Lolita is written as a confession: The “Confession of a White Widowed Male.” In Nabokov’s masterpiece, the narrator, Humbert Humbert, delivers his own unreliable account of the “Sorry and Sordid Business” of his sexual exploitation of a 12-year-old girl. Though the reference here is inexact, it was Lolita I thought of when I heard that David Weber, my former teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy, had confessed to “hugging and kissing” me in the spring of 1982, when I was 17 and he was 38. During the course of an investigation begun in the fall of 2020, sparked by an allegation made by an anonymous third party, Weber told Exeter’s lawyers at the international law firm Holland & Knight that he had hugged and kissed me once in the basement of a dormitory called Dutch House.
There were no other allegations against Weber, who had been a beloved English teacher at the school for nearly 40 years before officially retiring in 2008. But after his confession, Exeter principal William K. Rawson sent an email to students and alumni—thousands of people—telling them that he had “distressing information about sexual misconduct at the Academy.” Due to Weber’s admission of “hugging and kissing a student,” Rawson wrote, his “emeritus status has been removed and he has been barred from the PEA campus and all Exeter events.” I was not named in this email of February 15, 2021, but I was the student it was talking about, as Rawson and lawyers for the school confirmed to me.
The thing is, I have no recollection of this alleged incident; I have no memory of Weber ever doing anything inappropriate with me. Which I had made clear to Rawson as well as Exeter’s director of student well-being, Christina Palmer, and a detective from the Exeter police. Despite my repeated denials, however, the academy pressed on with its investigation of Weber, now 78, eventually sending the email that ruined his reputation.
So why did he confess? And why did Exeter punish him even though I said this never happened? As Nabokov says in the beginning of his novel, “Look at this tangle of thorns.”
I came to Exeter in the winter of 1981. I’d never set foot on the campus before. It looked like something out of a movie to me, with its pristine redbrick buildings, more like a fancy college than a high school. My family had just moved to New Hampshire from Miami. My mother and stepfather, burned out on running a busy health food restaurant for 10 years, had decided to move to a small town in the White Mountains and open a cheese shop. So I was sent to boarding school for my last three semesters.
Days after I arrived at Exeter, there was a snowstorm. I’d never seen snow. I energetically took part in a giant snowball fight in the courtyard outside my dorm, during which I developed a serious case of frostbite on my hands. No one had told me that when handling snowballs you should wear gloves.
Nobody in my family had ever gone to boarding school, so I arrived at Exeter unprepared in many ways. My father, trying to be helpful, had bought me a suitcase full of preppy classics from L.L.Bean (shirts with Peter Pan collars, knee-high socks), which wound up making me look like an embarrassing wannabe. The cool girls at Exeter wore threadbare corduroys, flannel shirts, and clogs so worn down, the heels were just slivers of wood; I’d brought nothing so shabbily chic. I also didn’t have the same level of academic training as my classmates, many of whom had been in private school since they could talk (and many of whom went on to become leaders in business, tech, academia, the arts). I’ll never forget the look on the face of my French teacher when, feeling anxious and overwhelmed, I got up to leave his class, telling him, “Je suis mauvaise”—“I am evil.” I had meant to say “Je suis malade”—“I am sick.”
The teacher who made me feel like everything was going to be okay was David Weber. He encouraged me to write. I started churning out short stories to show him. Often I would visit him in the evenings in his study at Dutch House, where he lived with his wife and young daughter—the door always open, by the way, with other female students coming and going as part of check-in; he was the dorm head. I guess part of me felt like my lowly status was raised a bit by having this kind and well-liked teacher as my friend. And he was a good teacher—in retrospect, I see he was a kind of early editor. He was a pivotal person in my life, and I remembered him with gratitude, although after I graduated in 1982, we hadn’t spoken.
So that’s why I was stunned when, on September 10, 2020, I got a call from Palmer, asking me brusquely, after a few pleasantries: “When you were a student at Exeter, did you have a sexual relationship with Mr. Weber?” She advised me it would be best if I could be brief, as she only had a few minutes for this conversation.
I felt a wave of nausea. I put a hand on the wall to steady myself. It wasn’t Weber I was remembering suddenly, it was the college boy who had raped me in a dorm room at the University of Miami when I was 14 years old, an experience I had only just begun to process some 40 years later.
Maybe it was Palmer’s calling Weber “Mr. Weber” that made me feel so infantilized, like I was a student at Exeter again, in trouble for something. I felt like I was going to be sick, and then I started to feel something close to outrage. It didn’t seem right of her to call me up and ask me this without any preparation.
I’ve since learned that Palmer’s approach that day isn’t what’s generally considered best practice when dealing with victims of sexual assault. When I asked my friend Jennifer Powell-Lunder—a clinical psychologist who teaches at Pace University—how mental health care professionals typically pose questions to alleged victims, she said: “It can be retraumatizing, so you give them all the time they need to get to a point where they’re ready to tell you, if they want to tell you at all. My first rule is always that it’s up to the victims to decide where they want to go with this.”
When I emailed the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), their press secretary, Erinn Robinson, concurred with this. “It’s important that any investigation process for sexual assault be victim-centered and trauma-informed,” she wrote. “Victim-centered means that investigations prioritize the needs of the victim, and trauma-informed means that the process should seek to minimize retraumatization of the victim and take into account the effects of trauma.”
In other words, ideally this process should have been about me and if and how I wanted this allegation against Weber to be handled. But it wound up being anything but that.
I told Palmer that no, I hadn’t had a “sexual relationship” with Weber. I let her know she’d upset me. A few days later I called the school. I wanted to talk to the principal, Rawson (who goes by Bill), because now I was worried—not only about this false allegation about Weber and me, but about how the kids at Exeter were being treated when they had sexual assault claims.
Rawson—formerly a lawyer at the international law firm Latham & Watkins—went to Exeter, class of ’71. He was appointed principal in 2019 after the exit of Lisa MacFarlane, whose brief tenure—2015 to 2018—saw the eruption of a firestorm of controversy over Exeter’s mishandling of sexual misconduct on the part of faculty members going back to the 1970s. The scandal came to national attention in March 2016 when the Spotlight Team of The Boston Globe reported on the sexual abuse of two Exeter students by a former history teacher, Richard Schubart (who died in 2019). One of these students was Cecilia Morgan, a classmate of mine.
In December 2016, Morgan did a video interview with the Globe, which took place in the office of her lawyer, Mitchell Garabedian—the attorney best known for representing sexual assault victims during the Catholic priests scandal; he was portrayed by Stanley Tucci in the 2015 film Spotlight. She gave a wrenching account of Schubart’s predation of her and its lasting damage to her life. She mentioned how, when she was a senior at Exeter, she had confided in her twin sister, Maria, about Schubart, and Maria had told her own adviser. That adviser was David Weber, who told the Globe that he “did not recall the conversation” with Maria.
