The Dark History of School Abuse

Ravi Gupta (0:00)

Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for political eclectics. I'm Ravi Gupta, and this is going to be a tough episode. So today, I'm interviewing Amanda Geduld from The 74, who wrote a quite extensive investigation into 70 plus years of sexual abuse in New York schools, both private and public schools. And we're going to talk all about what we learned there and some of the problems that persist, not just in New York, but around the country, in some cases, in our schools. And how our schools, in some cases, are some of the most dangerous places for kids who are subject to some of the worst actors in our society. So if you have kids around in the car or whatever, or you have something in your background that could make this a tough listen, I just want to warn you now, ahead of time before we get into this episode, because it is a tough listen. I also, before we get there, I want to mention, in this episode, I talk about this New Orleans pod, which I also talked about last week in the Nicole Anna Jones episode. We have one more day left, so tomorrow, October 15th, is the last day for voting for the Signal Awards. We have five nominations. I don't think there's any podcast, maybe in history, I don't know, of the Signal Awards, I sound like Trump here, that's ever gotten five nominations for one pod. We've got five. And we'll just link in the show notes to one of the people's choice. You could vote for all five, but I don't want to take up too much of time. It takes like 10, 30 seconds to do it, especially if you have a Gmail account.

It would be a huge favor to me if you just jumped in. We're neck and neck for the People's Choice Award for the Most Inspiring Podcast. So any of your votes that you put in in the next 24 hours could put us over the top.

We're one and two. Every time I click it, we're a different one or two. So go in there. The Signal Awards, we'll put the link right at the top of the episode description in the show notes. Do us a favor and vote. And I appreciate everything you do to support our work. And again, so we're gonna get into this episode and we're doing some work now in partnership with Education Reform Now. And so shout out to them for supporting our work, our education reporting. And so this is a tough listen and it's widespread. People who know me know that I'm gonna push on some of the questions like the unions and teachers unions, but as we get to the diocese and private schools have their problems in this too. So it's not that simple. So although I pushed a couple of questions on that, it obviously goes well beyond anyone problem within our politics and that there's something really wicked and destructive about certain aspects of our society that is timeless and not specific to public or private institutions that we're getting into here. And so without further ado, let's jump into this interview.

Amanda, welcome to the podcast.

Amanda Geduld (2:41)

Thank you so much for having me.

Ravi Gupta (2:43)

Well, this is one of those stories that I wish we didn't have to talk about. I'm a product of both the New York City public school system and archdiocese schools. I'm also on the board of an archdiocese Catholic high school, which thankfully, which is the school I graduated from. I searched your records and there was nothing there, but actually my middle school was one of the cases.

A couple years after I left and I couldn't figure out who the teacher was. But we'll get to some of this. But let's just start with the sort of Genesis, the origin story of all of this.

Amanda Geduld (3:16)

Yeah. So, I mean, in some ways, the Genesis of this story came far before I was even a journalist. I started off my career as a high school English teacher.

One of my first years in the classroom, I was a super young teacher, was very new, and came across a man in a position of power at our school, who was forming a really inappropriate relationship with a freshman student.

I went to my superiors and repeatedly reported what I was seeing and watched time and time again as it was brushed under the rug, covered up. I was told, we'll look into this and nothing happened. Ultimately, that man was protected and the student was not. Fast forward six years, I become an investigative journalist. On my very first day of work at The 74, my editor said, there's this thing called the Child Victims Act that allowed adult survivors to file claims against institutions that allegedly protected perpetrators, and I think that we should look into it. So we knew that there were about 11,000 cases filed under the Child Victims Act. What we didn't know is how many of those involved schools. And so we just started digging and we went through the New York State Court system and tried to find an answer to that question.