March 21, 2019 • 39 mins
Tim Ehrlich's secret nearly killed him. But he and a group of other men with the same secret found the courage to come forward and reveal it, and in doing so heal a lifetime of pain. (Warning this episode contains explicit information about sexual abuse).
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. The
following episode contains explicit details of sexual abuse. Listener discretion
is advised. It was the assistant headmaster. He was our
soccer coach, he was our lacrosse coach, um, and he
(00:20):
ran the boys acounts. This is Tim Erlick, a fifty
year old bariatric surgeon, looking back on his childhood. As
a ten eleven twelve year old boy, Tim was methodically,
relentlessly sexually abused, along with dozens of other boys, by
a middle school teacher named Sad Alton at the Pingree School,
an elite New Jersey day school. This is a story
(00:43):
about the worst sort of secret, the kind that festers
and grows over the course of a lifetime until it
becomes unbearable, impossible to hold. I'm d Ni Shapiro, and
this is family secrets. The secrets that are kept from us,
(01:05):
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. In June, Tim, along with twenty other men, bankers, lawyers,
real estate developers, a social worker, a high school principal, psychologist,
approached the Pingree School. They called themselves the Pingree Survivors,
(01:27):
and they were looking for some kind of justice, if
justice was even possible. On a fall afternoon, Tim and
I spent hours and hours on the phone, me hunched
over my recording equipment and my son's old playroom. My
son is now a college freshman, but during those hours,
I looked around the room at football posters, plastic bins
of legos, dented abandoned boxes of board games, scrabble, Monopoly,
(01:50):
shoots and ladders, and I thought about what it is
to be a boy ten twelve, all knobby knees, skinny
shoulder blades and downy cheeks, still a child just beginning
to stretch and yearn to be bigger, older. So my
mom is from Stylingtown. My grandmother family was all from Vienna,
(02:13):
and almost all of them except for her, her mom
and her three sisters and my great aunts and my
great grandmother immigrated to the United States, but the rest
of the family was all lost in the Holocaust. Tim
is the fourth out of six kids, part of a
Jewish family who moved to suburban New Jersey and were
fortunate enough to be able to send their kids to
private school, the Bucolic campus of Pingree's Lower School. In
(02:36):
short Hills is about as far away from his mom's
New York City Stuyvesant Town or his dad's Southwestern Georgia
as you can imagine. It's a place that looks safe,
constted by manicured privilege, as if nothing bad could ever
happen there. I know this because I was also a
student at the Pingree School during that time. I knew
(02:57):
many of these boys. I even dated one of them
when I was in seven grade. This is Tim's story,
but imagine it amplified by so many boys in this
one school, and then again in schools all over America.
Just in the past two years, haras Man Rama's taft
Hot Guests, St. Paul's, and other institutions charged with the
education and protection of their students have been embroiled in
(03:19):
controversies as the truth tumbles out, as truth tends to do.
Tim entered Pingree in the fourth grade on the heels
of his older brother Andy. Andy at that time was
in seventh grade, and Andy was the king of the Hill.
He was captain lacrosse team, buying for student body president.
So when I started at Pingery, my mom was like,
(03:41):
you know, you need to meet Teddalton, need to be
a boy Scout and automatically, you know, coming from a
big family like that, all the teachers know you. Everybody
at Pingrey knows you. You're little to me early, you know,
and that's how people still call me that. And it
was kind of nice because the older girls that you
know that Andy was friends with, you know, we're talking
(04:01):
to me, and the older guys are cool to me.