I remember reading about this and being surprised that Weber hadn’t reported Schubart; I’d always thought Weber was a good guy who put students first. (More on this later.) I wasn’t surprised to hear about Schubart and Cecilia, though. There had been rumors about them when I was at Exeter; I also knew of two other female students who had allegedly had sex with teachers. I remember sitting on the dorm-room floor of a girl as she regaled us with a description of the “long, skinny penis” on the teacher she said she was having sex with, and how we all just laughed (we were drinking vodka from a bottle at the time). In my later life, I’d never thought of reporting any of this to Exeter, because the girls involved were now adults, accomplished women I thought capable of handling the memory of these experiences however they thought best.
What troubled me even more than Cecilia’s story, when it came out in 2016, was the Globe’s reporting on more recent cases of sexual harassment and assault at the school—particularly the story of a 16-year-old girl called Kaur (her middle name, which the Globe said it used to protect her family’s privacy). She had killed herself in July 2014 after telling people she had been sexually assaulted by a male student at Exeter. (Exeter officials told the Globe they never knew about the alleged assault.) She had also been cyberbullied and sexually harassed by Exeter students on a notorious, now defunct social media app called Yik Yak. To add to the heartbreak of all this, Kaur had been an active member of the brand-new Exeter Feminist Union, other members of which were cyberbullied on the app as well.
The type of horror Kaur had endured was very familiar to me, as I’d spent 2014 to 2016 traveling around the country reporting for a book on social media and girls; I’d heard story after story of girls who had been sexually assaulted, bullied, and harassed, on- and offline. It was disheartening to hear that these same types of things were happening at Exeter, which always seemed to think of itself as being above such ugliness.
“This is such a devastating thing for young people to have this happen to them, and I need it to stop,” Cecilia Morgan said in her video interview for the Globe, talking about her assault. “This just is devastating for girls. I feel as though Exeter has disappointed me and a lot of other people back then from their lack of action.”
Exeter graduates tend to be some of the nicest people I’ve ever known: generous, civic-minded. As soon as it reached the wider Exeter community in 2016 that the academy had an ongoing problem with sexual assault and was still failing students who had been victimized, the alumni sprang into action. There were Facebook pages and petitions; an organization to help victims was formed. People talked about withdrawing their financial support from the academy until something was done. One alumnus who donates significant amounts of money to the school told me that among other larger donors he knew, “People were pissed.”
Exeter seemed to get the message. It was experiencing a public relations nightmare that could affect its long-term reputation as well as its bottom line—a $1.5 billion endowment as of August, of which it is very proud. It was being mentioned in the same breath as other prep schools in the news with sexual assault scandals, such as St. Paul’s, where in 2014 the notorious 18-year-old Owen Labrie had sexually assaulted 15-year-old Chessy Prout.
Exeter was being viewed as yet another elite school where kids weren’t necessarily safe, and girls in particular were being mistreated—as was further exposed in 2016 reporting by the Globe of the gross mishandling of another sexual assault case at the school that had happened in 2015: As a kind of penance for groping fellow student Michaella Henry, a school official had Chukwudi Ikpeazu bake her a loaf of “monkey bread” (apparently his specialty) every week and deliver it to her in person, thereby forcing her to re-encounter the boy who had groped her. The outrage this time went international, with a story in the Daily Mail. (In 2017 a charge of Class A misdemeanor sexual assault against Ikpeazu was abandoned with conditions.)
In 2016, Exeter’s external counsel, the law firm Nixon Peabody, hired Holland & Knight to conduct an in-depth investigation of “allegations of past misconduct by PEA faculty and staff” toward former and existing students. The report of this investigation, which was sent to students and alumni in August 2018 as part of Exeter’s new commitment to transparency, is a sickening read. It references 28 investigations spanning the 1950s to the 2010s, for which Holland & Knight says it conducted approximately 294 interviews of more than 170 people; it has graphically detailed accounts of teachers who “forcibly kissed” students, engaged in sexual relationships with students, did “sexualized photo shoots” of students, groomed students through inappropriately intimate behavior, and more. I knew several of these teachers and took a drama class with Lane Bateman, who in 1992 was arrested and charged with possession and distribution of child pornography (he was sentenced to five years in federal prison and died in 2013).
In its report, Holland & Knight raised a “systemic concern” of an “absence of an established and clear protocol for students, faculty, and employees to raise complaints and training for PEA administrators on how to respond to concerns of misconduct by faculty or staff impacting students.” In the last five years, Exeter says on its website, “we have implemented new training and programming to prevent sexual misconduct and clear policies and procedures to respond to reports of misconduct when they occur.
“There is no higher priority for the Academy than to provide a safe and inclusive environment for all of our students, one that is free of sexual abuse and harassment in all its forms,” says the school.
When I called Principal Rawson a few days after I’d spoken with Christina Palmer, I imagined that, given Exeter’s recent troubles, he would be relieved to hear that there was nothing to this anonymous allegation about David Weber and me. I wanted Rawson to hear it firsthand, so there wouldn’t be any confusion on this point: that there was no reason to move forward with an investigation of Weber, at least not in regard to this false allegation.
I was still very upset by my call with Palmer when I phoned Rawson; in fact, several times when I was talking with him, I got so choked up I was unable to speak; I started to cry as I explained that my level of emotion was because Palmer’s questioning had brought up feelings around my past experience of sexual assault that had nothing to do with Exeter or Weber.
Rawson listened patiently, allowing me to complain about Palmer’s manner on her call, for which he apologized for any “harm” it may have caused (harm was a word he used a lot). I asked him who had made this allegation about Weber and me. Rawson said he couldn’t say, as these allegations had to remain anonymous in order to protect the identity of the accusers so they felt “safe” in coming forward.
I asked if perhaps the allegation was an old one that the academy was somehow just getting around to now? Because back in 2016, I explained, in the midst of all the media attention around Exeter that year, a classmate had emailed me some information about how to report sexual misconduct on the part of teachers. This was the first I’d learned that apparently there had been rumors about Weber and me among some of my peers. Maybe it was because Weber and I had been so close? I had wondered. Or maybe it was because back then, other kids were known to be involved with teachers? I told Rawson that there was no basis for these rumors, however, which I’d also let my classmate know at the time.
Rawson said that no, the accuser wasn’t the person whose name I had shared. Then I didn’t know who it could be, I said, saying that this was all very upsetting to me because Weber had been a great teacher and my friend. Rawson just listened and murmured in his sympathetic way.
