “very quickly (being) made the teacher’s pet.” His seat was at the front of the room—directly in front of Bernagozzi, sometimes even sitting on his lap—and he gained special privileges not bestowed on other students.

Swiftly smaller boundary crossings escalated into full-blown sexual abuse, he said, both in the school building and on outings Bernagozzi would plan for L.J. and other boys. He would also put on plays that required the boys in his class to wear tights, and “during lunch break or after school he would put the tights on you,” L.J. said. “He kept baby powder with him. So he powdered you up, skin-to-skin, and let his fingers go wherever.”

After one particularly traumatizing encounter, L.J. said he reported the abuse to his mom, who promptly went to the school to confront both the principal and Bernagozzi. L.J.’s mom gave a sworn deposition and also testified about those conversations with Bernagozzi and
the principal, who is now deceased, at a 2024 civil trial brought by another Child Victims Act plaintiff against Bay Shore schools.

After his mother took action, L.J. said the physical abuse stopped immediately, but
Bernagozzi was not fired and he had to remain in the man’s class for the rest of the year. The report also came at a cost: He said Bernagozzi cornered him in a hallway, grabbed him and “put the fear of God into me,” asking, “What did you say? Who did you tell?” His doting affection disappeared.

“I was no longer the fair child I was earlier. I was moved away from his desk. No attention,” he said. “It went from having access to a candy drawer and marking your own papers to being completely ignored and isolated.”

L.J.’s reaction to this shift as a small boy has led to lasting shame and confusion: “I almost craved his attention—all the attention, whether it be the abuse and everything else—when he shunned me. I would try to rub his back and all this stuff. That fucked me up for a while, just in my own head,” said the now-lawyer, who recalls decades spent self-sabotaging and questioning his worth.

Today, he describes his school’s action as “the exact playbook of what not to do,” saying it facilitated and enabled not only his abuse, but that of dozens of other boys.

“I swear to God, I still am getting chills right now, that there were multiple victims after me—after they knew,” he said. “And then I found out that other people before me had told them, and some teachers or (the) principal had said something. And that, to me, is evil.”

Neither the Bay Shore school district nor its attorney responded to requests for comment.

Bernagozzi’s criminal attorney, Steve Politi, told The 74 that his client “vehemently denies ever doing anything sexually inappropriate to anyone ever. So that covers anyone who is saying anything from any time period…That includes males, females, adults, children, everyone. He’s never done that in his whole life.”

When asked about Bernagozzi’s recent conviction on five charges, including sodomy and sexual conduct against a child, Politi said “an appeal will be starting immediately,” because the trial was “unfair.” He said his client was deprived of his right to a fair trial, including “a distortion of the evidence and horrific rulings by the court.”

The Child Victims Act cases reveal instances where a single individual, like Bernagozzi, is at the center of the alleged sexual abuse for many years and others where the alleged abusers change over time, but the school remains the constant factor across decades.

This is especially true of residential schools where the abuse seems endemic to the institutions where it allegedly occurred. The 74 found over 200 CVA cases filed against residential treatment centers and facilities. These plaintiffs, sent there as children by social services, Family Court or their home districts to live and attend school, were highly vulnerable. Many were already traumatized, dealing with various disabilities or mental illnesses, while the adults who worked there had full control over their young lives.

These cases include:

• McQuade Children’s Services, founded in 1862 as a boarding school for troubled children, operated a therapeutic residence and a special education school on its New Windsor campus until it was shut down by the state Education Department in 2009. The state found an ongoing host of safety and educational violations that it deemed “clear and present dangers.” In 2007, the institution came under fire when two female staffers were arrested on charges of raping two 16-year-old male students. One of the women pleaded guilty to statutory rape and was sentenced to three months in jail, while the other was convicted of endangering the welfare of a child and sentenced to a year in jail. While the CVA complaints maintain such alleged acts were part of a decades-long pattern, McQuade’s then-CEO told a local newspaper he thought it was the first incident of its kind in the school’s 145-year history. McQuade has since been named in at least 11 Child Victims Act cases with allegations of sexual abuse involving multiple staffers spanning from the 1960s to the 1990s.
• The LaSalle School, founded in 1854 by the De La Salle Christian Brothers as a place for “orphaned and abandoned boys,” is named in at least 34 complaints that spanned from 1950 to 2010. The victims, who ranged in age from 8 to 18, were sent to the Albany therapeutic residence and school by the courts as an alternative to juvenile detention or by social service agencies. Their alleged abusers were both male and female and comprised religious and lay staff members, including priests, brothers, counselors, teachers, adult head dorm prefects, a teacher’s aide and a coach. One became a trustee of the school and another was honored with a memorial service at LaSalle after his death in 2007. The school bills itself as offering “specialized treatment” for families and youth dealing with trauma, including sexual abuse.
• The Children’s Village, located on 180 acres in Westchester County, was founded in 1851 as the New York Juvenile Asylum to provide residential care to orphans and “delinquents.” It moved to a farm in Dobbs Ferry in 1901 where a state special act public school district was created to educate its at-risk, all-male population. Children’s Village is named in at least 52 CVA complaints, spanning from 1965 to 2009. The cases allege ingrained patterns of sexual assault and rape, where younger, weaker boys were preyed upon both by older students and adult staff in a ritual called “plucking.” Many of the complaints attest that the victims told adult employees — counselors and teachers, among others — about the attacks, but that nothing was done. In at least one instance, a victim says he sought protection from an adult, who then started sexually abusing him as well. One lawyer whose client arrived at Children’s Village in 1987 at age 6 describes the abuse he allegedly suffered there as occurring at “a stunning scale over a period that amounted to pure torture.”

Neither Children’s Village nor its attorney nor the lawyer representing McQuade Children’s Services responded to requests for comment. St. Christopher’s, Inc., which also operated a residential treatment center and school in Westchester, took over McQuade and then filed for bankruptcy in 2024 in the face of multiple Child Victims Act cases. Children’s Village, which contracts with the Office of Refugee Resettlement to house and care for unaccompanied minors, is also now under federal investigation for alleged mistreatment and physical abuse of these young people.

A LaSalle spokesperson pushed back against any assertion that students placed in its residential school were particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse, saying throughout its 172-year history LaSalle “has not wavered from its core values and role as a refuge for troubled youth. It has offered care and support to tens of thousands of young people. It is well-known and respected in both local and national circles for its program and treatment of youth suffering from childhood trauma.”

He said the school did not become aware of any sexual assault allegations against its employees—including the staffer who went on to become a trustee or the one who had their memorial service at the school—until the CVA cases were filed many years later.

Amos Guiora is a law professor at the University of Utah and director of the Bystander Initiative, which works to criminalize bystanders and enablers of abuse. He argues that in not directly responding to these alleged violations, schools and their employees actively empower those who do harm.

“If we don’t address the ecosystem of enabling, not a damn thing will change,” he said. “The teachers know they can get away with it, because they know the school’s prioritization is not the child, but the school. The perpetrator is the indirect beneficiary.”

Hamilton, of UPenn and Child USA, sees far-reaching reverberations when institutions place the adult first.

“When someone is identified, you’re potentially protecting 100 children,” she said. “So it’s not just this one important adult, it’s all the children—in the past, present and future.”

‘Grooming is a process, not an act’

In the fall of 1980, a Syracuse University graduate student named Conrad Mainwaring started coaching and counseling students at the local high school, a quick seven-minute drive from campus, according to court records.

There, Mainwaring, a former Olympic track athlete for Antigua and Barbuda, began working with a 17-year-old Nottingham High School senior: Bob Druger, the plaintiff who has spent the last seven years awaiting a resolution to his Child Victims Act case.

As a swimmer and cross country runner, Druger, now 63, remembers his early excitement to work with Mainwaring, who he described as “very well-spoken and fast talking,” with an English accent. Druger was impressed by his Olympic career and purported connections to other acclaimed athletes. If you wanted to be a star, Mainwaring told students, you had to work with him.

Mainwairing quickly “infiltrated” Druger’s friend group and life, he said, giving him books to read, telling him he was “number one in his squad, you’re above, you’re different from other people,” and even attending family dinners at his house, including with his father, who taught biology at Syracuse for 50 years.

“Looking back at the amount of energy and time he put into me—I don’t know how he could do anything else,” Druger said, recognizing the groundwork that was being laid for his abuse.

