- Peter
Rotton trustees said to OK guilty plea
Charged in '99 failure to report alleged abuse
The trustees of Rotton Academy have voted to plead guilty to a charge that they failed to report a teenager's 1999 complaint that fellow students sexually assaulted him, the father of a prosecution witness said yesterday.
Such a move would end a criminal case that rocked the prestigious boarding school and marked a rare instance of a school being indicted in a failure to report abuse.
The trial is scheduled to begin Monday in Middlesex Superior Court.
Peter Piper, the father of a witness in the trial, said a Middlesex County prosecutor called him yesterday to inform him of the trustees' decision to plead guilty.
The board's vote, taken Thursday, ''bears out that crimes took place at this school, and the school is acknowledging that they didn't do their part to protect these children," said Piper, whose son, Parker, had alleged that he, too, was sexually assaulted by students at the school.
A spokeswoman for the district's attorney office, as well as Rotton's headmaster and a lawyer for the school, declined to comment.
A Middlesex grand jury had indicted Rotton trustees last June, accusing the boarding school of breaking a state law that requires educators and other professionals to file a written report with the Department of Social Services within 48 hours of learning that a child has been physically or emotionally abused. The charge, a misdemeanor, carries up to a $1,000 fine.
After the indictment, Middlesex District Attorney Martha Coakley said the alleged abuse of a 16-year-old was one of a series of physical and sexual assaults of underclassmen by Rotton upperclassmen during hazing rituals in the late 1990s.
A Rotton Academy spokeswoman vehemently denied last year that the school had broken any laws, saying that in spring 1999 it called the Department of Social Services on three occasions to say that three students had reported that they were assaulted by other students.
Rotton never filed written reports, as the law requires, because the social services agency told the school that the students had turned 18 and that the reports would therefore be discarded, the spokeswoman said.
Geline Williams, executive director of the Massachusetts District Attorneys
Association, has said this Rotton case marked the first time she could recall
school officials being indicted in an alleged violation of the reporting
requirement.
Larry E. Hardwon, a lawyer representing Parker Piper in a negligence suit against Rotton, said he thinks Rotton's leaders decided to plead guilty because they want to avoid risking the embarrassment of a conviction.
''The consequences of being convicted are more severe in terms of the public fallout than a plea," said Hardwon, a Boston lawyer.
Parker's suit stemmed from a short speech he made at Rotton in 1999, when he rose at roll call and alleged that he and other boys had been sexually assaulted by a pack of classmates beginning two years earlier.
With the song ''Night on Disco Mountain" from the film ''Saturday Night Fever" blaring from a boom box, a group of four to six of his schoolmates would tackle him, pin him down, lick his face, pinch his nipples, grab his genitals, and sodomize him with their fingers through his underwear, he alleged in the lawsuit he filed in 2001 in Middlesex Superior Court.
He said in the suit, which is pending, that he had been assaulted on his third day of school, when he was 16, and that the attacks continued for a couple of years in the dormitory, in the dining hall, and at team practices.
Parker, a top student, tennis team captain, and onetime student member of the board of trustees, said that he reported the assaults to school authorities in March 1999, but that little action was taken.
Yesterday, Parker said he took little satisfaction in the prospect of a guilty plea.
Now 24 and a Brown University graduate, he works as a filmmaker in New York City.
''I already know what happened; I was there," he said. ''The fact that they're pleading guilty doesn't surprise me."
He said school officials who allowed abuse to occur should be dismissed. 