Then he said that he was sorry to have to inform me of this, but I was going to be hearing from the Exeter police, to whom the academy is obligated to report any allegation of sexual misconduct. I later learned that this was due to the “Memorandum of Understanding” between the school and the Exeter Police Department that the academy had overhauled in 2017 in the wake of revelations about its past failure to report crimes on campus to the local authorities and the New Hampshire Division for Children, Youth & Families. “The MOU outlines the duty of all adults,” says the 2017 document, “and underscores PEA’s commitment to immediately report any act of sexual assault, regardless of the possible legal classification of the act or the time the act occurred.”
I told Rawson that in fact I had been contacted by a detective from the Exeter police, who had emailed me that very day. Rawson apologized again for the inconvenience and “harm” that might be inflicted on me through this experience, and said that he would convey my complaints to Palmer—who had already sent me an email apologizing for our conversation. “I am deeply sorry for the harm I caused,” she wrote, “and hope that you were able to find solace with someone.… We recognize how jarring hearing of an allegation can be,” she added.
When I called the detective back, I left her a voicemail saying that if this was about an allegation about me and a teacher at Exeter, such an allegation was false and I had nothing to report. I didn’t hear from her again. I thought the case was closed.
Later in the fall of 2020, I remember reading in the news that a former Exeter math teacher, Szczesny Jerzy Kaminski, 60, had been charged with sexually assaulting a student between 2013 and 2015. The Exeter alumni Facebook page “Exonians” ignited again with people expressing their concern. “The larger context of this case,” commented Cynthia Fuguet Mare, class of ’83, is “how the Academy, after recent years of coming face-to-face with evidence of sexual abuse of minors entrusted into their care…how, through police investigations and arrests, court proceedings, studies, committees, policies and training, mea culpas to the larger PEA community…can STILL fail to protect students.”
In late October 2020, I had another call with Rawson. Something had been nagging at me—I didn’t know why, but I felt like this thing with Weber and Exeter wasn’t over, and I wanted to make sure that it really was. But during our conversation, Rawson gave me no indication that the investigation of Weber had continued. We chitchatted, talked about how things were going at the school. He said perhaps in the spring, the pandemic permitting, I should come and give a talk to the kids about social media.
I didn’t hear from Rawson again until nearly four months later, on February 13, 2021. He asked to speak that weekend: “I need to make you aware of developments concerning a faculty member here whom we have previously discussed.”
I said that I was available. “Hope everything’s okay,” I wrote.
Rawson responded: “We have an admission that requires us to take action against him. I need to explain. I am very sorry to have to bring this to your attention at all, no less on top of poor communication previously.”
“An admission?” I replied. “Of something regarding me??? Now I’m very curious. Can you call me now?”
“Yes,” Rawson wrote. “I will call in a couple of minutes.”
As I waited for the phone to ring, I felt like I was going to vomit. I started to feel dizzy, like I might fall, so I sat down on the couch. I was remembering now how, after I was raped at the University of Miami, I came home and lay on the bathroom floor for a long time; I remembered how the cool tiles of the floor felt soothing and I had tried to just focus on that. One of the elements of the trauma I’d buried for so long were my feelings about being robbed of my consent. I didn’t want what the boy had done to happen to me, but it had happened despite my saying no, and the shock and rage I felt about that was more than I could handle for many years.
After a few minutes, Rawson called and told me that when Exeter had gone ahead and questioned David Weber—wait, what? I was thinking, why?—Weber had “admitted” to the allegation about him and me.
I felt light-headed. I leaned down and put my head between my knees so I wouldn’t pass out. “We never had sex,” I managed to say.
Oh no, Rawson said lightly, that wasn’t what Weber admitted to; he’d said he just kissed me once in the basement of a dorm. Rawson said it was school policy to take action against faculty members who were guilty of any sexual misconduct, so he would be sending an email to this effect to the wider Exeter community, and he just wanted me to know.
I had a lot of questions then, which Rawson kept saying he couldn’t answer. Why had Exeter continued with this investigation when I told them the allegation was false? I asked. And did Weber think that I was the one who had made the accusation? Rawson said that the process was confidential, and unfortunately he wasn’t able to share this information.
I felt like I was in an absurdist play, something by Beckett. I asked Rawson if he intended to name me in the email he was sending. He said he didn’t think he would do that. Well, please don’t, I said, because it isn’t true; I don’t know why Weber would say this about me, but it’s false, it’s insane.
Rawson said that he was sorry, but now that Weber had confessed, it couldn’t be helped.
I spent a couple of days anxiously wondering when this email from Exeter was going to be sent and what it was going to say. I didn’t trust Rawson now to be straight with me because, despite all of Exeter’s recent pledges to its community about transparency, he hadn’t been transparent with me about this situation. I was worried I was going to be named in the email, and I didn’t want to be named for a number of reasons, above all because I didn’t want anyone to think I was the one who had made the accusation against Weber. Because this was starting to feel like an injustice.
I didn’t know what the hell was up with Weber confessing. I couldn’t quite believe it.
I was in a physical therapist’s office (torn rotator cuff) two days later when I got another email from Rawson saying that he wished to “alert” me to “a communication to the PEA community that we will be sending this afternoon about the matter we discussed on Saturday morning. It will not provide information that would identify you,” Rawson wrote, “but I felt it important that you know in advance.” He then apologized for the “distress this has caused for you.” I guess I was distressed.
Walking home down Broadway, I texted my friend and Exeter classmate John Burbank, who lives in San Francisco. He’s known as an investor and asset manager, but I still remember him as a guy who used to come and sleep on my floor in New York back in the ’90s when he was visiting. He was like a brother to me. I also knew that he was an active Exeter alumnus, so I thought he might have some influence with Rawson (whereas I clearly did not; among the things I’d been wondering throughout this process: Would Exeter have listened to me if I’d been, say, a big donor?).
“That’s just absurd,” Burbank responded to my text telling him about the email Rawson was planning to send. “If I can help dissuade them from doing this I will.”
Burbank said he’d ask his lawyer Julie Kim to call me so she could draft an email to send to Rawson. Kim and I spoke on the phone that afternoon, and Burbank sent me a copy of the email. It went out that same day, sent to Rawson from Burbank’s lawyer Wesley M. Mullen. Among other things, it said: “My client [Burbank] is deeply disturbed at the prospect that the actions of PEA and its outside counsel will cause new injury where none existed. Any communication should make clear the purported victim’s denial—and should take care not to identify her to her contemporaries, or to publish unsubstantiated insinuations as to the scope of whatever allegations Exeter may be purporting to make.”
