I saw John Hellemann on the Chris Matthews Show this morning make reference to covering a story about pedophilia at the American Boy Choir School in Princeton, New Jersey. I hadn’t heard anything about it, so I went and found Helleman’s article, which he wrote in 2006. Let me tell you something. I now have a major case of The Creeps. While this rampant sexual abuse was taking place in the 1970’s, I was going to school less than a half mile up the road at Johnson Park Elementary School. We had our own problem.
I can’t find anything about it on the internet, but when I was in 4th grade we had a janitor named Eddie who was very cool and who all the kids loved. We were sad when he was moved to Riverside Elementary School on the other side of town. Over at Riverside he was allowed to run an afterschool basketball program. And he spent the next seven or eight years using that program to molest kids. When I was in middle school, I went with a friend who lived nearby to play basketball with Eddie at Riverside a couple of times. When his crimes came to light several years later, I felt truly lucky to not have become a victim.
The scariest thing I read in the article about the Boychoir School was this:
In Lessig’s final year, he found himself gripped by “an insane depression,” he says, over “the insanity of what was happening.” In his closet he’d found a hatch in the ceiling that led to a crawl space above. He climbed up there and crouched alone for hours in the dark.
One evening near the end of Lessig’s final year at the school, he went with Hanson for a walk around the grounds. As darkness descended on Albemarle, Lessig finally, tentatively, gave voice to his gathering misgivings about Hanson’s behavior.
“Is this really right? Should you really be doing this?” Lessig asked.
“You have to understand,” Hanson replied, “this is essential to producing a great boychoir.” By sexualizing the students, he explained, he was transforming them from innocents into more complicated creatures, enabling them to render choral music in all its sublime passion. “It’s what all great boychoirs do,” Hanson said.
Back in the 1970’s, I only rarely came into contact with the kids from the Boychoir. But, whenever I did, I got an uneasy feeling. Now that I know that at least 30% of them were being routinely raped by the choir director, I wonder about that feeling I had as a little boy.
The quote in your article sounds like something out of a Stephen King story. Hanson’s self-justification is very creepy.
Is there something about choirs that attracts these maggots? A similar incident occurred in the boys choirs associated with the church in our home town. The choir director was having his way with some of the boys. I sang in that choir for a few years, but fortunately under a previous director.
How do you think ‘these maggots’ got that way?
I don’t think Hanson dreamed that explanation up all by himself.
That’s the big question that nobody seems to be asking. If we’re serious about trying to get this rampant molestation/rape thing under control, I think we’ll have to.
It’s icky, though, and understandable that nobody wants to go there. When you take perpetrators of such inhuman crimes–especially against children–and start asking if they were victims once too…it’s the sort of thing that people hate liberals for.
But I would bet very little of this sort of behavior occurs in a vacuum.
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No indication of sexual abuse in suicide of Chet Allen. Sexual abuse within a family (incest) is quite different from pedophilia, choir boys/boarding schools and abuse by clergy/priests. Abusers are often predators creating the opportunity and are in a postion of power (authority) as an adult in relation to a minor. Often the circumstances and origins of physical abuse are similar to sexual abuse.
Sexual abuse of young boys in boyschoir is universal and happens in every country world-wide. Close to home, a well-known boyschoir in The Hague has suffered from a music director and molest for many years.
Most horrific – Sexual abuse infant nursery in Amsterdam
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Just. Eeeewwww.
One of my better buds in high school went to that school from ’80-’82. I didn’t know him that well before he went, so I can’t say if there was much of a change. And the only other person I could talk to about that was his dad who passed away last year.
Donald Hanson was there until 1982. Your pal would know him quite well.
I’m sure he did (the article said Hanson was fired in March of ’82), but what do you say to someone you haven’t seen in 20+ years?
If I had a guess, he probably was part of the 70%. If he was a victim, he hid it awfully well.
Half a mile, eh?
You really want some creeps? In about a mile or two radius from anywhere that is even semi-populated in the world, somebody is doing something really bad to somebody else on a daily basis.
Guaranteed.
Murder, theft, spousal abuse, pedophilia, rape, flat-out torture…the works.
