Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [8]
Hardwicke pours a cup of coffee and sits with his legs tucked underneath him on the floor of the TV room. At forty-seven, he is tall and thin, with pale-pink skin, a snow-white beard, and watery blue eyes. He begins by telling me about the first time he discussed his abuse with a reporter. “I felt this incredible evil hovering around me that I just knew was going to kill me,” he says. “And then this evil communicated, ‘No, it’s not you, it’s your wife. We’re going to start with her.’”
If the effects of Lessig’s abuse were subtle and slow to emerge, for Hardwicke they’re glaring and have plagued him relentlessly throughout his life. After he met Terri at Catholic University, they were married and started a business together doing freelance PR, graphic design, brochures, and such. But Hardwicke, who was told repeatedly by Hanson that he was gay, has struggled for many years with confusion over his sexual orientation. Well into his marriage, he found himself engaging in anonymous trysts with men.
“It made me feel awful,” he says, pulling his knees up to his chest. “It became sort of this thing that I couldn’t control, and I’d literally want to throw up afterward…I was pretty convinced that it was some kind of demonic possession, almost. I mean, I can remember several times after the event where I’d get gas for the car and it would be, like, sixteen dollars and sixty-six cents.”
At one point, Hardwicke concluded he was gay and announced he was leaving Terri. But a friend who knew of his experiences suggested he seek therapy instead. Because he felt complicit in the acts, he didn’t think of them as molestation. But his therapist, Dr. Emily Samuelson, a trauma specialist, disagreed with that assessment.
Within twenty-four hours after Hardwicke told Samuelson about being raped by the school’s cook, Hardwicke’s mother was killed in a car accident, propelling his paranoia to imponderable heights. His daughter was in the car, too, but she “walked out unscathed,” he says. “And I got to thinking later it was a metaphor for molestation. Some are killed, some are scarred, some are crippled. Others walk out untouched. It all depends where you were sitting in the car.”
After a few months of seeing Samuelson, in 1999, Hardwicke decided to approach the school and asked his father to help him do it. Hardwicke’s father, who by then had become Maryland’s chief administrative law judge, is a faculty member at Johns Hopkins. So they arranged to meet the school’s then-president, John Ellis, at the Hopkins Faculty Club. Ellis arrived with the school’s attorney. Up to that point, Hardwicke had never contemplated suing the school. “My intention was to have them apologize,” he explains. “I was trying to have somebody say, ‘It’s not your fault.’”
Hardwicke takes a long, deep drag on his cigarette. After several months of back-and-forth, he realized that no apology would be forthcoming and decided to explore a lawsuit. His father contacted some friends of his at Piper Rudnick, the largest law firm in Maryland, where he had briefly been an associate in the fifties.
Assigned to handle the litigation was an earnest, thirty-three-year-old, chubby-cheeked associate, Keith Smith, who was startled by the depths of Hardwicke’s depression when they first met in late 2000. “I’ve never seen anyone as black as John was,” Smith tells me. “He couldn’t work, couldn’t get out of bed most days.”
Not long after the firm signed on, the school made a settlement offer of two hundred thousand dollars. Hardwicke considered the sum “insulting.”
I ask him if he can quantify the damages he’s suffered. His back stiffens, face reddens, voice rises an octave or two.
This is what bothered me so much about filing a lawsuit. The first thing Piper Rudnick wanted to do was create a list of ways that I’d been damaged. And