Neither Rawson nor anyone on Exeter’s legal team ever responded to Mullen. Rawson had told me in July 2021: “We have been unable to find any record of such a letter.” (When Kim checked, she said that the email had not bounced back. I then re-sent it to Rawson.)
Rawson’s Weber email went out in the afternoon of that same February day. It didn’t include the information that the “student” who had allegedly been hugged and kissed by Weber said it never happened. It said that Rawson regretted “the secondary harm this may cause for some of our community members.”
“Sounds like they had really made up their minds about this Weber guy; I wonder why,” said my friend, whom I’ll identify by one of her initials, A. I’d been telling A. about this situation, which interested her especially as the mother of an Exonian, someone who had graduated in the last couple of years. A. was a sexual assault survivor herself, so she could empathize with how this experience felt to another survivor. “It’s so painful and so common for victims not to be believed,” she said. “And that’s essentially what they’re doing here: saying they don’t believe you in addition to insisting you were assaulted.”
Exeter’s track record on not believing victims was one of the grievances of a student protest that happened at the school on May 9, 2019. I’d heard about it from A., who’d heard about it from her kid. It’s surprising that this event never made it into the national news, because according to former students who were there—as well as a report in the school paper, The Exonian—it was quite dramatic.
More than 200 students swarmed Rawson’s office, planning on doing a sit-in. But there were too many kids, so the protest moved into a quad, where Rawson stood on a chair for almost three hours in the baking sun and answered questions. “Throughout my four years I had seen the administration wildly mishandle several [sexual misconduct] cases,” said Chinasa Mbanugo ’19, a senior at the time and an organizer of the protest. “There were several students as well as faculty who told us that we could risk our future at the academy if we spoke up. However, [we] felt that we needed to take that risk.”
A former student sent me an iPhone recording of the protest, which filled me with admiration for the bravery of the students; listening to them, I wished that when I was a girl, we’d been able to speak up about sexual assault in as open and uncompromising ways.
In the recording, the anger of the students is palpable. And so is Rawson’s firmness in his conviction about the rightness of the academy’s actions when it comes to dealing with alleged victims’ claims. He tells the kids repeatedly that they don’t know everything about the sexual assault cases at the school, they don’t know what goes on behind the scenes—which he says they can’t know because it all has to remain confidential in order to protect everyone involved. In fact, Exeter has a policy that says alleged victims can face “community conduct action,” meaning disciplinary action, if they talk to other students about their claims; the academy says this is to avoid “retaliation” against alleged perpetrators.
What’s clear from the dialogue at the protest, as well as from follow-up reporting by The Exonian, is that kids at Exeter believed that there was a lot of sexual assault going on at the school—a lot that never got reported, they said, because students didn’t feel “safe enough to come forward with their stories of abuse” in the process then in place. This process, as Rawson described it at the protest, went like this: First Christina Palmer heard a report, after which there was an investigation spearheaded by other Exeter officials and involving an “independent investigator”—usually a lawyer hired by the academy, something Rawson didn’t mention here—after which several deans made recommendations, with Rawson as the final person in the chain, the ultimate decider on “what should be done” about an allegation. He called this “Principal’s Discretion.”
The students wanted to know what formal training Rawson had that made him qualified to make such determinations. It was a fair question. My friend Jennifer Powell-Lunder, the clinical psychologist, told me that often at schools, “We have nonclinical people doing clinical work. That’s the problem. They’re not trained…. They have nonclinical people doing these assessments”—which, she said, can lead to misinterpretations of the testimony of alleged victims and perpetrators alike.
Rawson responded to the students’ question about his training by saying that he was trained as a lawyer. “I’m probably more equipped to handle these things because I have a lot of legal training,” he said, “and I’m used to seeing two sides to a story.” This answer perhaps gives an indication of the extent to which the school views these situations as legal matters. (The Exonian later reported that Rawson also said that he had done a session on sexual assault and consent at a gathering of the National Association of Independent Schools, in addition to his own “independent reading.”)
“I think that was a huge feeling in the sit-in protest my senior year,” said Jane Collins, class of ’19—who had been cohead of the student organization Exonians Against Sexual Assault (EASA)—when I contacted her by phone, “that the school doesn’t care about victims, that the process is all about protecting the school from a legal perspective.”
Why were the alleged victims so often not believed?, students at the protest wanted to know. They were upset, they said, that time after time at Exeter “nothing [had] been done” to punish the students who had been accused of sexual misconduct.
“We are here,” said one student, “because of a pattern both in the decisions made by the administration and in the behavior of students who continue to perpetrate sexual assault because they believe that they can get away with it based on the nonaction that they have seen from the administration. You or the administration, what is your plan to prevent this? Because clearly, the measures that have been taken by the school so far in order to prevent sexual assault and educate students are not working.”
Rawson said, “If I understand you correctly, you’re saying sexual assault is happening on a regular basis, correct?”
The student said, “It is.”
Other students in the crowd affirmed loudly, “Yes.”
“Everybody agrees?” said Rawson.
The students said, “Yes.”
“Okay,” said Rawson. “It’s being reported very infrequently. Why is that?”
“You should ask yourself why,” said the student.
“I don’t accept that,” said Rawson.
There was an audibly negative reaction to this comment, soon after which Rawson said: “You’re saying that it’s happening all the time. You say whatever we’re doing, it’s not enough, so let’s figure out what more we should do, and we’ll do it.”
Collins said that in the days after the protest, EASA delivered Rawson a 16-page document entitled “Proposed Revisions to the Handling of Sexual Misconduct Cases at Phillips Exeter Academy.” She sent me a copy; it’s like a policy paper from the U.N. in its level of professionalism. She said she graduated before hearing whether the school implemented any of its suggestions, though she hoped they would. “They never listened to students about what should be done about sexual assault at the school,” she said. “If they had, it could have made a huge difference.”
In fact, after the events of the spring of 2019, Exeter apparently took EASA’s recommendations seriously. Today, the school’s website says that “over the summer of 2019” assistant principal Karen Lassey “worked with a group of students” from EASA and other student organizations to “redesign the process of investigating and adjudicating cases of sexual misconduct by a student.” According to a spokesperson, the primary change was the creation of a misconduct review board consisting of deans and faculty members who review “the findings of the investigator” and render “a decision regarding appropriate disciplinary and educational responses.” “Principal’s Discretion” is now gone.
“The process Exeter puts you through was harder for me to deal with than my assault,” said the young woman I’ll identify by one of her initials, M. She was the student whose alleged sexual assault at Exeter sparked the protest, in addition to the students’ more general frustration.
