That sort of secrecy has created “a horror show,” Manly says. “I’ve handled hundreds of public-school cases, and in the majority of those, perpetrators of molestation told their victims, ‘This is our secret. Don’t tell your parents. Don’t tell adults. Don’t tell anybody.’”
If you doubt him, Manly asks that you recall the story of Mark Berndt, the Los Angeles elementary-school teacher who molested at least 71 third-graders over several decades, cresting in a campaign of assault between 2009 and 2011. Berndt’s crimes were remarkable for many reasons but perhaps especially because he meticulously photographed them — and then left the film for development at his local CVS store, where a clerk who saw the photos alerted local police. The photos depict Berndt feeding cookies to his victims — cookies topped with his own semen. A connoisseur of bondage and discipline, Berndt blindfolded some of his diminutive victims and bound their hands with tape and photographed them in sexualized poses. He placed live cockroaches on the children’s faces. A sheriff’s investigation said his “highly assaulting” attacks included touching girls’ genitalia and exposing himself to his students.
When confronted with the evidence against him, Berndt, then 61, refused to resign; he knew that his teachers’-union contract made it nearly impossible to fire a teacher, even one convicted of serious felonies involving students. Berndt ultimately agreed to quit but only after squeezing Los Angeles Unified School District officials for a $40,000 payoff. When Berndt learned that felony convictions might imperil his pension, the United Teachers Los Angeles contract saved him again. Berndt would continue to earn about $4,000 per month (plus cost-of-living adjustments) while serving his 25-year sentence.
At trial, Manly showed that LAUSD officials knew that Berndt was trouble years before but did nothing. Their nonchalance cost the district $139 million to settle legal claims with 69 parents and 81 students.
Berndt’s case was unique only in the bizarreness of his violence. Manly can tick off, without reference to notes, a list of similarly horrific cases that involved secrecy between teachers and students. There was the Redlands Unified School District high-school teacher who seduced a 16-year-old boy. She swore him to secrecy and, when she discovered she was pregnant, demanded that the boy carry out his fatherly duties. The district settled the family’s claim for $6 million in 2016. In 2018, the same district paid $15.7 million to settle three other sex-abuse lawsuits involving eight children. In May 2018, nearby Torrance Unified School District paid $31 million to settle the claims of eight former students who said they were molested by their wrestling coach. That same month, the Corona-Norco Unified School District paid $3 million to a special-education student raped by a teacher’s aide for two years beginning when the student was just eleven.
The catalogue of abuse goes on and on, though you’d never know it from listening to state officials fixed on the unfailing virtue of public-school teachers and the universal danger posed by allegedly unfit parents — “extremists,” Bonta calls them. Irvine’s University High, Sacramento’s Mark Twain Elementary, San Diego’s upscale La Jolla High School — search any California school district (Santa Barbara, Redding, California’s Central Valley), and you’ll discover that sexual violence against children is rampant and unfolding behind a wall of official secrecy.
“The common thread [between the Catholic Church and public-school scandals] is secrecy,” Manly says. “You’re telling kids to keep sexual secrets, including gender issues, from their parents. It’s a bad idea. I’m telling you, sending that message to kids is a very, very bad idea. I can’t tell you how many more cases there will be where adults are telling children — their victims — ‘This is our secret.’”
What would he recommend?
“You need a policy where children aren’t told to keep secrets from their parents or other caregivers,” Manly says.
This sounds like the parent-notification policy now gaining purchase in local school districts — the policy Attorney General Bonta is suing to stop. But even if that policy survives California’s notoriously progressive courts, it will be too late for the scores of kids already abused by schoolteachers — perps whom Bonta, Thurmond, and teachers’-union leaders would prefer we forget.
Soon after we spoke, Manly texted me with good news: He was celebrating yet another settlement in the case of the Redlands Unified teacher who became pregnant after having sex with her 16-year-old student. “That’s almost $46 million collected to date against Redlands Unified,” he said.
The key phrase is “to date.”
“We’ve identified 14 other teacher perpetrators in Redlands since then — five convicted and two to be indicted presently.” Those cases include “50-plus victims,” he says.
You’d think this ongoing scandal in the nation’s largest public-school system — the sexual assault, the cover-ups, the climate of secrecy, and the staggering payouts — would generate the sort of outrage that surrounds similar cases involving the Catholic Church. You’d think that Bonta, the state’s top cop, would call for investigations, prosecutions, and — imagine this — the decoupling of teachers’ unions from school governance. You’d think that local school-board trustees, fearing multimillion-dollar settlements with sex-abuse victims, would unanimously adopt the parent-notification policy. But in the upside-down Golden State, many still think that only government can save us from the terrors lurking inside our own families.
