A federal lawsuit filed Thursday accuses two teachers and the headmaster at the Indian Mountain School in Lakeville of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy between 1982 and 1984, and says that school officials who knew what was happening did nothing to stop it.
It’s the second lawsuit filed against the school in three months alleging that the Indian Mountain School “failed and refused to stop teachers and the school’s Headmaster from ‘predatory sexual assaults and pedophilia’ inflicted on minor boys,” according to the plaintiff's attorney.
The abuse so traumatized the teen that at one point he tried to slit his wrists and kill himself, according to the suit.
The lawsuit alleges that “the school employed known pedophiles, and allowed those pedophiles free reign to gratify their perverse sexual desires by molesting young vulnerable boys in the school’s care and custody,” adding that officials “refused” to discipline or fire teachers they knew were abusing students.
According to the lawsuit, English teacher Christopher Simonds "manipulated, groomed, and sexually abused, assaulted, molested, fondled, sodomized and sometimes raped" dozens of boys during his nine years at the Indian Mountain School and abused the plaintiff more than two dozen times.
Simonds also took lewd pictures of the students to "blackmail" them and gave the boys cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and LSD, the suit alleges.
Despite although they found Simonds with child pornography and even discovered a young boy in his apartment late at night in violation of school policy, school officials turned a blind eye, the lawsuit says.
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According to the suit, then-headmaster Peter Carleton and other staff members were aware of the assaults but failed to comply with mandatory reporting laws.
The suit says that school officials, administrators and teachers "actually conspired to prevent others from learning about or preventing or remedying the ongoing, rampant, serial molestations being perpetrated by school employees on the boys in the school's care and custody."
Carleton himself would watch the boys shower and visit their rooms late night, "sitting on their beds, and touching them in inappropriate and sexual ways," the lawsuit alleges.
“'Carleton was very definitely kinky,'” the suit quotes Board of Trustees chairman Paul Levin as saying. “We used to kind of wince and think he was trying to be funny. There’s a certain kind of person who gets away with murder through charm.”
When the plaintiff approached teacher Windsor Copeland for help, Copeland himself began sexually abusing the teen and one of his classmates, according to the lawsuit.
“[The plaintiff] has suffered from the abuse his entire life. But he has chosen to come forward now with the courage and conviction to confront those responsible and to obtain the justice he deserves,” the plaintiff's attorney Antonio Ponvert III said in a statement Thursday.
Indian Mountain School's current headmaster Mark A. Devey responded to the new suit publicly Thursday with a statement promising to support its former students.
"Recently we notified our school community that we were conducting an investigation in order to identify any alumni who may have been victimized while a student at Indian Mountain School in the past. We believe that it is best for both the school and its alumni to deal with these issues now," Devey said in a statement. "It is heart wrenching to hear these allegations, and we are saddened by them. We will take the allegations very seriously, and we will support our alumni."
Another former student filed a similar lawsuit in federal court in October.
“This school was supposed to keep its students safe from harm,” Ponvert said in a statement. “These were little, vulnerable boys, totally unable to defend themselves. Instead of protecting the children, Indian Mountain School faculty and officials at all levels either closed their eyes to obvious criminal acts or participated in these horrific acts themselves.”
The lawsuit says the plaintiff suffers from permanent "mental, psychiatric, and emotional injuries" as a result of the abuse he endured, including anxiety, sexual dysfunction, PTSD, depression and low self-esteem.