In the spring of 2019, M. had a panic attack; she had a history of suffering from them. She was taken to a local hospital and given Ativan, a drug used to manage anxiety, also used presurgically as a sedative. Common side effects include sedation, dizziness, weakness, disorientation, and unsteadiness. “I was taking it around the clock in a pretty heavy dose,” she said.
When she returned to the school—where she was a popular senior—friends took care of her, making sure she was okay. After spending time with one friend, a girl, M. started hanging out with a boy—both of whom knew that M. was sedated. M. and the boy were on their way out to go for a walk when M. said he told her, “Oh, I have to get my coat.” M. then went with the boy to his room where, she said, he sexually assaulted her. The encounter ended with the boy saying he had to go somewhere. He walked her back to a mutual friend’s dorm and left.
When M. got to the dorm—a girls dorm, Wheelwright Hall—her friends became concerned, seeing there were marks on M.’s neck and chest, “which I didn’t even remember how they got there,” she said. She told her friends that she and the boy had “hooked up,” without going into details. That night, she said, her friends “freaked out a little bit,” feeling it was wrong of the boy to have hooked up with her when she was impaired. How could she consent when she was out of it? they asked. The next day, they urged her to contact the boy, which she did, texting him that “what happened wasn’t right. I don’t think I was able to consent to you. I don’t even remember parts of it.”
M. said the boy then texted her back, saying he was upset that he had “hurt” her—so upset that he “implied that he was going to hurt himself.” M. said she felt that no matter what the boy had done to her, “I would feel bad my entire life” if he went so far as to commit suicide, so she texted him: “No, it was my fault. I instigated it.”
“That text would be thrown in my face later by the administration,” she said.
Several friends who knew of the alleged assault began to urge M. to report it to the school. When I spoke to one of them, her classmate Gillian Quinto, Quinto confirmed that she had told M., “You definitely need to report this.”
A few days after the alleged assault, M. went with another friend to talk to Christina Palmer. She said she spent “an hour or two” “pretty much explain[ing] everything that had happened.” M. said that Palmer “pushed” her to reveal the name of her alleged attacker, because “there needs to be consequences,” and so M. did name the boy. The school then filed a report about the alleged assault to the Exeter P.D.; but since M. was 18, she was able to avoid a police investigation. “I didn’t want to press charges,” she told me. “The police thing scared me in the sense that it could become public,” and “from what Palmer said, the school investigation would be quick and justice would be served.”
According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website, the majority of sexual assaults, an estimated 75 percent, are never reported to the police. “The prevalence of false reporting cases of sexual violence is low,” it says, yet when survivors come forward, many face scrutiny or encounter barriers. For example, when an assault is reported, survivors may feel that their victimization has been redefined and even distorted by those who investigate, process, and categorize cases.” According to RAINN, of every 1,000 sexual assaults that are reported, approximately 975 perpetrators will walk free.
M. and I had a lot in common, I realized, as we talked on the phone. We were both sexual assault survivors, as well as alleged victims whose testimony had been discounted by Exeter. The same administration, after doing its investigations, ultimately didn’t seem to believe either one of us—not me, a woman in my 50s who said that nothing bad had happened to her at the school, or M., a teenage girl who said that something did.
“I loved the school up until that point,” M. told me. “I lost a lot of trust in adults in the administration that I thought I could trust in a dire situation.”
After M. reported her alleged assault, Exeter began its investigation. “They asked me if I felt threatened by” the alleged attacker, she said, “and I said ‘no’ because he hadn’t beaten me up or anything.” She had to see him frequently, as they participated in some of the same activities. “It was very uncomfortable and anxiety-producing,” she said.
When I asked Deb Bonner—a sexual assault prevention educator who hosts the podcast Prevention Is Now for the Prairie Center Against Sexual Assault—about best practices in such cases, she said: “Schools need to take steps to ensure the safety of both parties, which includes trying to separate them as best they can. What are their schedules? Do they have to pass each other on their way to class? This can be a real juggling act, but they need to try and switch things around.”
Exeter had faced a lawsuit in 2016 for taking more extreme steps toward separating students involved in sexual misconduct allegations, as reported by the Globe. In this case, the school had asked a boy accused of sexual misconduct and harassment toward a girl to leave the school, but his parents sued for him to be allowed to return, which he was.
“It was very disturbing,” said Collins, 21, who was a freshman at the time. “There were a lot of boys rallying around [the boy]…. There was a dodgeball tournament where all these boys pulled up their shirts and their chests said, ‘Free [the name of the alleged perpetrator].’ ”
M. said that Palmer collected evidence from her: the texts between her and the boy, pictures of the marks on her neck. “They were like, we’re going to conduct a very thorough investigation,” M. said. “ We’re going to bring in an outside party. ” That outside party turned out to be one of the “independent investigators” the school says it “retains” for sexual assault cases. M. said she thought the woman who interviewed her was a lawyer. Exeter officials did not respond to questions about whether this investigator was a lawyer for the academy.
M. said the school never suggested to her that she herself might want to have an attorney at this interview, or even her parents, who were not informed that the interview was taking place. Actually, it’s Exeter policy that “parents, guardians or attorneys may not attend or listen in on interviews” during these investigations.
M. said the school’s investigator asked her “weird questions about my history with” the alleged perpetrator, “like, had I led him on?…It felt like they were trying to do something so they wouldn’t have to pursue disciplinary action against him. They were trying to paint a narrative like, ‘Oh, maybe he got confused.’ ” She said the investigator also asked her “about what I was doing sexually with the boy I was seeing at the time when the incident happened,” which M. did not see as relevant. “They asked me a lot of questions about the text where I said it was my fault. I tried to explain to them I was afraid [the alleged attacker] was going to kill himself.”
After the interview, M. said, Palmer told her not to continue talking to anyone about the alleged attack, as it could be considered “retaliation,” and M. could face disciplinary action. “I felt like, this is literally the most traumatic experience of my life thus far,” M. said. “I’m going to talk to my friends about it.”
Over the next few weeks, as April 2019 turned into May, M. said she heard nothing from the administration. She continued sessions with a school therapist the academy had arranged for her to see. She was anxious, she said, waiting for the outcome of the investigation. “I spent a lot of those days throwing up.”
Frustrated by a seeming lack of transparency, she said she went to see Palmer several times, asking her, “What’s going on?” “You guys are keeping me out of things,” M. said she told the director of student well-being. “I’m suffering. This is hurting me.” She said Palmer said it was taking so long because “she [was] dealing with so many cases” and “they were so busy interviewing people.” “She told me to keep things quiet, like, ‘Don’t talk to people.’… It felt like she kept trying to keep me quiet.”