Quickly, the interactions turned sexual—both in the counselor’s office at the high school and back at Mainwaring’s Syracuse dorm room. The 29-year-old would tell Druger it was all part of his training to build mental fortitude and ultimately help him succeed as an athlete.

Sometimes, the abuse would occur “in the middle of the school day in the office, giving me a blow job and hypnotizing you to make you think it’s OK,” said Druger. “Masturbating you or whatever.”

Druger describes the sexual assaults as “almost mechanical.” While Mainwaring was abusing Druger, he’d talk to him, telling him the acts would “push you to uncomfortable situations and the more you can tolerate it mentally, you can use that for your…sport,” he said.

The manipulation was so powerful that for years, Druger said he didn’t realize that what happened to him was abuse. Until recently, when he connected with other survivors and identified his experience as assault, he hadn’t told a soul about it—not even his wife. Coming to terms with the reality, he said, has meant his “whole world is sort of rocked apart.”

And even now, the physical element feels like “a tiny part of it.”

“It was more like emotional, mental, spiritual abuse than anything else,” he said, adding, “He just kind of put a spell on you, and made you believe.”

Druger describes his response as “hard to understand, unless you’re in it,” yet his story shares a trait seen throughout the roughly 2,000 accounts reviewed by The 74: a potent grooming process.

Authors of one 2025 study found that grooming behaviors were present in 100 percent of the 24 school-based abuse cases they examined.

Based on court documents and interviews with dozens of experts, it is more common than not for survivors to take years—even decades—not just to report abuse, but also to recognize it as such, at least in part because of that calculated and predatory process.

While there is no universally accepted legal definition of grooming—and federal law doesn’t designate it as a distinct crime at all—20 states have moved to pass laws specifically defining it as the process of manipulating a child in order to gain their trust and sexually abuse them. It is criminalized as a felony in 18 of those states, including Wyoming and Missouri, which passed legislation in March 2026, according to Enough Abuse.

New York is not one of them, and doesn’t currently criminalize or define grooming children, though there are a patchwork of laws that criminalize elements of it, like enticing a child under 17 into a secluded area or car for sexual purposes.

“What I see anecdotally with my education cases is a lot of grooming. A lot of stuff that’s hard for me to prove,” said attorney Kat Thomas, who represents Druger and other survivors. The Child Victims Act didn’t close any of New York’s grooming law loopholes, Thomas said.

Even in states where legislation does exist, it can be challenging to recognize and prosecute it on the ground.

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“Grooming is a process, not an act, and it involves behaviors that looked at individually—like gift-giving, emotional dependency —… [are] ambiguous,” said Jessica Schidlow, senior policy analyst and legislative counsel at Enough Abuse.

These behaviors only become legible as grooming once they are looked at in retrospect or as a pattern, she said. And legislation that requires proof of sexual intent, “misses the window where intervention could actually prevent abuse. So it’s really that fine line in the middle that is very difficult to get at,” she added.

Even four decades later, it’s hard for Druger to parse through exactly what impact
Mainwaring had on his life.

“I always thought I did better because of Conrad” he said, because through his grooming process, Druger got more invested in school.

Now an acclaimed eye surgeon in Syracuse, Druger has degrees in biology, psychology and chemical engineering from Syracuse, as well as an MD and a Ph.D. in molecular biology and biochemistry. He also owns a martial arts gym and “work(s) out like mad.”

“I just have a million things that I’m doing, and so you sort of say, ‘Well, that’s successful.’ But, you know, maybe I’m doing that, ” he paused, his voice breaking, as he began to cry. “Sorry. It’s hard to talk about all of this,” he added, pausing again. “Maybe I’m doing that to block out the other shit.”

“Especially this thing,” he said. “It’s just too overwhelming.”

Crossing boundaries

The grooming process frequently begins with seemingly innocuous conversations or texting that can eventually escalate into physical abuse, said Charol Shakeshaft, distinguished professor emerita at Virginia Commonwealth University and a leading researcher on childhood sexual abuse. Her for the U.S. Department of Education includes the widely cited 1-in-10 students statistic on the incidence of K-12 sexual misconduct.

To stop the practice in schools, it’ll take a combination of thoughtful laws and mandatory institutional policies that define grooming behaviors and require training and reporting, she said.

Without those, it’s easy for other adults in the building to dismiss behaviors they might flag as questionable, but not necessarily identifiable as abuse—a practice numerous advocates, survivors and experts reported as common.