Deal wid it.
Why hell, Booman. Anywhere that there are American troops in the world…you know, them nice fellas and gals that Barack Obama is so blithely siccing on every corner of the globe (Australia being the newest mischief that he and his PermaGov bosses are up to.)…you can bet your bottom $10 (inflation, don’tcha know) that there are some people up their ears in nasty shit with other people who don’t much want to be there.
Bet on it.
What? You think Abu Ghraib was an anomoly!!!???
Like the Enron people, Nixon and Bernie Madoff, the Abu Ghraib miscreants are just the unfortunates who got caught. The rest? Including that nice neighbor who always nods hello at the local supermarket?
Watch out!!!
We humans are both the tip of the evolutionary sprout on earth and the carriers of everything savage that has ever occurred in our genetic memory.
Bet on that as well.
Got the creeps now?
Good.
As William Burroughs said in his definition of a paranoid, ” A paranoid is someone who is in possession of all the facts.”
You ain’t gonna get those facts watching news coverage of yet another fool who got caught. Like reading alla them columnists and listening to alla them talking heads on TV, whatever the media covers is just another attempt at diverting attention from the real deal as it stands. The magician’s other hand is up to its armpits in dirty business that never sees the light of TV.
It was happening 1/2 mile from your apparently quite lucky, relatively trouble-free childhood?
Great.
Now it’s time to grow up.
1 Corinthians 13:11, King James version
Barack Obama’s hands are both bloody at least up to the elbow, and he is headed for armpit territory soon enough.
And you are supporting him.
Barack Obama, his (supposed) subordinates and those to whom he is subordinate are complicit in the whole surveillance state-style coordinated opposition to the Occupy movements that seems to upset you so much.
And yet you are supporting him. (As the least of several other evils, in your heart of hearts. That’s my take on your present act, anyway. You used to be all for frog-marching, as I recall. Do you really think only Republicans are worthy of that treatment? On the evidence of what is happening right now in this country and around the world? Please.)
Wake the fuck up.
The clock is ticking.
Stop these people now!!!
You can’t support Ron Paul?
Well…I can understand your position. If I consumed as much media as you do I wouldn’t be able to support him either.
But at the very least, stop okey-doking what is happening at the highest levels of the US government at this very moment.
It’s not going to end well.
No it’s not.
Not for me and mine and not for you and yours either.
You can bet on that, too.
MLK’s arc of justice is getting bent further and further out of shape every day now. It’s gonna snap back eventually, and then there is going to be all hell to pay.
Watch.
Don’t be on the wrong side when it does.
You will regret it.
Later…
AG
Sad.
Whoa, it’s that Lawrence Lessig.
Boo, without going into details that could identify individuals, there was a longer history of abuse at ABS than depicted in the article. I have knowledge of an abuse-related suicide, of ritualized student-on-student sexual and physical abuse and two other sealed settlements (all perhaps a direct echo of the era depicted in the article).
I also know one guy who’s never mentioned any of that stuff, but he had left the school for another at a relatively early age.
The institution is sick and flaunts it’s irresponsibility and just because it has bought itself some distance (in terms of years) from on-the-record abuse, that doesn’t mean it’s bought innocence. The School’s reputation SHOULD be ruined and anyone who sends their kids there at this point should consider themselves horrible parents for even taking the risk.
Oh yeah. And a murder.
So, of course, you are going to fill me in by email.
I’m a little too close to folks and families involved to do that in good conscience. I feel badly for any of them if they even read this page. Put it this way.. it all ‘went away’, the truth was never public and there was more than one famous Princeton institution who weren’t interested in more information coming out.
I’ve been thinking about damaged adult authority figures recently because a certain educator from my youth who had an overall positive impact on my life was accused of sexually abusing kids. The truth is this person had a weird charisma combined with a neediness. Adults with charisma and damaged psyches (two things which often go hand in hand) have an enormous ability to draw students into their sphere of power, and they seem to have a need to do this. Creepy is a vast understatement. Horrifying how vulnerable kids are and how some adults feel a need to harm them. It’s very sad what we put children through.
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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."