When M. then asked friends on the list she had given Palmer of people to interview about her case—“people who’d seen me [after the alleged assault] and my parents too”—“they were all like, ‘No, they never interviewed me,’ ” she said. “I marched my ass over to [Palmer’s] office and I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ Then she retook the names and the next day they all got emails about getting interviewed.”
Finally, in the second week of May, M. said she was called into Rawson’s office—she hadn’t spoken to him about any of this until now. She said that Rawson said the report on the investigation into her alleged assault—which M. was never allowed to read—had come to the conclusion: “ ‘You were able to consent.’ ”
“That was it. That’s the quote,” said M. She said Rawson then reassured her that she and her alleged attacker would both be able to graduate. “It was something weird and invalidating. There was no apology. Nothing like, ‘We recognize you went through something hard.’ It was just pretty cold and dry. I remember Palmer said, ‘Do you have any questions?’ I started crying. I started breaking down and I flew out of the room.”
M. said Palmer caught up with her and walked her over to the campus health services—M. was afraid she was going to have another panic attack. “ ‘You can’t change this,’ ” she said Palmer told her. “ ‘You have to move on.’ ” (Citing confidentiality, the school would not respond to questions about M’s account.)
That night, news of the principal’s decision raced around campus via social media, and the next day, more than 200 students stormed Rawson’s office. M. stayed home that day, not wanting to be the focus of the protest, but kids sent her photos and texts.
“The students at Exeter are incredible people,” she said. “I wouldn’t have gotten through this without them. I developed clinical depression over this. They saved me.”
It was after M. reminded me how incredible Exeter kids can be that I decided to go on a video chat that my classmates were having in May of this year. I’d continued to feel upset by what had happened with the Weber email, and I thought my classmates might have some suggestions about what to do about it.
“You need to talk to Holland & Knight,” someone said after I’d told them about the situation, which they seemed to find as bizarre as I did (there were about 20 people on the call).
“How can I do that?” I asked. “Will they talk to me?”
A few of my classmates agreed to be cc’d on an email to Rawson asking him if I could talk to Exeter’s lawyers at Holland & Knight. One was my friend John Burbank; the other three were people who were active in the alumni community.
Rawson put me in touch with Holly Barcroft, Exeter’s general counsel, who connected me with Miriam McKendall and Phil Catanzano at Holland & Knight. On June 3, 2021, I had a Zoom call with McKendall and Catanzano. I learned on this call that Catanzano was the attorney who had interviewed Weber during the investigation into the third-party allegation that Weber and I had had a “sexual relationship.” I had a lot of questions for the lawyers, which I’d written out prior to the conversation so I would remember everything I wanted to ask.
When I asked why Exeter had continued this investigation even after I had denied the allegation about Weber, McKendall said that it was part of the “process” to reach out to the persons involved and that included Weber.
“But you never reached out to me,” I reminded her.
McKendall agreed that, no, they had not. The reason being, she said, “as we understood it, the academy had reached out to you, and you had made it clear that you didn’t want to be contacted about that.”
After Palmer had upset me with her call, I did email and told her not to contact me anymore, but that email was addressed to Palmer alone; I had continued to talk to Rawson. And I never knew that Holland & Knight was continuing with the investigation.
I told McKendall I would have gladly talked to them.
“If it was a miscommunication, let us be the first to offer you an apology for it,” said McKendall.
“Do you think that that constitutes a problem in your investigation?” I asked.
McKendall said, “Well, because David Weber admitted to the conduct—”
“So his word is more important than mine?” I asked.
“Oh, certainly not,” McKendall said.
“It sure looks like it,” I said.
“I would disagree with that,” she said.
I asked whether Weber had thought that I was the one who had made the allegation; McKendall and Catanzano said this was not his understanding; he knew it was a third party. When I asked whether Weber had been told that I had denied the allegation—something I asked twice on this call—they did not answer directly.
Catanzano responded by saying, “I asked him if he knew your name, and from him knowing your name, he did remember you. That is when he shared this information with us. We did not press him for that.” They also stressed that Weber had had his attorney present.
“He immediately, upon hearing my name, offered this information?”—meaning his confession—I asked.
“Within moments,” Catanzano said, “he shared that you were a student he was close with, and we asked him what he meant by being ‘close with,’ and within moments of that, he shared with us that he kissed you.” In the basement of Dutch House, in the spring of 1982.
I started to laugh; the whole thing suddenly struck me as so absurd. I didn’t even remember that Dutch House had a basement.
Catanzano seemed irritated by my laughter. “Excuse me,” he said a bit testily. “We did not know the extent of his behavior until he shared it.”
“It never happened,” I told them.
After some more back and forth, Catanzano told me, “Our goal here today was to hear your perspective on what occurred.”
A few times during the call, the lawyers asked me to talk about Weber; but it made me wary, wondering if perhaps whatever I said would be used in their report, to somehow bolster the academy’s version of events, so I didn’t answer. I told them if they would just listen to my questions, they would know everything they needed to know about what I felt about this situation.
“Are you aware of Her Voice at the Table?” I asked.
“No,” said McKendall, “tell me.”
Her Voice at the Table was a series of virtual events Exeter had run over the last year to celebrate 50 years of coeducation at the school. As part of the festivities, in the spring of 2021, Gloria Steinem spoke at a virtual symposium.
“Do you find it ironic that in this situation, my voice was not consulted by you?” I asked.
“I disagree that your voice wasn’t consulted by the academy,” said McKendall.
The next day, I mailed a letter to Weber at his home in New Hampshire. After talking to the lawyers, I was more doubtful than ever that he had actually confessed; none of it made sense to me. I tried to make this letter as brief and spare as possible so as not to confuse him—I’d started to wonder if he’d possibly become confused in his old age.
I told him that I was not the one who had made the accusation against him; that I had denied this accusation; and that I’d like to talk to him about it. Within a few days he emailed me back at the address I’d given, saying, “Of course I’m willing to talk with you.”
“If the school had treated this ‘case’ as a misdemeanor, so to speak, and without duplicity,” Weber wrote, “I would have entirely moved on by now. Since they have proceeded as they have, I’ve only partly moved on; I’m still angry.”
I called him at his home on June 7, 2021. I was nervous as the phone rang; the situation was so awkward. But as soon as I heard his voice, I felt more comfortable, recognizing the person I knew. He sounded the same, almost 40 years later.
“You say you’re angry about this; so am I,” I told him. “I don’t like the way I was treated.” I asked him to tell me the story of what happened from his side.