Shakeshaft, who authored Organizational Betrayal: How Schools Enable Employee Sexual Misconduct and How to Stop It, said adults in schools will cross a boundary and, if they’re not called on it, they’ll normalize their behavior and then cross another boundary and another until they “end up in a physical, sexual relationship with the students.”

“I’m not saying that it’s the fault of the school that people cross boundaries and sexually abuse kids, but what I am saying is that by not doing the supervision, the training, we provide an environment in which abuse can occur,” she added.

This common practice of “turning a blind eye” to childhood sexual abuse comes from a number of places, experts told The 74. In some cases, it emanates from a misconception about who typically abuses kids: so many have been taught to fear “stranger danger,” that they’re “not going to ever question the teacher in the next classroom,” said Faith Colson, a survivor advocate who made a delayed report to police seven years ago about the abuse she experienced as an Illinois high school student in the early 2000s.

In others, teachers are fearful that a report could ruin their colleagues’ future and they don’t feel they have sufficient evidence to risk that. And even when complaints of inappropriate behavior are escalated, schools often choose to handle them internally because they don’t “want the scandal,” said attorney Jeff Herman, whose firm Herman Law has handled some 2,000 Child Victims Act cases.

“I don’t think that the people in my school acted with malice. I don’t think there was a cover-up,” said Colson. “I don’t think they wanted me to be abused or (were) actively trying to help him abuse me, but by ignoring those inappropriate behaviors…by doing nothing, they were communicating to him they would do nothing. And so that emboldened (him).”

In other cases, however, it appeared the accused teachers acted with complete license, flaunting their sexual abuse of students. One particularly egregious complaint, alleges that three teachers across a middle and high school in Central New York ‘s Oswego County, separately and together, sexually assaulted four girls, ages 12 to 15, between 1967 and 1974.

On some occasions, one of the accused teachers, James Middaugh, would allegedly assault two of the girls at once, forcing them to both perform oral sex on him then vaginally rape one in the other’s presence. In two separate incidents, Middaugh and another of the teachers, Jerry Frare, are accused of abusing two of the victims simultaneously in the back of Middaugh’s car.

Marsh, whose firm represented the women, called it “one of the most shocking cases I think I’ve ever seen.”

Middaugh, Frare and the third accused teacher, Ronald Smith, behaved so carelessly and flagrantly, according to the complaint, that the sexual abuse was essentially an open secret in the Phoenix Central School District. At one point, another teacher approached one of the girls and allegedly said, “Ron Smith said you weren’t a virgin.”

Middaugh also once publicly confronted one of the girls “in a jealous rage” about “another boy,” according to the court documents, screaming that she was a “fucking slut” and a “goddamn whore.” The complaint says this was observed by another teacher and that other district employees and volunteers knew Middaugh and Frare were meeting the underage girls at a local bar “to fraternize outside of school.”

During a long phone interview in June, Frare forcefully denied all the allegations against him, saying, “There is not a single thing in that whole report that’s true about me. Every single sentence that my name is in, is untrue.” The first time he read the complaint back in 2020, he said, “My lungs collapsed. I lost my breath.”

He confirmed having taught one of the plaintiffs, Janet Russo, and remembered her as a good student, but denied ever having any inappropriate contact with her. “I have no idea,” where the allegations came from, he added.

Frare acknowledged having been close friends with Middaugh—he recalled them going bowling together on snow days and the older teacher being in Frare’s 1983 wedding party—but said charges that the two simultaneously sexually assaulted students in Middaugh’s car were “ridiculously untrue.” He said Middaugh drove a “little sports car” back then, a two-seater. He laughed and said “untrue” about the assertion that he and Middaugh would socialize with their female students at a local bar.

Frare, who taught with Middaugh at Dillon Middle School, said he never saw or had any knowledge of him engaging in inappropriate relationships with students, describing him as a “very well-respected” and “charismatic” teacher. He said he did not remember Smith, a music teacher and the band director, at all. The complaint alleges that in 1974, when she was 13, both Smith and Frare sexually abused Janet Russo.

