Criminal - The Choir

Episode Date: January 12, 2018

As a child, Lawrence Lessig was a gifted singer. His church choir director encouraged him to attend a choir camp at a prestigious boarding school in New Jersey. He was so talented that the school invited him to stay and join their official choir. He sang at Carnegie Hall and toured the world. But it was what happened behind the scenes that would change his life forever. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. This episode contains descriptions of sexual abuse against minors and may not be appropriate for everyone. Please use discretion. You know, the boy choir school was at this mansion at the end of this long, winding road. And you got to that road through these very windy back roads in New Jersey. And then the driveway opened up to this huge oval. And at the end of the oval was this incredible mansion. And I remember pulling in and parking with everybody else that was moving in and thinking this was such an extraordinary place. And I had won a lottery ticket, you know, kind of a Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

like moment. And I was incredibly excited to be there. Lawrence Lessig is a law professor at Harvard and one of America's most famous lawyers. He's been called the Elvis of Internet law. But lately, he's been focused on the influence of money on Congress. He was briefly a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president in 2016. Before he was the name he is today, he was a kid in Rapid City, South Dakota, where he was born and where his father built silos for Minutemen missiles. They eventually relocated to the small town of Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

As a kid, he go to a summer camp in Princeton, New Jersey, at an elite boarding school called the American Boy Choir School. He was so good that the school invited him to stay and join their official choir, meaning he'd be away from home for most of the year. Your father didn't want you to go. No, he was very strongly opposed. And it was kind of a Billy Elliot moment where I had to plead with him that this was my chance to see the world because what was so attractive

was the idea of touring around the world with a boy choir. And that the education was so great, and this was such an opportunity, and I just remember him melting and yielding and really hating the fact that he did that. He enrolled as a sixth grader at this incredibly prestigious school that had been around since 1937. Students performed for presidents and for the Pope.

Lawrence Lessig remembers performing at Carnegie Hall and traveling the world. Meeting extraordinary musicians and having a real sense of excellence. You know, we worked incredibly hard and we were incredibly good. And all of that was completely other than the world that I was living in in small town Pennsylvania. You know, one of the weird things that was true about the place, which is astonishing as a parent to think back about it, but was that we climbed the building all the time. You know, this is a three-story, very old mansion. So, you know, probably it was 40 or 50 feet at least to the top of the roof. But we would take ropes and wrap them around chimneys and rappel up the side of the building and all the way up the roof.

And people also perfected the ability to kind of climb brick. So you would just Spider-Man-like learn how to grab the right crevices on the brick to climb. And a friend of mine climbed the brick wall next to the director's apartment one Saturday morning and got to the ledge and looked in and saw the director asleep in bed, and next to him was another student. And he told me that, and I didn't quite believe it. Who was this director, Donald Hanson? So Hanson was a musician from Canada. He had come down probably four years before, maybe three. And he was, you know, he was very young. He was in his early 30s at the time.

He was an incredible pianist, an incredible musician, and incredibly beautiful. I mean, he was a striking, powerful person who, he didn't seem abnormal at all to anybody, and certainly not to my parents or anybody around who looked at him, everybody looked at him as this incredible genius musician. And he was literally, quite literally, saving the school at the time. The school was losing money, and Donald Hanson was operating as both the headmaster and director, pushing the board to raise the money the school needed to survive. So this man, the school's savior, seemed to have free reign to operate however he liked.

What happened to Lawrence Lessig during his time at the American Boy Choir School stayed hidden for many, many years, until he realized he was in the perfect position to do something about it. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The whole place became incredibly crazy. There were regular parties on Friday nights and Saturday nights.

You know, kids would be drinking. regular parties on Friday nights and Saturday nights. You know, kids would be drinking, I remember this drink called the Grasshopper, which I think was vodka and some weird mix. And you know, it was completely out of control. And there was a regular movie night where we would all sit in Hansen's room watching a relatively small television screen, but it was the biggest one in the building, and watch a movie. And some of us would sit on the couch next to Hansen, and there would be a blanket, and the movie was run silent, run deep. And he was as silently as he could, reaching inside of my pants

and sexually abusing me at that time. And I was kind of stunned. I don't even remember the movie. I just remember sitting there and just wondering what was going on and did anybody see what was going on and understand what was happening? And that was the very beginning of the next three years.

How old were you at that point? I guess, that must have been I was 12. You know, there was a period of time after that where he would be very familiar and playful and signaling his strong affection. But from that point, this is like I think around December when this happens, until my birthday the following June, I don't think there's any other encounter. And then we went away on tour to California, and he became increasingly focused again. And when we came back, it was on my birthday or the day after my birthday or something like that. And he said, okay, I have to give you your present. And he invited me up into his room. And it was this weird mix of, I don't know how to describe it. I mean, he was saying to me, I mean, he said to me, you know, you're an ugly boy.

