The elite Horace Mann school — still reeling from revelations that it harbored sexual-predator employees for decades — fears that making abuse records public would give victims seeking retribution “an unfair negotiating advantage.”
The callous statement was made by Howard Epstein, an attorney for the tarnished Bronx institution, in an attempt to convince a Manhattan judge to seal information related to a total $1 million payment to two victims last March.
“The public has no legitimate interest in the details of abuse that occurred nearly 20 years ago,” Epstein argues in papers filed in the school’s Manhattan Supreme Court case against insurer AIG to recoup settlement costs.
“Any public interest in this aspect of the case would be mere curiosity,” he says in the Jan. 16 filing.
Former student Amos Kamil, who’s working on a book about Horace Mann’s sordid past, called the legal argument “disingenuous.”
“The public has no legitimate interest? That’s been their position since the late 1960s” when the abuse started and later spread to affect some 50 students who were molested by at least 20 teachers.
“It’s ridiculous,” Kamil said. “They’re just trying to protect their own.”
Epstein argues, “There is also merit in not publishing the identities of alleged perpetrators whose conduct has not been tried in a court of law.”
Insurer AIG has accused the school of choosing a confidential settlement process with 32 victims over a public trial to avoid any “adverse publicity.”
AIG, which wasn’t a party to the settlement negotiations, wants to know “the extent of Horace Mann’s knowledge of [the abuse claims]” when they first happened.
One of the two victims at issue in the insurance case is Ben Batler, who committed suicide in 2009.
His mother, a former teacher at the school who tried to report her son’s abuse to administrators, has spoken publicly about his abuse at the hands of the late music teacher Johannes Somary.
The second victim has not come forward to talk about his experience.
Robert Boynton, a spokesman for the Horace Mann Action Coalition, an alumni group started to support the victims, said the documents should be redacted to hide the names of victims or perpetrators.
But, he added, “hiding behind the privacy of the victims is particularly cynical and disgusting,” Boynton said.
Justice Charles Ramos will decide in the coming weeks whether the seal the settlement documents.
A rep for the school did not immediately return messages for comment.