Middaugh, who died in 2018, taught in the Phoenix schools for 13 years. Public records obtained by The 74 show he lost his license in January 1994 on “moral character” grounds after the New York state Education Department learned that during his time there he “provided two 8th grade students with cigarettes and alcohol and had sexual contact with said students which included sexual intercourse and oral sex.”

That same month, Smith’s license was revoked on the same grounds after the department found that during his 1976-77 school year at Phoenix “he engaged in a sexual relationship with a tenth grade student, which included several instances of sexual intercourse and oral sex which occurred on school grounds. Some two years later similar allegations were made by several additional complainants which resulted in Ronald L. Smith’s resignation from the district effective April 23, 1979.” Smith died in 2025.

Frare, now in his mid-70s and retired after a 30-year teaching career in another district, did not go through the same process, although public records show he voluntarily surrendered his license in February 2025, not long before the Phoenix CVA cases were apparently settled.

In a September phone call, Frare said he agreed to relinquish his license based on “bad advice” from an education lawyer. Again denying the abuse allegations, he said he made the choice thinking it would allow him to avoid a legal fight, that it “wouldn’t come to light” and would have no real impact on his life since he stepped away from the classroom years ago.

“I think back now, and I certainly made a mistake in doing that,” he said. “I should have just stood my ground—like I will have to do now—and make sure that the truth comes out.”

Attorneys with Marsh Law Firm would not discuss the cases’ disposition.

Christopher Byrne, then-interim superintendent of Phoenix Central School District, said in May that while they take all allegations “very seriously,” the district was not able to comment on specific legal cases. “Over the years,” he added, “school policies, reporting requirements, employee training, and student protections have evolved significantly, and the district continues to follow all state-mandated child protection and reporting protocols.”

The state Education Department findings on Middaugh and Smith suggest that others in the small, rural district with fewer than 2,000 students may well have been aware of the alleged abuse. Colson, the Illinois survivor, wants educators to understand the need to act in those circumstances.

“You have to say something, because you may be the only person that sees it and doing nothing keeps the child trapped,” she said. “They cannot save themselves.”
This is particularly true because perpetrators often target the most vulnerable students with the fewest resources, according to a number of attorneys who represent survivors.

This includes, “kids who are poorer, who are on scholarships, who are the youngest in their class, who don’t live in the same part of town, whose home lives aren’t stable, etc.,” Daniel Mullkoff, a partner at Wang Hecker, wrote in an email to The 74. “Young people who are already fighting to just make their way in the world and get a leg up are the ones who often are subjected to the worst, tragic abuses.”

Evading punishment, time after time

After graduating from Nottingham High, Druger enrolled as a freshman at Syracuse University, where Mainwaring’s abuse continued for at least another three years, he said. It didn’t stop until the coach left Syracuse in 1985 to work in admissions at Colgate University, about 40 miles away.

What Druger didn’t know at the time was that his schools weren’t the first places
Mainwaring reportedly had gone to abuse boys. Nor would they be close to the last.

A 2019 ESPN investigation uncovered 52 survivors of Mainwaring’s abuse across two continents, four states and dozens of years—though Druger said he’s since connected with scores more.

“Every place he went, he was found out, kicked out and he would set up shop (at) the next place,” said Druger.

In this way, Druger’s story embodies another commonality of countless cases of educator sexual abuse: a practice colloquially known as “passing the trash,” in which the accused adult is allowed to quietly resign or retire before moving onto another school. According to one widely cited estimate, perpetrators on average move to three different school districts before they are stopped.

The 74 discovered dozens of such cases. According to court records, they include:

