Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [9]
Obviously, I say, the damage is very real to you.
“It is real,” Hardwicke says. “There’s a snake that was put inside me, and it coils through my intestines and has become mixed up in my whole being. It’s alive and it talks and I can’t get it fucking out.”
Piper Rudnick filed Hardwicke’s lawsuit in January 2001. And around that time, Hardwicke started calling and e-mailing alumni from the school. He wanted to tell his story to people who might understand. He also wondered if there were others who had suffered similarly. It didn’t take long for him to discover that there were many others—several dozen by his current count. There was his classmate Robert Staab, for one. There was also Bobby Byrens. There were Chuck Clinton, Mark Goebel, and Doug Palmatier. And, of course, there was Larry Lessig, the famous lawyer in California.
WHEN HARDWICKE FIRST telephoned Lessig, the call did not go smoothly. Hardwicke asked about Lessig’s experiences with Hanson, promising he would keep the information confidential. But Hardwicke had already mentioned the names of some former students he’d spoken to. Lessig, agitated and deeply wary, told Hardwicke, “You’ve already revealed other people’s secrets to me. I don’t know why I’d trust you to keep my secrets confidential.”
Lessig, however, did agree to talk to Hardwicke’s lawyers. But when Keith Smith called, Lessig said, “I’d love to talk to you, but I can’t.” The implications of Lessig’s phrasing were plain to Smith: “It tells me right away there’s a contract, a settlement agreement, that says he can’t talk.” Smith was interested in deposing Lessig as a potential witness. Now he knew that he would have to subpoena him—overriding any past confidentiality agreement.
Lessig had few doubts about the merits of Hardwicke’s suit. “Sometimes he described the sexual acts in sadistic terms that were hard for me to credit,” Lessig says. “But there were certain signposts that were totally credible to me,” ranging from Hardwicke’s description of Hanson’s brazenness to the special handshake he used—a little tickle on your palm with his middle finger—to signal his desire for sex.
Lessig wished the plaintiff well, hoped he’d win, would be compensated. But Lessig didn’t want to be deposed. He worried about having the seal broken on his past, about having these furtive scenes from his boyhood recounted in a court proceeding. Besides, his mind was elsewhere: on an epic copyright case, Eldred v. Ashcroft, that had become his abiding obsession. But Hardwicke continued badgering Lessig with a stream of calls and e-mails. Finally the lawyer told Hardwicke, “John, I’m in the middle of an extremely important battle—and this is not it.”
In January 2003, three months after arguing Eldred v. Ashcroft before the U.S. Supreme Court, Lessig read a story in the New York Times about Hardwicke’s case. Earlier, the school’s lawyers had moved to have the case thrown out on the grounds that the Charitable Immunity Act provided the school blanket protection from such a lawsuit. Now the trial-court judge, Jack Sabatino, had sided with the school. “The Act insulates charitable organizations from liability for any degree of tortious conduct, no matter how flagrant,” Sabatino opined. “Accordingly, plaintiff’s contentions that employees and agents of the American Boychoir School acted willfully, wantonly, recklessly, indifferently—even criminally—do not eviscerate the School’s legal protection.