Weber said that for him it all started in 2017, when he was questioned by Catanzano in connection with Cecilia Morgan’s complaint to Exeter about Richard Schubart. “They were investigating whether there had been failures to report,” he said. “What I told them was I had no recollection of such a conversation with [Cecilia’s sister] Maria, but in general I thought Maria was a reliable person, so if she said there was a conversation, there must have been a conversation, but not one in which I understood there was a reporting obligation.”
After concluding their investigation, Weber said, Exeter officials told him, “We’ve decided that you didn’t do anything actionable, and I had been essentially completely exonerated.”
Weber said he didn’t have any further dealings with the school’s lawyers until late September 2020, when he got a call from Barcroft: “She said, we have received a complaint that accuses you of having had an inappropriate relationship with a former student.” Weber said Barcroft never told him any details of this allegation, although she did make clear the accusation was coming from a third party. (A spokesperson for the school denies this, saying, “Ms. Barcroft simply informed David Weber that Holland & Knight would like him to submit to an additional interview, in light of new information received.”)
Barcroft’s call to Weber came weeks after I had denied the allegation to Palmer, Rawson, and the Exeter police. But Barcroft did not inform Weber of any of this, he said; he wasn’t aware of my denials until he got my letter. And then in October 2020, he had his interview with Catanzano over Zoom.
“So did you tell him anything happened?” I asked.
“I told him that we kissed,” he said.
I was stunned.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
“Because we did,” he said. “I’m surprised that you remember that differently.”
I had imagined that Weber would have some other explanation—that he felt pressured or cornered or rattled; that he had thought that by saying he had kissed me he was somehow pleading to a lesser charge than a “sexual relationship,” for which there might even be legal repercussions—anything but this casual assertion of something of which I had no memory.
“I have no recollection of that at all,” I told him. “Are you sure you remember me?”
He laughed and said, “Yes, I do.”
“Do you have any signs of memory loss or dementia or anything?” I asked. “Or could you be confusing me with another person?”
He said, “No.”
“So you told him this because you thought it happened.”
“Correct,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Well, I’m telling you it never happened.”
“Okay,” Weber said. “I’m convinced that it did happen, although I’m also convinced and have always said that there was no sexual dimension to it.”
I was trying to understand him. I suddenly had a different memory—a memory of something I don’t think I ever would have remembered but for this conversation. It was of a different English teacher, a burly fellow who, at graduation, hugged me so hard it knocked the wind out of me. I remembered how my older brother, who’d been standing there, had later asked, “What was that?” And I told him, “Oh, he’s just very intense.”
“So you’re saying we kissed but there was nothing sexual about it?” I asked Weber.
“Correct,” he said.
I felt that I had arrived at another absurd impasse in this situation.
Weber and I sort of tacitly agreed to disagree on our memories of each other. Then we started speculating about why the academy would have come down so hard on him for an incident that I said never happened and he said was not sexual.
“As far as I can tell,” Weber said, “they’re proceeding in the way they are because they were humiliated by the whole Schubart thing and the way it assimilated Exeter into the larger New England prep school narrative of decades-long sexual abuse of students, especially by faculty. Now their focus is on extricating themselves from that narrative and demonstrating that they’re no longer like that, and they have zero tolerance for any kind of boundary violation.”
I was thinking of M.
Weber and I spoke again a couple of weeks later with his lawyer, Russell Hilliard, on the phone. I wanted to hear more about what had happened when Weber was interviewed about me by Holland & Knight, and his lawyer had offered to be on this call.
On the call, Weber also shared that some of his fellow teachers and former students had expressed support for him and reached out to Rawson to express their dismay at the “hugging and kissing” email. Weber was troubled, he said, at seeing some of the posts on the Exonians Facebook page that had appeared after the email had landed, comments which characterized him as a predator, of “abusing an adolescent.” (The page is public.)
When people posted positive comments about him—“He was someone I trusted implicitly,” for example—they were challenged by those who insisted that they had a “moral obligation to examine those memories in light of new information.” These defenders of victims said that expressing any positive memories of Weber was offensive to—even a form of violence against—all victims. This was a strange and unsettling thing for me to read, as I was the alleged victim in this case and I knew that no abuse had happened.
“I think some of the firestorm on Facebook was people thinking there must have been more to [Rawson’s email] than it said,” Weber speculated. “Otherwise the academy wouldn’t have acted in such an extreme way”—delivering the same punishment to him that it had handed down to Cecilia Morgan’s abuser, Richard Schubart.
Weber said the first draft of Rawson’s email had actually said that he had admitted to “sexual misconduct.” But Weber and Hilliard had protested this language, saying that it was “false and defamatory,” after which Exeter amended it to say that Weber had admitted to “hugging and kissing” a student; however the beginning of the missive still said it brought news of “sexual misconduct.”
When Weber confessed to the alleged hugging and kissing incident in his interview with Catanzano, it was actually around the same time as the conversation I had with Rawson in which he gave me no indication that this investigation was moving forward.
After he confessed, Weber said, the conversation became “very explicit on an anatomical level.”
“What? Really?” I said. “Oh, my God!”
“[Catanzano] wanted to know precisely what things…came into contact,” Hilliard offered.
My heart sped up. It angered me that even after my denials about an alleged “sexual relationship,” there had been a lawyer interrogating Weber about what contact he had allegedly made with my then 17-year-old body.
“I’m just disgusted,” I said, my voice getting louder. “It’s not right of him to discuss my body with another person in this context…. Do you understand how I feel?”
I wasn’t sure if the men did understand. Weber almost defended Catanzano in this regard, saying, “Yes, but he’s been asked to investigate my behavior.”
I felt that I had to make it clear to them that, to me, this line of questioning was outrageous. “You’re men,” I said, “so you haven’t grown up in a world in which your body is constantly being commented upon and talked about. It’s infuriating for a lot of women to think that here is a man asking another man about her body—my body!—and he’s talking about my body even after I said this conversation should be over!”
I was upset. I could tell that the men didn’t really get why. But how could they understand completely? They didn’t know about my sexual assault. They couldn’t see how for me this was all wrapped up in my feelings about once having been robbed of my consent.
After a moment, Hilliard said, “I’m distressed that they weren’t honest with us about what had been alleged or not alleged or denied…. That’s the inexplicable part to me—when they have your uncategorical denial in conjunction with some anonymous third-party report and don’t share that with David and me. The only explanation is that it’s not appropriate.”
“What it says to me is they privileged the accusation over your denial,” said Weber.
“Why in the world did they pursue this?” asked Hilliard.
I was hoping just to get Morgan’s reaction to what I’d learned about alleged sexual assaults at Exeter in the present day when I called her in July.