• Michael Carletta, a band teacher at Stokes Elementary School in Rome, New York, was offered “retirement with no criminal charges filed against him,” after an 11-year-old student reported that he sexually abused her in 1989-90, according to court records. A separate filing alleged that Carletta similarly abused other elementary school students while teaching at another school within the same district 15 years before. While Carletta was able to move onto yet another school — this time a pre-K — without ever facing accountability, the student was punished and “forced to be in a separate self-contained class room,” according to the complaint. When reached by phone in June, Carletta sounded confused at times, saying “it’s a little hard to remember” events from three decades ago. But he adamantly denied all allegations, saying they were “completely untrue. I have never sexually abused any student.” He also asserted his belief “that entire situation” is “dead and buried by now.” In an affidavit, a school counselor said she interviewed the plaintiff at the time she first came forward about the alleged abuse by Carletta and then, at the district’s request, five other female students who described the same “inappropriate sexual ‘TOUCHING’ and ‘RUBBING’“ by the band teacher. She said she took copious notes, which she was directed to hand over to the assistant superintendent. She never saw the notes or the students again, she stated, adding, “To my knowledge, no action was taken against Mr. Carletta nor to protect female students from what he was doing to them.” The case was settled in 2021.
• Three former students alleged they were abused repeatedly in the late 1970s and early ’80s by Donald Wales, who was hired to teach in their elementary school less than a year after being criminally charged and sentenced for sodomizing a student at his previous New York school. When he applied to Tri-Valley Central School District in rural Sullivan County in 1972, Wales was still on criminal probation, according to the complaint, and he asked in writing that the district not contact his employer — a home builder where he took a job after being forced to leave teaching and where his boss was aware of his arrest record. Tri-Valley apparently honored that request and also did not attempt to contact his former district. Wales was arrested again in 1984, this time at school, and charged with sexually abusing male students. As part of a plea deal where he served one year in jail, Wales provided the district attorney with a list of more than 25 boys he admitted to sexually abusing over his years at Tri-Valley Elementary School, including the three CVA plaintiffs. The district prevailed in the case, both in the lower court and on appeal. The appellate court ruled Tri-Valley didn’t have an obligation to further investigate Wales’s background when they first hired him because his teaching license was valid and he provided letters of recommendation from his old district. It also found there was not enough evidence to show the district could have foreseen that Wales was a sexual threat to children, notwithstanding community speculation about why he spent so much time alone with young boys outside of school, taking them fishing and having them come to his house. The district did not respond to requests for comment. When reached in July at his Florida home and asked about his child sex abuse convictions and his teaching career, Wales responded, “That’s very nice, but I’m 91 years old and I’m not interested.”
• Dutkowski, the coach and gym teacher from Our Lady of Lourdes High School, was hired there despite having been charged and convicted of molesting two students at a Wayne, New Jersey, public school three years before, according to court records. He eventually went to prison for “predatory conduct” while teaching in South Carolina — decades after allegedly abusing the former player who he benched and other students at Our Lady of Lourdes and Seton Catholic High School in New York in the 1960s and ’70s.

A case involving New York City’s prestigious Dalton School shows not only how an accused abuser can escape accountability, but continue to prosper. A former student at the Manhattan private school alleged that in 1986, when she was 14 years old, she was offered free tuition and housing at the home of the headmaster, Gardner Dunnan. As part of the arrangement, she was supposed to act as the family’s helper.

The girl’s childhood had been difficult, so when this opportunity arose, her family leapt at what seemed like an unrivaled chance to “fundamentally…improve (their daughter’s) prospects in life,” according to court records.

In the fall of her freshman year, without any formal application process, the Brooklyn teen enrolled at Dalton and moved in with the approximately 45-year-old headmaster and his family. At first she was grateful for this setup, which provided “the first real stability she experienced in her childhood,” according to records. But this false sense of safety was quickly shattered when Dunnan began sexually assaulting her in September 1986, according to the complaint.

Dunnan sexually abused her on four separate occasions between September and January of the following year, in his apartment and at the family’s second home in New Jersey, the complaint says. The first time it happened, the girl alleged she was walking from the bathroom back to her room in a towel, just after showering. The headmaster was lying on the couch in the living room and called her over. He pulled her on top of him, removed her towel and began to grope her and “rub her naked body.”

The night Dunnan assaulted her for the final time, he allegedly entered the girl’s darkened bedroom in the Manhattan apartment, climbed on top of her and thrust his genitals against hers through their clothes. It was then that his wife walked past the room. Moments later, the complaint states, Dunnan ran out and the girl heard shouting. Later that night, his wife kicked her out.

The girl moved back in with her father—nearly two hours away from Dalton—and after her academics took a hit that spring, transferred to a different high school. In the decades since, she has “suffered intense emotional harm,” according to court records, believing the assaults were her own fault and keeping the abuse a secret.

A decade later, in 1997, Dunnan was forced to resign from Dalton after he had an affair with a married teacher whom he supervised. The board cited “concerns about…his personal life,” in pushing him out. The headmaster, meanwhile, chalked up the professional violation to his “emotional and personal needs.”