And I'm the only one who's going to want you. And so he was setting it up as if this is a great gift to me. And quite frankly, it felt like a great gift. I was happy to accept the characterization of myself as an ugly boy. That's just the insecurity of that age. And I was certainly experiencing the attention as a powerful gift, despite my ugliness. And that began a much more regular know, series of experiences. And, but over the time, this, this, uh, relationship, this, you know, our connection changed. And in my final year, this was a three-story mansion and he moved his apartment from where it had been, um, originally,

which is a place that my friend climbed up the window to see it, to the third floor. And the third floor at the time had a very large apartment that had been used as a rehearsal room. And then it had two bedrooms down the hall. And I was in one of those bedrooms, and he moved up to the large apartment. And then he had a wall built that separated the bedroom and the large apartment from the rest of the third floor. And so I was behind the wall. So essentially, I was living in his apartment. And the framing to everybody was, well, this is eventually going to be all my space.

And so when you leave next year, then I'll just move in here too. But the reality was I was, you know, 14 or 14 or 15. And I was living with the director. We had a key to our apartment. And that was, you know, during that year, I was, you know, regularly sleeping with him, you know, in much the way a couple does. You know, it's not like we had sex all the time, and it's not like that was the central part of our existence, but it was where I lived. And one night I came in to find him choking on his own vomit because he'd gotten so drunk that he just couldn't move. And I had to flip him over to stop him from choking to death.

But in that context, there was no way that others in the school didn't realize what was going on, in particular teachers. I mean, there was a classroom on that floor. And so, you know, five days a week, the science teacher would walk up the stairs and look at a door behind which he knew one of the only ninth that everybody knew he was sleeping with everybody all the time. And it was just, you know, when was your turn? And it's just impossible to even imagine, but it was not something that at least I experienced with jealousy or anything. It was, you know, we were the club. We were the people on the inside.

And, you know, it's an astonishing number of people. It could have been a third of the school at any particular time that had some sexual contact in some form. You know, it's a small school. You know, there are certain times there's 30, sometimes there's 50, depending on the year. But still, a large number of people he's having some kind of connection with. You also, as you say, just had a friendship with him.

You obviously talked about life and things. What kind of things would you speak about? What kind of conversations would you have? We certainly talked about managing the school a lot. Because I was the head boy the last year, and so we would work out how we would discipline or how we would make sure that the kids were doing what the kids needed to do and what did the kids need to do and how did we do that. So in that sense, we were working together. There were a couple times when we had a conversation about what was going on and you know and i would raise skeptical questions about it um and these were questions always prompted whenever i went away you know like i went home for thanksgiving or i went home for christmas and

you know you leave i would leave that world and immediately I would feel, you know, deep anxiety about what was going on in that place. Why were we doing that? That didn't seem, I mean, that wasn't, I knew that wasn't what normal people did. Why did we do it? And I remember one time we were walking, you had a Jaguar parked in a garage just off of the campus and we were walking to the Jaguar to go someplace. He was going to take me to a shop or something. And I was saying to him, so why do you do this? Why is this good? And he gave me this very passionate argument about how every great musical organization has this at its core.

If you don't have this kind of passion, sexual connection between the leaders and the performers, they just never have, they never perform at the level that they otherwise could. And so, this was kind of part of what the deal was. And, know, I don't remember feeling like I believed it completely, but I didn't have a place to stand, really, to know whether it was wrong or what to do if I thought it was wrong. And, you know, I felt, you know, it was like a collaborator inside of this system that seemed clearly to be wrong. What happened next?

So, I graduated in ninth grade and went home. And when I got home, it was a difficult transition home. When I got home, Hanson reached out to me and invited me to come with him to Canada to his family had a camp up there and wanted us to spend some time at the camp. It's a kind of final goodbye. And so I asked my parents if I could go with him

and my mother for the first time signaled that she was unsure about the relationship and wondered about the relationship. And I got furious and I ran out of the house. Nonetheless, she let me go and I went. And I had this final week there and then I went back and spent the rest of the summer really just struggling about what was going on. That fall, he started 10th grade back in his hometown Williamsport. He didn't tell his parents anything. The chairman of the American Boy Choir School board asked Lawrence Lessig to be the alumni representative on the board.

