I was watching an old cowboy movie on TV yesterday. It starred Jock Mahoney, a former stuntman who became an actor. I looked him up and found that he was Sally Field’s stepfather and that she wrote in her memoirs that he sexually abused her repeatedly when she was a child, up to the age of fourteen.
That puts a whole different spin on her famous response to winning the Oscar, "I can't deny the fact that you like me. Right now, you like me!"
Today, I picked up a book in one of the nearby Little Free Libraries. It was by Nobel prize winner Alice Munro. Andrea Robin Skinner, her daughter, has written that her stepfather sexually abused her, starting when she was nine years old, and that her mother stayed with him even after he admitted to the abuse years later.
Personally, awhile ago, I found that a substitute teacher at my school, one of the “little Ivy League” prep schools around NYC, had a lifelong career as a child sexual abuser and died without ever spending a day in jail or being convicted. He was even named flight instructor of the year once upon a time and ran a summer flight camp for boys for years. I remember him offering to teach me how to fly but never took him up on it. I didn’t like him as he was a little too crewcut and condescendingly “macho” for me. I’m grateful that my stranger danger radar worked so well.
Learning about my exposure to such a predator caused me to look a little deeper and I found Great Is the Truth: Secrecy, Scandal, and the Quest for Justice at the Horace Mann School by Amos Kamil and Sean Elder. Horace Mann School was another member of the little Ivy League and I could have gone there which would have made me a fellow student of former Attorney General William Barr, who was enrolled there at the time. The book relates the many decades of proven abuse by teachers, administrators, and staff at the school as well as outlining some of the other examples of abuse at other elite prep schools across the country. Who would have dreamt that sexual abuse and bullying would occur at elite educational institutions modeled on the “public” schools of Great Britain which have had a reputation for such bullying and abuse since Percy Bysshe Shelley and Tom Brown’s Schooldays?
We are justifiably angered at what the Epstein case has shown us but the rot goes much, much deeper and the damage is more widespread than we’d like to imagine. We have to face the full spectrum of this problem and not fool ourselves that it is just Epstein, Trmp, and the Epstein class. Child sexual abuse is all around us and half measures are only going to allow it to continue damaging our children, our society, and ourselves.