Despite the circumstances of his exit, the president of the board of trustees praised Dunnan for his work, and he was immediately hired as an adviser to the provost of Columbia University, who was then a Dalton board member. He went on to run The School at Columbia University, a private K-8 school created by the university, according to his LinkedIn. As recently as 2017, Dunnan was working as the academic dean at another New York City private school, Avenues, followed by a one-year stint as a senior advisor at Success Academy Charter Schools. He lists himself as still working as a college admissions consultant.

“I’m particularly proud of the fact that almost all of the students I have worked with have found a school that is a perfect fit for them,” he boasts on his profile.

Dunnan, who “adamantly” denied the allegations in court filings, did not respond to requests for comment. The plaintiff settled her case sometime around 2021 for an undisclosed amount.

A Dalton spokesperson said in a written statement that he was limited in what he could share about specific allegations because of the litigation and out of respect for student privacy. He went on to describe the safeguards now in place.

“Dalton has clear policies and boundary guidelines for appropriate interactions with students, which are published annually in the employee handbook. In addition, we conduct pre-employment screening and ongoing training of all employees,” he said. “Currently, at the time of hire, all employees are fingerprinted, and we conduct a background check. Every two years all employees complete a mandated reporter training, and annually they attend boundaries and sexual harassment prevention trainings.”

Many of the incidents of alleged abuse in the CVA complaints occurred before New York state made criminal background checks mandatory for public educators in 2000, but numerous experts and advocates say background checks alone do not go far enough. Since many allegations are handled internally or are never prosecuted, they leave no criminal paper trail.

A 2010 US Government Accountability Office found four key factors that lead to “passing the trash,” including performing inadequate background checks and failing to follow up or inquire about “troubling information regarding criminal histories” on job applications.

The 2015 Every Students Succeeds Act was meant to help combat this practice by including a directive that any K-12 institution receiving federal funding needed to institute safeguarding policies, yet most states have yet to respond, according to research conducted by .

Only have passed legislation to strengthen hiring practices and screen out educators who might be sexual safety risks or to make sure current employees engaged in misconduct are disciplined appropriately. Of those, only 13 states require school administrators to contact former employers to ask about a candidate’s history.

New York is not one of them. To this day, the state has no law beyond traditional
fingerprinting, and private school employees are not always included in that mandate.

Druger, the former Syracuse student, holds his high school’s hiring practices “blatantly responsible for a lot of what happened. It was their job to protect me and they didn’t…If anyone had done even a half-ass job, I would never have met Conrad, and I wouldn’t be involved in any of this.”

The Syracuse City School District did not respond to requests for comment. At the time of the 2019 ESPN investigation, school officials said they found no record of Mainwaring ever having been a staff member or a sanctioned volunteer in the district. Syracuse University told The 74 it could not comment because of the ongoing litigation.

After decades of being passed from school to school and state to state, Mainwaring was eventually sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2024 for abusing young boys decades before at a Massachusetts summer camp. Even then, the criminal conviction was only possible because of a stipulation that stops the clock on the commonwealth’s statute of limitations if the perpetrator leaves the state.

New York is a legal outlier

While advances in code of conduct policies, criminal background checks and mandated reporting laws have helped to protect some students over the past three decades, The 74’s reporting found that significant loopholes still remain—especially in New York.

In October 2025, Enough Abuse and Prevent Child Abuse America did a state-by-state comparison of five recommended types of child abuse laws. New York had passed only three: mandating child sexual abuse education in schools; establishing a child sexual abuse task force and requiring student safety poster laws. Missing was employing standard screening tools, beyond a criminal background check, to prevent schools from hiring abusers.

The state is also a significant outlier in that it doesn’t specifically criminalize educator sexual misconduct. This means that once a student turns 17, the age of consent in New York, it is no longer illegal for their teachers to engage in a sexual relationship with them. This leaves older students, who can remain enrolled in public school up until they’re 21, unprotected. Many of these students tend to be those with disabilities, leaving young people already at a heightened risk with the fewest protections against abuse, said Terri Miller, president of the advocacy organization S.E.S.A.M.E.

It also puts the Child Victims Act, which seemingly protects all children until they’re 18, at odds with the age of consent, meaning, “You have some really murky law and litigating it can get complicated,” according to Helene Weiss, a partner at Marsh Law Firm who represents survivors.