And he was great. Now. I started with the Boy
Scouts in fourth grade, when usually it was probably like
the fifth or sixth grade kind of thing that my mom,
you introduced me to Ted Alton, gave me Tiddleton, I'm
a golden platter. One of the things that struck me
again and again in all of the descriptions of Ted
Alton was how charismatic and respected and how much he
(04:28):
was considered to be this kind of golden teacher, and
also that he was everywhere. That to me was one
of the most chilling aspects of this was that it's
almost as if he designed life, or not almost as
if he It seems like he did design a life
in which he would be present in every possible way
(04:49):
for the boys that he was going after. I didn't
have them to a teacher until sixth grade. He was
a sixth grade like social studies teacher um, but for
soccer and lacrosse and obviously both scouts. It was our
quote unquote tripping counselor, so he was in charge of
(05:10):
taking us on these amazing I mean, I dream about
these excursions through the woods and waters of Maine, and
we would go whitewater canoeing on the Penobscott and the
Allagash and the Saco River, and running down the bluffs
at the Socco and and see buried villages Black staff. Honestly,
(05:35):
that's what makes this all again so pray, is that
they were probably some of the best members of my life.
In the Pingree survivors approached the school in search of answers.
They wanted the school to take responsibility for the history
that had so traumatized them. Pingree's lawyers retained a private
(05:57):
security firm to conduct an independent investigation. The cover page
of the ensuing report carries a warning that the material
is sensitive, personal and graphic and not intended for children. Quote.
The evidence demonstrates that between nineteen seventy two and nineteen
seventy eight, while employed by Short Hills Country Day and
(06:18):
Pingree Thad Alton sexually assaulted at least twenty seven students.
Alton's behavior permeated multiple facets of the former students lives,
since some former students simultaneously attended Pingree, Camp Wacanaki and
were part of Boy Scout Troop number sixty four that
regularly met on school grounds in a number of different locations,
(06:42):
including his office at school during the school day, after
school in the evenings and on week ends, the school
gymnasium and the girls locker room, the home of his
in laws, his own school owned home at times when
his wife and children were present, the home of a
former student on Boy Scout camping trips, his summer home
(07:02):
in Martha's Vineyard, his truck and Camp Waganaki, including on
camping trips, and inside his own cabin. In particular, the
sexual contact that occurred inside Alton's office and elsewhere included
Alton's touching a student's naked penises with his hands, the
students touching of Alton's naked penis with their hands at
(07:23):
Alton's request, Alton's placement of student's hands on his naked
penis to masturbate him, Alton masturbating in front of students
while encouraging students to masturbate the mutual touching of students
naked penises. Alton often invited groups of boys into his
office as well, and had boys touched each other's penises
(07:44):
and then coaxed them to perform oral sex on him
and or each other. In addition, Alton used heterosexual pornographic
magazines and movies to entice the boys to touch their
own penises, those of each other, and that of Alton.
For my mom, here's my mom. You know these kids,
(08:06):
work aholic husband, We've never ever involved in my life,
never coached any of mine, little league or anything. Um,
I didn't really know him growing up. And so for me,
Ted Alton was sort of a savior because here's this masculine,
outdoorsy guy, lacrosse coach, soccer coach. My mom it was
(08:26):
he's a father figure, you know. And it was probably
about sixth grade, and she said to me, she said,
I know Ted Alton. He she had she knew that
something's going on. She's not a fucking idiot. She knew
that that Ted Alton, you know, I was doing something
with boys. But she said to me, she said, Ted
Alton will never touch you because he doesn't like Jewish boys.
(08:47):
But it was more important for her to have him
in my life as a father figure, even though she
knew that he was probably, you know, doing something sexual
with these boys. And it really didn't think into me,
like until last year, of how she sort of navigated
that situation. At the point when she said that to
(09:07):
you that he wouldn't touch Jewish boys, had he already
made an approach to you? Oh yes, I've already been
two years as a boy scout. I was like, yeah, mom,
you know, Okay, No, he's already made his mark. We're
going to take a quick break. We'll be back in
a moment. This is a story at its core that
(09:34):
is about the failure of adults, or, in the words
of Edmund Burke, the only thing necessary for the triumph
of evil is for good men to do nothing. What
did Tim's mother know? What did other mothers or fathers suspect?
A question that emerges again and again. How could this
abuse have gone on right under the noses of so
(09:55):
many grown ups? Yeah it was. I mean, I'm a
short Jewish kid and this powering, six three big guy
who's in the military, but with a big smile, and
he was known for his bear hugs. That's how he
got the nickname Bear. But I remember the pants he wore.