And he agreed, which meant he saw Donald Hanson again. Hanson had, at that time, had a relationship with another boy who had graduated. And I said to him, I thought that should be it, that this, that he should not, that I thought it was wrong for him to have these kinds of relationships, and he should not have them anymore. And he had this love affair with his boy who left and that, you know, that that should be the end of this cycle of his life. And he was so committed, so agreed. It was almost like he was liberated. Like finally somebody was telling him no and he could agree.

And we talked about, you know, I'm on the board. And if I know, if I, you've got to promise me this isn't going to happen because I have an obligation. You were just a teenager, though, confronting him. Yeah. I mean, there was nothing dangerous about the confrontation i didn't feel but i but just that just that i was just thinking about myself as a teenager confronting one of my teachers and having the courage to say hey what you're doing is wrong i must have taken taken courage? Maybe. I didn't remember it as a courageous act. I remembered it as a

hurtful. It was hurtful. But I felt like I had to. Maybe it was jealousy. I don't know what, you know, who knows what it was completely. from that moment on, I had this, you know, I would go down regularly for board meetings, I'd see him. There's no time at which we had any further sexual connection.

And he would continue to affirm that this, I would say, how are things going? He said, things are great. No problems, no issues, no complications. And then, you know, a couple of years later, there was an emergency board meeting called because he had been caught with some kid or some mother of some kid had told the school that he had abused her son. And, you know, we came down for the emergency board meeting and i went to his room and i said what the you know you promised me and he said i know i just couldn't help myself i'm sorry and i felt so stupid i felt so you know because i was so convinced I had saved the world. Like I had taken this board position, I'd leveraged the power to do good

by keeping him the essential part to make the school succeed while at the same time protecting those kids. I was such a genius and I turned out to be such a fool. And these children, I don't know how many children, turned out to have been so harmed, so damaged by him continuing to be who he was. By this point, Lawrence Lessig was in college at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduation, he went on to study philosophy in England. Donald Hanson had left the American Boy Choir School,

and no one was quite sure where he'd gone. And once he reached out to me and he came to visit in Cambridge, England, and my girlfriend at the time and I, she knew the whole story, met him, and we went for a hunt down the Cam. It was a completely surreal experience. What did your girlfriend, well, it does sound surreal. What did your... Did your girlfriend look at you and say, why are we...

Why are we hanging out with this guy? Partly. I think she partly was just, you know, she wanted to understand it. And so here we were together and we were going to see the abuser. And, you know, again, he was a completely compelling and loving character. So it was, you know, the afternoon, you know, standing back from it or above it, it's surreal.

But the actual experience of the afternoon was perfectly normal. And I remember if we had dinner or whatever, we all had the afternoon and then said goodbye. And that was the last time I saw him. So that probably was, you know, 1984 or 1985. You told your girlfriend. Did you tell anyone else about what had happened to you? Well, the first person I told was a girlfriend I had at college. That was a really emotional experience

because explaining it to her completely tore me up. And then the second person I told was my girlfriend at Cambridge. And it was so striking. I saw her, she's now a professor at Texas, and I saw her in the fall of 2015. And she had some photo albums from the time we were together, and she pulled them out as she was preparing dinner, and I started flipping through them,

and there was a person in the pictures I didn't recognize, and I took the book over to her, and I pointed to this person, and then it hit me that that was me. And I had never seen myself for who I was, because I had this conception of who I was defined by that man who had called me this ugly boy. And all through that time, I had experienced my self-conception as this ugly person who was so grateful for the love and attention of anybody. And I was sitting in their kitchen thinking, so much of my life had been set up by this man. So, you know, there are many times between that abuse

and the moment when I saw those pictures where I had reflected on the significance of what that experience had done and how it had damaged me. But that moment was the most profound because it wasn't just that I could reflect on things that had happened to me. It's that I saw it change the way I looked at the world and myself, most importantly. And I don't know. In 1991, he started teaching law at the University of Chicago,

and for the first time in his life, he got some help from a therapist. He said, you need real therapy. And I said, well, what's that going to cost? He said, well, you know, it's going to be a couple hundred thousand dollars to pay for the therapy you need. And I said, I don't have that money. And he said, well, why doesn't the school pay for it? And I said, that's a good question. So I hired a lawyer and we sued the school and the school quickly settled. And all I wanted was the money for the therapy. And they

wrote the check for the therapy. And I went, I started getting therapy. And I was really proud of the way they dealt with it. Like, I was, you hurt me, and I need help, and they just wrote the check, or the insurance company wrote the check. But this way that they dealt with the question, which felt like a very healthy and direct way to deal with it, changed pretty dramatically. In 2001, he got an email out of the blue from someone he didn't know. It said, are you the Lawrence Lessig who went to the boy choir school?