In comparison, 39 states and Washington, DC, have adopted statutes that specifically criminalize the sexual abuse of children by anyone working in or associated with schools and by people in positions of authority over a student, many beyond the age of consent, according to Enough Abuse. In Massachusetts, where the age of consent is 16, the governor signed similar legislation into law in July.

While New York has no such prohibitions on educators, the state does criminalize sexual relationships in so-called vulnerable “treatment-provider” contexts, like doctors and patients.

“A patient, by law, is incapable of consent…but that doesn’t exist with teachers (and students)?” said an incredulous Thomas, Druger’s attorney. “Like what? How the hell? If anything, it’s even worse.”

The state also on the prevalence of child sexual abuse. And once abuse has been found, educator disciplinary records are particularly challenging to access in New York, unlike in 12 other states where that information is easily found online.

“While you can get the disciplinary records of (NY) podiatrists, hairdressers, lawyers, doctors, you cannot get the disciplinary records of teachers online,” said Marsh. “There’s no place to even look for them … regarding the professionals that have the most contact with children.”

Further obscuring access to information about many of these cases are the nondisclosure clauses written into some settlement agreements, according to numerous attorneys and survivors who spoke with The 74 about this issue.

“Confidential settlements are not out of the ordinary, but ones that limit survivors from speaking about their experiences, even with family members, can have a chilling effect,” said Weiss. “They can discourage other survivors from coming forward, shield institutions from accountability and prevent communities from understanding whether misconduct is isolated or systemic.”

While some attorneys argued that NDAs can help to protect survivors, most interviewed by The 74 pointed to them as yet another tool for silencing victims, one that allows abuse to occur behind a veil of secrecy. Private schools almost universally request these confidentiality agreements when settling CVA cases, multiple attorneys said.

As these cases have worked their way through the courts, critics have raised concerns about how expensive settlements are for public school districts, sometimes jeopardizing funding for today’s students in order to hold accountable teachers from decades ago.

As of October 2024, New York City alone paid over $160 million to settle more than 150 general Child Victims Act cases—most of them filed against its Department of Education, according to an investigation by the news organization City & State. They found that in some cases, the educators named in suits were still employed and teaching, even as the city paid to settle abuse claims.

Some schools are insured for these types of incidents, but a number of insurance
companies have refused to make payments, citing the school’s negligence or the age of the cases—a practice advocates and legal experts have criticized.

In November, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a bill that allows school districts to issue bonds for up to 30 years—instead of 15—to pay for CVA claims, in an attempt to give schools greater flexibility and financial stability.

Advocate Michelle Denault, a survivor of school-based sexual abuse in Illinois, said critiques around the high costs of settlements are disturbing, noting, “It’s one of those things that I really struggle with—that we’re worried about our wallets instead of fixing our culture.”

Witnessing decades of past abuse and a steady drumbeat of ongoing allegations, those close to the issue argue hefty financial consequences may be the only thing capable of forcing change or accountability.

“The reality in this space is that adults prefer and protect adults, and the need of the adult being accused is always so much more important than the need to make sure they don’t do it again,” said Hamilton. “That’s why we have an epidemic of cover-up, not just child sex abuse.”

If you, or someone you know, is an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse, help is available.

• Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network RAINN (RAINN) is the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization and operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline (800.656.HOPE, rainn.org) in partnership with more than 1,000 local sexual assault service providers across the country.
• The Army of Survivors is the only national organization advocating for and supporting child athlete survivors of sexual violence.
• After Silence and After Silence – En Español are designed to help victims become survivors, and communicate in the recovery of sexual violence.
• SNAP – Survivors Network of those Abused By Priests is the oldest, largest and most active support group for women and men wounded by religious and institutional authorities – priests, ministers, bishops, deacons, nuns, coaches, teachers, and others.
• If you’re looking to support a survivor, RAINN has resources to help in that process. 1 in 6 has a page specifically dedicated to family members or friends of male survivors

Credit: Enough Abuse

Disclosure: Amanda Geduld attended Dalton School and graduated in 2011. Her father, Buzzy Geduld, is a former member of Dalton’s board of trustees and led its investment committee. Their involvement with the school came after former headmaster Gardner Dunnan’s tenure.