Over email, Morgan had agreed to talk to me. We had never spoken before; we hadn’t known each other at Exeter except in passing. The conversation started with her telling me that, in anticipation of our call, she had looked up her agreement with Exeter—in 2015, she received an undisclosed settlement from the school.
She said that in her talks with Exeter, school officials had promised her “they would create a system that would be available to students to talk about or report any possible sexual abuse and that there would be some kind of training for the adults, the staff, to prevent it. It was a big concern of mine that sexual abuse be prevented,” she added, saying that her worries were related to her experience with Schubart.
“Mr. Weber knew about it,” she said.
I hadn’t brought up Weber’s name; Morgan mentioned him first. Then she told me something I didn’t know, something that hasn’t been made clear in news reports about her case, nor does Weber seem to remember it himself: She said that when we were students at Exeter, she had actually told her sister, Maria, to tell Weber not to report Schubart.
“Mr. Weber said [to Maria], ‘Do you want me to report this?’ ” Morgan said. “And Maria asked me and I said no. And so he didn’t, which, in retrospect, I don’t think was the appropriate approach. I was protective of Mr. Schubart and our relationship…. But Mr. Weber should have reported Mr. Schubart. Mr. Schubart should have been turned in….
“Quite frankly, Mr. Weber has ruined my life,” Morgan said. “I mean, if he had turned Mr. Schubart in and I had been acknowledged and all of that stuff before I went off to college, before I went off into the world….” I recognized in her voice the pain that sexual assault victims carry with them throughout our lives.
“I hate Mr. Weber,” Morgan said, repeating: “Mr. Weber never turned Mr. Schubart in.”
I’d told her that I’d decided to do this story because I’d been contacted by Christina Palmer, who had called me up out of the blue and asked if I had had a sexual relationship with Weber when I was at Exeter. I said I didn’t know who had made the allegation, which was false.
“They won’t tell me who it is,” I said.
There was a pause; then after a bit Morgan said: “You may want to hang up on me when I’m done telling you this. A couple of years after we graduated from Exeter”—around 1984—“a friend of mine told me that you were having a sexual relationship with Mr. Weber. She found this out.”
“She ‘found this out’? How?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Morgan. “She and I were good friends and she knew about what had happened with Mr. Schubart. She said that she had heard this.”
“She’d heard it from whom?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Morgan. “I have no idea.”
“I wonder if she’s the person who reported this,” I mused.
“No—I am,” said Morgan. “Because I was so pissed.”
“Oh, you reported it?”
I was so shocked by this revelation it took me a moment to understand what she was saying.
“Because I was very upset that Mr. Weber didn’t turn Mr. Schubart in,” Morgan explained. “The fact that, if Weber had been having a relationship—or whatever you want to call it—with a student at the same time, then of course he was not going to turn Mr. Schubart in. This whole culture of, ‘Let’s just have sex with students and we all get away with it.’ Do they have any idea how devastating it is to the student?” she went on. “It was very upsetting, this culture of men fucking around with girls, taking advantage of them—I was just so upset by it. So I just said, ‘Would you please talk to her?’ ”—meaning me.
“I can tell you I’m upset right now,” I said after a moment. “My body feels bad right now.”
“I’m so sorry,” Morgan said.
But why, I asked, after all these years, had she decided to make this allegation? She said it was after she’d received an email from Rawson that went out to the Exeter community promising the school was doing everything it could to “deal with sexual misconduct.” In an email dated August 24, 2020, Rawson announced that criminal charges had been filed against Szczesny Jerzy Kaminski for “multiple counts of sexual assault involving a former Exeter student.” The principal further encouraged alumni to “report sexual misconduct,” saying, “We remain committed to investigating any allegations.”
Searching her emails as we spoke, Morgan said she found the one she said she sent to Christina Palmer on August 24, 2020, concerning her allegation about Weber and me. She said she’d also exchanged emails about this with Holly Barcroft around the same time. “I never had any contact with Rawson,” she said.
I asked her why she didn’t simply “reach out to me and say, ‘Look, I heard this. Is it true? Would you like to report this?’ Why didn’t you come to me?”
“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I wish I had. Because it never occurred to me, I guess, because I was focused on David Weber. I apologize. Why didn’t I? Because maybe I thought you would say, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? It’s none of your business.’ ”
“And if I had said that, wouldn’t that be my right?” I asked.
I told her about my experiences talking with Palmer, Rawson, the lawyers at Holland & Knight, and Weber. “I felt like I was being treated like a liar by everyone,” I said. “I felt like no one believed me, and that was upsetting too because it made me think about how victims are not believed.”
“Clearly, I screwed up,” Morgan said. “I’m not sure this makes it any better for you, but I didn’t know they would upset you. I just thought they would ask you and you would either say yes or no. I honestly just wanted them to talk to Mr. Weber.”
I told her how this all made more sense to me now—the decision by the school to punish Weber despite my denials—now that I knew it was she who had made the allegation.
“Why?” said Morgan. “I didn’t know I had that much sway at Exeter.”
“They might have wanted to make sure you were satisfied with how they dealt with this case because Weber failed to report your situation,” I said. “They might have also thought, like you did, that Weber must have been having a sexual relationship with a student and that’s why he didn’t report your case. His failure to report caused them a lot of problems.”
Morgan sighed. “I didn’t want him to be punished,” she said after a while. “I wanted the academy to deal with their system that covers up the abuse of girls. I wanted them to put a system in place where teachers are compelled to report…. I want the school to do the right thing because I know how traumatizing it is to have this happen and I want it to stop.”
“We’re on the same page, and I totally support you in that,” I said. “We have a lot in common. Our lives are parallel in a lot of ways, so I get you, and I’m not mad at you. I understand why you did what you did. I understand all of the emotions behind it, I think.”
“The last thing I would want to do is hurt another victim, and I am so ambivalent about Exeter and a lot of stuff,” Morgan said. We were silent a moment and then she said, “I really actually don’t give a shit about Exeter.”
We laughed. And then we decided that the next time we’re in each other’s city, we’re going to get together for a beer.
A couple of weeks later, I got an email from Rawson responding to the many questions I had for him, Palmer, and the school’s lawyers about this whole situation. Rawson seemed convinced that Exeter had handled everything correctly.
“My colleagues and I believe we have followed the thoughtfully conceived protocols for investigating and disclosing sexual misconduct in the Weber matter,” he wrote. Because “Mr. Weber admitted, with his attorney present, to engaging in conduct with a student that unquestionably constituted sexual misconduct,” there was no other choice of action. But, he added, “that does not keep us from sincerely regretting the harm you have experienced in that process.”
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