He always worthy, sort of like polyester pants, which we
(10:16):
had laugh at nowadays, you know nowadays in blue shirts
and a black tie and a certain smell. When Tim
is in sixth grade, he runs away from home a
couple of times, and instead of getting on a train
or a bus and going to New York, he calls
Ted Alton, and Ted caused him his parents and talks
(10:37):
him into going back home. And then in wood Shock,
I made him a plaque. I said thanks, and he
kept that in his office, you know, for all the
you know, probably for years, probably still has it for
all I know. And how fucked up is that? And
I guess in some ways he was kind of a
first love, maybe the father figure who crossed the line.
(10:58):
But we all felt loved by him. And that's why
no one said anything, because if we don't want him
to get hurt, and we also got something out of it.
It was there was a pleasure to it. What kind
of a crush in sixth grade. But on the flip side,
I would also being gratified by ten Alton and other
boys because the boy scouts and it was very confused,
(11:19):
extremely confusing. There's a psychological theory called imprinting, in which
a young animal learns the characteristics of a desirable meat.
Just think of ducklings following their mother. There are key moments,
vulnerable moments, when his imprinting can occur, and when it does,
it can have lasting, even permanent consequences. Tim hates this theory,
(11:41):
which was mentioned to him by a therapist. He quickly
fired and I get it. He doesn't want to think
of himself as permanently branded altered forever by the abuse
of Ted Alton. But what is the sexuality of a ten, eleven,
twelve year old boy? In many religious traditions, thirteen is
the age when manhood first begins. What does it do
to a psyche to have powerful sexual feelings triggered before
(12:05):
a boy is ready and in the hands of a
skilled predator who was an honor to be invited into
t and there would be other boys there, And it
all started out very tame is game truth or dare?
And then it was then it became you know, more
dares and less truths. And what happened is it sort
of spawns these relationships with these other boys, and for years,
(12:27):
these other boys do things without head around. I slept
with multiple sets of brothers, not at the same time,
but a brother my age, and you know, one kid
my age and his older brother want the brother who
slept at each other. So it's really really dark and dirty,
and it's it's the conversation that nobody wants to have.
(12:50):
So having all that be so knitted together with love
for this, you know, seemingly loving a father figure year
and then everybody else who's in this kind of chosen
band of boys, I mean, it would be impossible to
be anything other than just horrendously confused. One of the
(13:14):
things that I found in in digging into the material
was the way in which Ted said to many of
the boys, this is our secret. And there was some
combination both of loyalty to him and of almost a
kind of implicit threat of no one can know about this,
but also the potent combination of I've got the report
(13:39):
in front of me, um language like reasons for the
lack of reporting by former students, right, you had in
the in the mix of UM for me and some
of the guys, I know you know, the really deep
doing to loneliness, because again what leads us into Ted's hand.
But you know, an absent father, you know, I mean,
I mean I came from a large family and who
(14:01):
had time for me. I mean, thank God for my grandparents. Um,
but I never felt loved in my house, you know,
I think my parents ever said that to me. And
that's that's what he gave you. He showed us love.
Here's another quote from the report. It is a well
known and well documented fact that child victims of abuse,
especially sexual abuse, rarely report that abuse while they're still children.
(14:25):
In other words, even if they are able to hold
on to it or remember it, it seems like there's
just this feeling of responsibility and shame and so many
complex feelings that are all tied up in it. I
think I spent thirty plus years of my life, h
thirty five plus years really thinking that it was my
own fault, that I thought this out, that I needed
(14:46):
a father figure, that I enjoyed it, that I wanted it.
And then there's also to be honest with your boys.
There's two reasons why you know, boys never talked about this,
and it's because number one, you're going be accused of
being gay, and number two, you know you're gonna they're
gonna think you're gonna be a child molester one day.
