So does the state of Massachusetts. Hawkins’s story led to a five-year investigation that uncovered more student allegations of abuse. A grand jury charged Groton’s board of trustees with criminal misdemeanor, for allegedly failing to report similar claims of assault by at least one other student. (Individual trustees are personally indemnified against legal action.) “If we had the information we would’ve reported it,” says Groton spokeswoman Karen Schwartzman. The school, which pleaded not guilty last week, claims that administrators met with the unnamed boy and his parents, but didn’t learn enough to file a report. “The state needs only a bare minimum of information,” says Martha Coakley, the district attorney prosecuting the case. The school did report the claims of Hawkins and two other students, but says the state did not act on them because the students were no longer minors.
If Groton is found guilty, the fine would amount to a mere $1,000. But the matter is a stain on one of the country’s most prestigious schools. Young Franklin Delano Roosevelt attended Groton, as did boys with last names like DuPont, Morgan and Harriman. John Kerry’s father taught there. Back then, the atmosphere was different. Parents of Groton students dropped off their sons and entrusted them to the headmaster, expecting the boys to be returned as men five or six years later. (Groton went coed in 1975.) Embarrassments were handled quietly, within the walls of the school, not in court. But today, with parents fretting over every B on a report card and demanding constant accountability from administrators, the idea of the school’s acting in loco parentis is a quaint memory.
At first, Hawkins kept quiet about what happened in the best stoic tradition of the school. He later told the school’s beloved headmaster, William Polk, who then sternly lectured the students about personal boundaries. Groton also investigated–and found 19 additional students who said they had heard about the assaults on Hawkins or others, according to school officials. (State officials say it’s still unclear whether any of the 19 had also been physically assaulted.) After two more students claimed similar abuse in “pig piles,” and the school failed to take enough action to satisfy Hawkins, he took matters into his own hands. One morning in 1999, during an assembly for a few hundred prospective students and parents, Hawkins walked up to the microphone and nervously made an announcement: “At Groton School, over at least the past four years, a series of homosexual rapes and molestations has occurred.”
The scandal has split the school. One Groton father says his son, a ‘93 grad, was “completely broken” by the abuse. “The bullies took complete control over the little ones,” he says. “My son was turned into a sexual slave for a while.” But others save their outrage for Hawkins. “I can tell you that the entirety of it is, pardon my language, bulls—,” says one of his former buddies. Few believe Groton’s reputation will be permanently damaged. But the episode has left some alums nostalgic for the days when a private school’s business stayed private.
