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wibta For canceling a beloved children's figure over something that happened in the 80s, but that I have enough evidence happened for me to take it to the police and media?
Throw away account, obviously:
I went to one of *those* boarding schools back in the 80s. I'm going to talk around a bunch of things and fudge a few details with spiritually similar things from other schools because I *do not* want to be identified, and there was eventually enough news coverage that if this gets popular at least some of you will have seen it.
So most of the staff were pretty bad, and one guy (my rapist among many other things) was so bad we literally thought he was the devil. Which he actively played into with his creepy fucking hell puns, but this is not about him this is about the guy who (I thought) never did anything like that and (mostly ineffectually) went to bat for us on a lot of things. Like he really pushed back on how much everyone used racial slurs which sounds really minor compared to the physical abuse (cause it was), but we had kids with lynching victims in their families having the serious ones thrown right at them so ya know.
Right anyway, my friend group was the weird queers who were too faggy or in the case of my friend 'Lilly' too brave/stupid to hide it. So, Lily had the 'nice' teacher for one of the classes where I got stuck with the literal devil (who, actually no this is not about him but think The Wall in terms of what his version of this class was like).
So one day she has an 'accident', that we kind of assumed was her getting hate crimed again. Then lying about it trying to keep me and my not exactly boyfriend from getting into another brawl because we went 'too far' over the last incident (sorry, not sorry, hope you still walk funny dickhead).
So recently, we were back on the lets talk about it part of our cycle of trauma dumping and pretending we are friends for normal reasons, and she opened up that actually it was the 'nice' teacher. During a just barely related lecture he went onto a whole tangent about how he took a vow of religious chastity, and that it was difficult, but that he wholeheartedly recommended it to anyone else who was 'unsuited to marriage or overly tempted by the grave sin of homosexuality', which honestly explains a lot about him, but he was staring right at her the whole time (this was the 80s so when she said she was a "trans-sexual" as we did back then what they heard was "I'm the extra icky type of faggot")(and people ask me why it took till the late 90s for me to transition when it was so obvious Lilly clocked me as an egg during our first homeroom together). Right well after that she used the actual class topic to pull a 'just asking questions' about how his religion was bs. So he called her up to the front of the class and punched her in the face so hard she hit the ground.
The school has been significantly reformed (not that I trust it), in part because Mr. Nice Guy blew the whistle as soon as cultural shifts and collaboration from now adult alumni he kept in touch with made that actually viable. And he is the lynchpin of a really cool charity that helps a lot of kids and would struggle if he just retired let alone got forced out in a scandal and blew their reputation.
But also he's never apologized (though tbf Lily hasn't directly asked), and while he is mostly admin he technically still works with children.
Anyway, we are all so fucked up by school that we rely on each other for dealing with things about it so we don't have to think about any of our own specific trauma too much. So she came to me, but honestly I just don't know. He probably saved multiple lives by helping as much as he did, and still does some great work that I don't want to stop, I actually volunteered with him for awhile. But like, he literally punched a kid for being queer and not rolling over when he tried to bully her for it. So should I go to the police and/or press with this?
I'm sorry you had to deal with this fucked up situation. I've had... not entirely dissimilar experiences in the 80's and I feel you, fam.
As to the question about what to do: what do you think will be the consequences of your actions, and what do the victims think?
In one extreme, where going to the police is going to put more kids in danger again and the victims all are against it then it's clearly the wrong thing to do.
In the other where not going to the police is going to put kids in danger and the victims all are for it then it's clearly the correct thing to do.
Probably reality is somewhere in the middle, and how you weigh the factors is going to be extremely detail dependent.
(edit: although from the sound of it I would probably report devil-guy to the police first in any case.)
I wish I could say, hello what the fuck, but this isn't, actually, very surprising. The more I read about the eighties the gladder I am not to have lived through my childhood then.
Anyway, in my experience following those things on the news, it's basically never actually true that a charity's existence and effectiveness hangs on the shoulders of just one person. Or, not nearly as much as abusive arseholes, and the missing-stair social technology built up around them, tend to claim. Oh sure, there'd be scandals in the media, but it doesn't consistently worsen their reputation in the long run, in the useful ways; depending on how they handle it, they could even get more popular from the effects of 'oh, they finally shaped up and got rid of that guy! He'd been known as a beloved figure free of sin, in popular consciousness, but I've known all about him for ages.' And the overwhelming majority of the actual work that the charity does, of the people that work there and the infrastructure that got formed over the years, very probably isn't going anywhere. I guess if he's also a multimillionaire funding it, but that's any amount of replaceable too.
