Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [14]
Lessig once told me a story about the summer after he left the Boychoir School. Hanson invited him to take a trip to the Hanson family compound in Canada. Lessig badly wanted to go. But his mother said no, and when Lessig asked why, she said, “I don’t know, there’s something weird about this.” Lessig threw a titanic fit. “I screamed, slammed the door, walked out of the house,” he said. “I came back three hours later, and we never said anything about it ever again.” Lessig paused. “They knew.”
So if they knew—that is, they know—isn’t keeping it from them a charade?
“You underestimate the power of the human mind to ignore things that aren’t placed right in front of you,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be such a successful charade to succeed in not forcing them into this deeply depressing, painful recognition of not taking steps to protect your kid.”
What has brought all this into focus for Lessig is the birth twenty months ago of his son, Willem. Lessig recalls his father’s tirade when he asked to go to the Boychoir School. “It wasn’t until I became a father that I understood,” he says. “I can’t imagine sending my son away to school. I can’t imagine how they could do it.”
Willem has also afforded Lessig an insight into his deliberations over whether to reveal his abuse to his parents: “I think to myself, My God, I would never want my child not to tell me something like that.”
But Lessig and his parents remained locked in a silent impasse: the parents too fearful, and perhaps too guilty, to press him about what happened; the son too angry with them to volunteer the information. When Lessig saw his mother and father at Christmas, at their home in Hilton Head, they told him they’d received a card from a friend that mentioned his latest legal adventure: We saw Larry’s name in the paper, the card reported. We see he’s fighting a lawsuit with that boychoir in Princeton.
His parents inquired, What lawsuit? Lessig refused to tell them. Now he doesn’t have to—and they don’t have to ask. For better or worse, the impasse has finally been broken.
JOHN HEILEMANN is a contributing editor at New York magazine, where he writes the “Power Grid” column, and also a columnist at Business 2.0. He was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in reporting in 2001, and he is the author of Pride Before the Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era, and has been a staff writer for The New Yorker, The Economist, and Wired. He lives in Brooklyn.
Coda
In the days following the story’s publication, Lessig’s e-mail inbox was flooded with hundreds of messages. Most expressed support and sympathy; others shared stories that echoed his, and sought advice about counseling or therapy. On various Web sites, Boychoir School alumni came forward with stories of their own, few of them as dark as Hardwicke’s, but many troubling all the same. Meanwhile, Donald Edwards, in a letter to the Boychoir School’s faculty, staff, parents, and trustees, offered for the first time a public apology to the victims of Hanson’s abuse—an apology, however, that was marred by the letter’s blithe conclusion. “There is little any of us can do outside the legal process to address the past,” Edwards wrote, as if the school’s conduct in the Hardwicke case was a good-faith attempt to confront the past, as opposed to evading it.
Among the responses to the story, one was especially shocking. In an article in the Toronto Star, Don Hanson emerged from hiding (though without revealing his whereabouts) to denounce the accusations against him. “This is an awful lot of slander, this whole thing,” he said, adding that Lessig’s involvement in the case “just pisses me off, just destroys me. He was the best head boy that I ever had in the choir.” Regarding Hardwicke, Hanson was harsher: “He has an axe