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these Series Essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his

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you get your podcasts. The emails were a man named John Hardwick, who'd been a student at the Boy Choir School before Lawrence Lessig, and who wanted to file a lawsuit. And he had tried to get me involved in the case that he was bringing. And I was incredibly reluctant. And I told him, you know, it's not my issue, and I got my life, and I don't want to go back there, and please don't call me. And he literally would not stop.

He was, you know, calling. He said, well, can I send you a list of students, and you tell me which ones you think were abused? And I said, no, no, no, no, no. You know, God forbid I would be in the middle of that fight and have to confront and think about that experience again and again and again. And I just didn't want to do it. And I felt like the insurance company in the school had behaved well towards me. So I didn't, it's only kind of a weird loyalty. You guys had dealt with me

appropriately. So I expect you're going to deal with him appropriately. And so it just wasn't my fight to get involved, given that I had such hope about, you know, how it would resolve itself. And obviously I was wrong about that. A couple of years later, Lawrence Lessig was reading the New York Times and came across an article about John Hardwick's lawsuit. The headline read, Judge Throws Out Lawsuits Against Boy Choir School. The judge ruled that the school was insulated from any legal action because it was protected by something called the Doctrine of Charitable Immunity. I was like, this is outrageous.

It's just so wrong. The insurance company is wrong. The court is wrong. Everything is wrong here. And so I contacted Hardwick and I said, let me take the case. I'll take the case for free and let's get this stupid decision reversed. Will you describe a little bit more, just help me understand the Charitable Immunity Act, what it says? So the act basically immunizes charities for the negligence of their employees. It's a completely stupid doctrine that was erected originally at a time when there wasn't really insurance available. So it was a way to make sure that, you know, if you slip and fall

in front of the church, you can't sue the church and drive the church out of existence. But the important line there was negligence, you know. So, it's one thing to be negligent. It's another thing to be reckless or intentional in the wrong that you are committing. And our claim was, or John's claim was, that the school, you know, was completely reckless about policing the behavior of its employees, not just Hanson. I mean, you know, there are others, many others. I don't know how many, and I don't know any of this firsthand, but from people I trust, you know, others who were there and attracted to the institution because it was just a place where you could be as children.

That's why they were there and attracted to the institution because it was just a place where you could be as children. That's why they were there. And when the institution should be, you know, charged with knowing so clearly what's going on, that this should be considered reckless at least, that they didn't take steps to address it. And so it wasn't negligence. It was something much worse than negligence. But the lower court had said, well, it's too hard to draw a line between negligence and recklessness and willfulness. And we think the intent of the legislature was basically to immunize all of that behavior, which made no sense. It was completely unjust and just left these institutions free to continue to do their wrong. And by this stage, I was a law professor. And what law professors realize is the great thing that tort law does

is that it disciplines institutions to behave appropriately. So if an institution is liable, what that means is that insurance companies and boards of directors make sure that the right protections are in place to avoid this wrong going forward. So the reason to make sure that they're liable, schools are liable, is so that the insurance companies say, we're not going to sell you insurance unless you're taking steps to make sure that, you know, your children are not being abused. And that's all that this is about, making sure that there's a system to protect children because you know that the pathology of abusers will always try to find a way in. So you need these systematic institutional protections. When you agreed to take on the case, to work on the appeal,

how many people in your life knew about your own direct connection agreed to take on the case, to work on the appeal. How many people in your life knew about your own direct connection to this abuse? Was it just those two girlfriends still at that point in your therapist? It could have been just those two. I don't think I had any reason to talk to anybody else about it. But when I took on the case, I knew it was going to be public. And so I had to do the hardest thing for me, which was to talk to my parents about it. What was that conversation with your parents like? So it was unfortunately easier than I had hoped it would be. You know, what I feared most is that they would take it too personally, that they would feel like they had failed to protect me.

