Groton battles abuse charges that threaten its prestige
By T. Trent Gegax
Newsweek
June 28 issue - Every time he heard the music, Zeke Hawkins knew they were coming to get him. A 16-year-old first-year student at Groton, the exclusive New England prep school, Hawkins was in a friend's dorm room one night in 1997 when he first heard a boombox playing a song from the movie "Saturday Night Fever." A moment later, a group of upperclassmen pinned him down. Hawkins was startled, but not terribly scared. He figured he was in for a night of hazing. Maybe the older boys would shove his head into a toilet or force him to drink water until he threw up. Hawkins had heard about hazing at prep schools, a relic of a brutish past. Instead, Hawkins says, the boys began licking his chest and face, and grabbed his groin. They then forced their fingers into his rectum. In the months that followed, he says they came back at least a dozen times. "Some kids didn't mind it, for whatever reason," says Hawkins, now a 23-year-old film director's assistant in New York. He explains the assaults as a vaguely homoerotic ritual intended to ingratiate new students to the older kids. "But a lot of us thought they clearly crossed a line."
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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.