On the other hand, I… I mean, that might start sounding like I'm the asshole, but I can imagine a coherent character for that guy who's basically fine by now, quietly learned better over the past couple decades when he too got out of that hellhole of a school, and it would be a shame to stir up a storm like that for basically no concrete benefit. Problem is, you can't know, right? I suppose society checks in more on kids today, especially when they're not from disadvantaged backgrounds, but most incidents still go unreported. It's nowhere near proof, but it's sure evidence that he'd do it again.
So, yes, I suppose go to the press (not the police unless you or anyone you know is in active danger and they're a necessary lever against it, I don't fucking trust them); but pick someone you trust not to sensationalise it, not to leap to publishing it without even representing you two's story properly, or without care for the current victims' wellbeing if they exist; and start by finding out if kids he works with now actually are consistently okay. If they aren't, that's your dilemma solved already, in my view.
1, 2 A news story about some bigwig in an NGO getting ousted for sexual harassment of his team, and a blog post looking at their yearly reports since, in comparison to a bunch from the same cause area. They, yeah, they look fine, at first glance.
3 A recent well-known study estimating how much of child abuse in general goes unreported. (In MICE! the US, of fucking course.)
4 A free PDF zine laying out risk factors for voluntary interactions with police, demographics or other circumstances, and a flowchart for when to try and get anything useful out of them and when not to chance it. (In MICE, of fucking course, though at least one or two lines of this one's bibliography are about the rest of the Anglosphere?)
[op replying in thread to education storm ]
I think I may need to do some detective work on his charity which I could stand to volunteer at anyway.
Part of why I panicked enough to go to Reddit is that as much as I am still emotionally processing school I thought I understood it logically, but this shocked me and I feel like if he did this I don't know what might do.
[op replying to whatt-in-carrnation]
Almost nothing else about him has changed since then. Which I thought was a good thing...
But also the circumstances have changed and if this was the only incident maybe it just wouldn't come up?
Maybe! Maybe. I've… honestly, I've no idea what I'd do, if that was really the only incident…… I'd probably let it go, then, in your place, at the very least any sort of litigation literal or metaphorical is exhausting and would take months or years out of your life.
I just wouldn't be anywhere near sure that it is. I've seen far too much of people told 'you're the only one with any complaints, isn't that odd? Doesn't that mean you're the disruptive element?' and it turning out that half the people in whatever reference group had the same one, got told the same thing and gave up early. *bitter smile* Don't do these systems' job for them.
[Replying to OP]
I can see a possible world where this was a one off thing that won't be repeated- where it was under duress and the least bad option he saw in the moment. Or where he's had transformative personal growth and change. I do have to say that this is not the most likely world we're living in. It's also not an overriding consideration, even though it's a large one. Have you talked to the girl he punched about this?
[replying to u/whatt-in-carnation's original comment]
depending on how they handle it, they could even get more popular from the effects of 'oh, they finally shaped up and got rid of that guy! He'd been known as a beloved figure free of sin, in popular consciousness, but I've known all about him for ages.'
This makes no sense. A charity's donations come from immense numbers of people. One guy couldn't beat up this many children personally if he had a century to do it in. (Or I guess if he was Chuck Norris in a hurry.)
Uh, you do know people talk to each other, right? Even if not the police or media? (Also, the proportion of charitable giving as a whole that comes from a few wealthy donors is actually as much as a third, but I admit that these are mostly not the people I was talking about, and it surely varies by the specific org.)
"Have you talked to the girl he punched about this?"
Yes she's the one who told me all this. Though she was drunk and a bit high.
[replying to whatt-in-carrnation]
It sounds like I need to talk to more people from school. Ugh. It's not like all of the other students hated us but the number who were at least willing to stand back and let stuff happen is not great.
NTA, and the fact that you're even asking means you've got more conscience than he does. Doing good admin work later doesn't buy back punching a child in the face. Report it.