Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [7]
In March 1982 Howard sent a letter to the school’s parents, informing them that Hanson had resigned “for reasons of personal health.” Without mentioning the scandal, the letter lauded Hanson for his service: “He alone held the school together in the early seventies…hiring and firing staff, running the admissions and concert offices, from time to time driving the bus and even washing the dishes…His story at the Boychoir School is one of total devotion to the boys and dedication to the best interests of the School.”
After his dismissal, Hanson retreated to Canada, while Lessig gave up his seat on the board and got on with his life. His academic brilliance now unfurling in earnest, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied philosophy for three years before entering law school. For a time, his attitude to what Hanson had done, he says, was, “No harm, no foul.”
Then, at Yale Law School, Lessig took a course taught by arch-feminist Catharine MacKinnon and began to ponder his relationship with Hanson in a different, more sophisticated light. “There was this moment when I realized that I had been, in the traditional way, a woman in all relevant respects—totally passive, an object of sexual aggression,” he says. “I’d adopted this supportive, protective role with respect to him.” Among his many other afflictions, Hanson was an alcoholic. “There was this one time I literally saved his life,” Lessig recalls. “I came into his bedroom and he was passed out, vomiting, and I had to flip him over to stop him from suffocating. And this, I felt, was my role. I was his wife.”
Lessig had been involved with a number of women in college and graduate school. And he began to see self-destructive patterns in his relationships. “I remember throwing tantrums,” he says, “as I recognized how this thing had intruded in my life.”
After landing a plum professorship at the University of Chicago Law School, Lessig entered therapy. “The therapist was really great,” he observes with an ironic chuckle. “He said, ‘This is very significant, but you’re lucky—at least you didn’t become a homosexual.’”
What happened next is something Lessig refuses to discuss. But according to Hardwicke’s lead attorney, Keith Smith, Lessig sued the Boychoir School and received a settlement. Both the suit and the settlement are officially under seal, with a confidentiality agreement that bars either side from disclosing their existence, let alone any of the details. What Lessig can say, however, is that the school and its lawyers are aware of his abuse by Hanson. And that, in his interactions with them before the Hardwicke case, he thinks that “they behaved well.”
In the next decade, Lessig had almost zero contact with the school, as his legal career went supernova and his personal life settled happily. From Chicago, he moved on first to Harvard Law School and then to Stanford. He married, had a son, and set up digs in a rambling Spanish house not far from the ocean in San Francisco. Soaking in the hot tub on his balcony at night, watching the fog creep in, Lessig believed, with good reason, that he had put the Boychoir School behind him.
And then one day in 2001 came the e-mail from John Hardwicke.
THE DISTANCE FROM LESSIG’S to Hardwicke’s house is vast in every sense. In deepest rural Maryland, not far from the Pennsylvania line, it’s a small Cape Codder with rickety shutters and a mudslick for a driveway. On the day I visit, in February, the front walk is covered with snow; horses graze in a pasture next door. Inside, John and his wife, Terri, pad around in stocking feet, smoking Marlboro Medium 100s one after another. There are stuffed toys strewn around the house—Terri’s creations. In the living room, a court jester sits amid a metric ton of brick-a-brac, next to a full-size harp.
After a while, the Hardwickes’ fifteen-year-old daughter bounces through the door in a pair of pink Chuck Taylor high-tops.