Because in a sense they had, in a real sense they had. And I didn't want them to feel too guilty about that. But afterwards I realized I wanted them to feel guilty enough about that. Because I, you know, I remember through that period always feeling like I was, you know, an adult. Even though I was 12 or 13 or 14 or 15 i felt like i was smart enough to know and take care of myself and i didn't need anybody to be protecting me it's certainly not my parents and if they had tried to i would have been outraged just like i was when my mother signaled she might have known something was going on but you know 10 and 15 years later uh as i look back

on it i was like this was your job. This is what you were supposed to be worrying about and thinking about. And that you didn't was bad. And then when it came out, it didn't seem to hurt as much as I would have thought. That was also difficult. And so I didn't want to rub their noses in. I didn't want to make them feel terrible about it. But in the end, it made me feel even more alone about the experience

because I felt it was just for me. It wasn't for anybody else to feel the burden. I wonder if this case, that first day in the courtroom, if it felt different, if it was, were you more nervous or was the weight greater? No, it was easier than any case I've ever done. There's no ambiguity in my head about what the law should be here. And there was no justification for the decision below. I was absolutely confident. And I remember after the Court of Appeals argument, the lawyer for the insurance company came up and said,

I've never seen a better oral argument in my life. That was extraordinary. And I was both touched and astonished that there would be any doubt because of course this was going to be the most important thing I argued and I knew I would do it well because I had to, I had to

finally I had to do something good in the middle of this disaster that's, you know, one part of me, you know, will always feel guilty for, even though, you know, the adult part of me says, you were a kid, but the kid part of me says, yeah, but it was me. I, just like all of those teachers, I could have said something. I could have known enough, should have known enough, should have had the courage enough. I've read that there was a moment when the lawyer, when Greenblatt, sort of outed your personal stake in the case.

Yeah. What happened? You know, it was almost, I experienced it as like fearing that it would seem that I was biased. And then I mentioned, immediately thought, well, I was biased, but I'm an advocate. I'm not a judge. It's my job to be on was biased, but I'm an advocate. I'm not a judge. It's my job to be on the side of what I'm arguing for. And, you know, fuck you. I was abused.

What's the wrong in that except by the person who did it? But at that point, I kind of embraced the recognition that I'm not going to hide the fact or be able to hide the fact. People are going to put two and two together. And so that's when it was clear I needed to just come out with it in a way that made it as comprehensive as it could be. The court ruled in favor of John Hardwick, and the school immediately appealed the decision to the state Supreme Court. And when the Supreme Court ruled, the Supreme Court took, like, almost two years to decide. The Supreme Court of New Jersey took almost two years to decide. And when it decided, there was nothing reported on it at all,

so nobody knew about it. And I didn't go around sort of telling everybody. You know, I sort of blogged about it. But, you know, seven people read blogs. So I remember I was in a train, and I got the news, and I bought drinks for everybody in the cafe car on the train. And, you know, I said, I just want a case, and it's really important. And I'm not going to tell you why it's important.

I'm just going to buy you a drink. And that was the sum total of the celebration were those happy people on the train, not sure why they were getting a free drink, but that was it. You know, one of the ways in which the experience of this abuse was so important to where I am right now, is that it's from that moment in my life

that I began to think about justice in the way that has, that is completely my obsession right now. And that's the distinction between thinking about the criminal and the people who enable the crime to happen. Those people who do nothing when great harm is happening. Not so much as opposed to, but in addition to those who are doing the great harm. And so in this case itself,

what was important to me was not so much whether you could go out and arrest people like Donald Hanson, which of course they could have. They could have criminally prosecuted him. They could have criminally prosecuted him. They could still criminally prosecute him. But it was making sure that those around the criminal felt the responsibility to do something too. Where's Hanson now?

I don't know. I've tried to find out. Not so much because I want to have him arrested as much as just to see where he is in his own head. But I know he fled and went into hiding because, you know, once it became clear the extent of his crimes, New Jersey was pretty intent on prosecuting him criminally and he wanted to evade that. This might sound odd, but why are you willing to talk about it? Because I can. You know, I'm incredibly privileged. I have tenure.

I have a wife and a family that love me. And I don't need anything else beyond those things. But there are a lot of people out there who need much more. And they will only get it if the world comes to terms with its failure to protect those who need to be protected. And in my view, we will only do that when we learn to focus our anger in the right place, which means not just at the criminal, but at those who enable the criminal. You know, I remember when the Weinstein case first came out, as pathological as Weinstein is, and certainly he is, you know, scum, there's an endless list of people who let that happen. And that's the responsibility we have to develop a sensibility to.

Sensitivity has got to be a part of our life. And so I, you know, I'm in a place where I can afford to, whatever it might do to me, I can try to campaign for that. That's what I'm trying to do, campaign for that. That's what my work is about. That's what I'm trying to do, campaign for that. That's what my work is about. That's what everything I do is about. And so I'm happy to talk about it when I can. The American Boy Choir School filed for bankruptcy in 2015

and then, citing low enrollment, closed its doors for good this fall. ¶¶ Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr, Nadia Wilson, and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Matilde Erfolino is our intern. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show.

Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. Special thanks to AdCirc for providing their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. Radiotopia from PRX. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation.

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