In May 2010, a male schoolteacher was accused of sexually molesting a sixth-grade girl at Centre Ridge Elementary School in Centreville, Va., but quickly acquitted, the Washington Post reports.
When that teacher tried to recover legal fees, as allowed by his contract, the Fairfax County school district forced him to sue, which he did. Upon winning that suit, the district refused to pay additional legal fees as well as lost income and spent a lot more tax dollars to defend themselves wrongly.
Total expenditures for this case to taxpayers:
- $141,030 for legal fees for the district
- $72,838 for reimbursement of the teacher’s legal expenses
The teacher was seeking $117,822 in legal fees plus an additional $29,750, which was income lost due to his inability to act as a soccer coach during the trial.
At the trial, the jury heard testimony from a half dozen or so witnesses that the molestation could not possibly have occurred due to the size of the room where it was reported to have taken place. The jury deliberated for 47 minutes before returning a not guilty verdict.
The details are not easy to follow, since the number of times the teacher had to sue his district to get his legal fees back for having to defend himself against his school district is extensive. Also, statements from the district claim an offer of $60,000 was made to settle before additional legal charges were incurred. The claim that the offer occurred before additional expenses were incurred has been denied by the teacher, and no additional comments were reported.
Upon examining the claim for reimbursement, lawyers determined that a little under $10,000 was expense-related and not subject to reimbursement, and the claim for lost income as a soccer coach was also not subject to reimbursement by the contract. Plus, the union paid the teacher $35,000 out of insurance proceeds. All these deductions came off the $117,822, bringing the teacher’s claim to $72,838, which is the amount the district paid, even after paying more than $140,000 in legal fees of their own.
A couple problems here:
The district’s legal fees were wasted
Those $141,030 in legal fees paid by Fairfax County Schools got them exactly nothing. Spending the public’s money that way constitutes a breach of trust.
Furthermore, this money was spent by the district against one of its own teachers after he had been found not guilty. So, not only was this teacher falsely labeled as a sex abuser, but his own school district bent over backwards to keep money that was rightfully his by law out of his hands. There isn’t any question as to what Virginia law says here.
Talk about getting it from both ends!
The shame never stops
Many professionals argue, even if you win a sex-abuse case brought by a disgruntled student, you still lose. Your life is turned upside down, said David Bernstein, a law professor at George Mason University, in an article that ran on May 23 in the Washington Examiner.
In many people’s minds, any teacher accused of abuse will always be a sex offender. In schools, the false accusations are often levied by a street-savvy student who has a grudge against a certain teacher.
Making false accusations not only destroys the career of a teacher, but it also harms students who are actually abused by teachers by creating a “cry wolf” effect in our schools.
Students who are abused by teachers need help. Many of them drop out of school. Many have trouble in relationships later in life. Writes Kathleen Kendall-Tackett in Chapter 3 of Handbook of Child Sexual Abuse: Identification, Assessment, and Treatment, Paris Goodyear-Brown, ed. (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2011):
Can childhood sexual abuse impact the health of adult survivors? Unfortunately the answer is yes. Men or women who have experienced childhood sexual abuse often have poorer health than their nonabused counterparts and these effects last long after the abuse has ended. Without intervention, abuse survivors are significantly more likely to have a number of serious and life-threatening illnesses. … increased women’s risk of cardiovascular disease ninefold. … Men and women … more likely to have organic diseases, such as ischemic heart disease, cancer, stroke, skeletal fractures, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease …
And by falsely accusing a teacher of sex abuse, students take away resources from both law enforcement and child protective services that should be available for students who are true victims.
When does touching become groping? When does an out-of-class relationship become abuse? Is the disgruntled teenager lying? These are serious questions that confront people in schools every day, and by charging teachers falsely with abuse, students blur the lines for school officials, law enforcement, and child protective services.
Prosecutors know it’s tough and tend to overcompensate
Unfortunately, what happens in many sex-abuse cases, as happened in the Fairfax County case, is that the student and friends recant their testimony.
Realizing that this may be the direct result of intimidation by the accused teacher, prosecutors often keep at the case in the face of evidence and testimony that has not been recanted. The problem here is that this prosecutor activity has the effect of siphoning resources that should be devoted to trials that keep pedophiles out of our schools as much as we can.
How common is this?
A report from last year said that 11 percent of people—not just teachers—who are accused of sex abuse are falsely accused. Intuition tells me the number may be a little higher when we’re talking about the percentage of teachers who are falsely accused by students.
“There’s no question but that the attitudes of personnel in schools are changing because of the many cases that have come up across the country,” George Thomas Houlihan, superintendent of the Johnson County Schools in Smithfield, N.C., told the Washington Post in 1993. “I think all of us are being extremely cautious in how we handle students and in what we say and do with students and employees.”
“This survey shows tens of millions of Americans have been falsely accused of abuse,” said Natasha Spivack, a spokesperson for the organization Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE). “These persons were stamped with the scarlet Abuser label, leaving them to wonder whatever happened to the notion of ‘innocent until proven guilty’.”
Defense attorneys, home school lawyers, and the American Coalition for Fathers and Children have also spoken out against false accusations.
A statement from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers presented at a summit in June of this year noted the “immense, often irreparable harm caused to our clients by false allegations, not only to reputation and personal relationships, but often to the accused individual’s livelihood and even health.”