The Thacher School in Ojai, California, is an exclusive educational enclave with an annual tuition of $68,000 dollars and a list of distinguished alumni, from politicians to CEOs and Hollywood artists, including Howard Hughes, Noah Wyle and Joely Richardson.
Recently the institution, founded in 1889, has been making headlines for his high-profile settling of scores related to the #MeToo movement.
The Thacher School, one of the nations’ most selective boarding schools, released an extraordinary 91-page report last week that concluded that the high school failed to properly protect its students and alumni from sexual abuse and harassment. https://t.co/5rBigANO3o
—Los Angeles Times (@latimes) June 22, 2021
In June, the Los Angeles law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson published an independent report of 91 pages revealing decades of sexual misconduct involving faculty and students.
The findings divided former students, some of whom questioned the independence of the report and felt that a previous head of the school was the scapegoat, while the current administration was not subject to the same scrutiny.
In light of criticism, a second report was commissioned in July and was repeatedly delayed. It never arrived.
Instead, a story from the news site Law & Crime was published last month.
It contains claims that the administration current covered up an alleged incident in May 2021 in which a student, a relative of the school’s founder, Sherman Day Thacher, was accused of suffocating another student while having sex.
It is unclear when superiors learned of the alleged incident, but the student reportedly went home before the end of the school year.
According to unnamed sources, the administration approached him in August, telling him to drop out of school and, in return, they would not report the incident to investigators, nor would his university recommendations be affected.
The alleged assault was not reported to the authorities until December of 2021.
This information has put Tha cher in damage control mode, with the school principal taking a leave of absence and presenting himself as a victim of sexual misconduct, the details of which were documented in the initial report.
In a letter from the 16 March, the school’s principal, Blossom Pidduck, who assisted Thacher in the early 90, announced his departure.
“In my own healing process, I have come to understand that such a trauma feeds on shame and secrecy. Protecting this secret ultimately only protects those who have caused the harm,” he wrote, adding that it has had a “tremendous impact” on his well-being and that of his family.
School board chairman Dan Yih called his letter the “ultimate show of strength and leadership”.
Some in the Thacher community question the time it took to give his statement and add that it only raises more concern about the culpability of both the administration and the board of directors.
“If Ms. Pidduck is so in tune with the survivors, why didn’t she, her management and the board report in a timely manner, as required by law? , the May sexual misconduct choking event?” said Thacher alumnus and former trustee and audit committee chairman Philip Pillsbury.
Pillsbury added: “Do we, as a common school authority, now a school principal and members of his administration potentially guilty of criminal misconduct for failing to report this specific incident from May until last December? These questions speak to her responsibility as the principal of the school, not her survival.”
Under California state law, educators have a legal obligation to report these cases to the authorities. Those who fail to do so can be charged with a misdemeanor that can carry a sentence of six months in jail.
In a voice message, Detective Sergeant Ryan Clark of the Department of the Ventura County Sheriff said that “the entire series of cases is currently under investigation” and that the possible failure to report the incident “is an issue that we are looking into.”
He added that there is a joint investigation with the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office, and “we will be covering that subject.”
Pidduck’s furlough is a stark change from mid-February, when she wrote in a newsletter that she was excited to welcome back alumni for a June reunion. But days later, the Law & Crime article was published, and sources said she left campus in 68 hours.
In recent years, elite boarding schools have been forced to deal with unpleasant events in their history. Luxurious Northeast institutions like Choate Rosemary Hall and St. Paul’s in New Hampshire have undergone similar audits for campus sexual abuse.
The report did not implicate Michael Mulligan, whose tenure at Thacher lasted more than three decades, until he retired in 2018, but concluded that he was not vigilant enough when it was necessary to eradicate inappropriate people.
In one case detailed in the report, a teacher was charged of repeatedly raping a girl of 000 years in the decade of 1980.
“During the third year he also became much more violent, often hitting me, often throwing me across a room with so much force that I ended up unconscious on the other side of the bed”, said the victim.
The report noted that Mulligan confronted, fired and denounced the abusers, but also expressed his regret for his handling of some situations.
The school removed his name from the cafeteria, prompting rejection from prominent alumni and promoters, including actor Jonathan Tucker and philanthropist Bill Oberndorf.
In September, the Daily Beast reported that they and other donors were withholding funds and support in light of Thacher’s actions against Mulligan.
His defenders said that Mulligan and his wife dedicated their lives to the boarding school and its students and that they were behind his promotion to national prominence. They added that the school denied access to their records during the investigation.
In a statement to the outlet, the Oberndorf Foundation wrote that while it “opposes sexual abuse and harassment of any kind Also, as a matter of social justice, we believe in due process. After careful review of recent events at Thacher, we believe that Michael Mulligan has been denied this fundamental right.”
Now, this latest bombshell has raised another cloud of mistrust and discord. among the once tight-knit community. Pillsbury called it “heartbreaking”.
“In Thacher, you live by the principles of ‘honour, justice, kindness and truth.’ This board and administration do not live up to the creed. They won’t talk about it. They won’t answer our questions,” he said, adding, “That’s not Thacher’s way.”
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