(15:07):
And in nineteen seventy four, seventy five or seventy six
or whatever, this is being gay is essentially you know
your death tennis, So that is just not gonna happen.
And you get near forties and your fifties and Eve
internalize all this stuff. And for me, if I didn't
deal with it, I probably wouldn't be alive right now.
(15:28):
When Tim finishes the eighth grade, his family falls on
hard financial times, which precipitates a move to Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
But Ted Alton had already done all the damage you
would ever do by the time the boys hit puberty.
He was kind of done with them. By eighth grade,
Tim had aged out. Everybody deals with trauma in a
(15:50):
different way. Some people turn to sports, some to drugs
and alcohol. Tim just kept himself busy with his studies.
He graduated at the top of his class in high school,
got into a great university. He kept busy with front life,
government bita Kappa. He eventually went to medical school and
shose surgery one of the most difficult of all residencies.
(16:11):
He was involved in everything because if he had free time,
if he was alone with his thoughts, he would go
to a very dark place. There's moments when there was
a holiday or vacation, I'd have a hard time because
I would just think too much. And I even to
this day, I don't do well by myself. So that's
(16:32):
how I sort of coped, which you know, I think
it's better than most when I look at some of
the very high achieving guys. But then there's then there's
also a group of guys. There's two guys who were
teenagers who killed themselves. They killed themselves when they were teenagers.
Or you mean they killed themselves later, No, they killed
themselves when they were teenagers. Correct. Tim embarks on his
(16:59):
life as a quote on successful adult. At least on
the outside. He has girlfriends, dates women, enjoy sex with women.
Eventually he gets married and has three children, but there
are instances in which he finds himself attracted to men.
Because here's the thing, Tim is gay. You know, I
(17:20):
always had attraction to women. I always had long term girlfriends.
You know, there was a part of me that was
attracted two men after I moved. I never acted on
it all through college. I wasn't still he in the
medical school. I had one incident and then had such
negative feelings about it afterwards, felt so much guilt and
(17:42):
shame and nausea. To be honest with you, I don't
think I vomited, but I just felt so shitty that
I didn't do anything again for years. Tim, did you
at the time recognize that you're really negative? Almost visceral
physical response was directly tied to that childhood abuse? Not
(18:05):
at all, Not at all. I still think you know
my brain when I thought about Ted and the boy,
I thought about that man. I was lonely, I was
looking for a father figure. I enjoyed the sexual gratification.
And that was the script that I told myself. But
I still probably tell myself, but maybe that was a better,
a safer place, that narrative and the reality you know
(18:27):
in nineteen four that I'm gay and that I was
sexually abused and my family fucking sucks. So for me,
I think that narrative for me was very self protective
and un't I don't mean to laugh, but no, I
think that that's true. And and there's something really powerful
and interesting about adaptation, you know, being able to be
(18:47):
adaptive under even really really extreme circumstances. Tim goes through
the motions he digs into his bariatric practice. He and
his wife welcomed two girls into the world, and then
his son is born. But there's something about having a
boy that really, um kind of rocked my world, remember
when he was born, and that really led to more
(19:12):
feelings of my life, of thoughts about me as a
boy and Pitt and the Voice Scouts and my adventures
and you know what happened to me. And I mean, look,
I always, I always knew what happened. You know, I didn't.
I'm not one of these people who said, you know,
I never thought about it, and boom, you know, I
read about it and all put it back to me.
Yet I knew every day it happened. I probably thought
(19:32):
about it every single day in my life. But when
he was born, it really became pervasive. At the time,
Tim lived in Westport, Connecticut. Westport is not too far
from me, I know it well. If you look up
effluent suburb in the dictionary, Westport's picture would appear, well,
not really, but you know what I mean. It's a
(19:54):
place where mom's in Lulu lemon yoga pants, push strollers
down Main Street and tanned fit dad's take their kids
to jiu jitsu and tennis lessons on weekends. A place
where if there is some aspect of your world that
is secret or painful, you might feel like you're the
only one. Everybody looks like they're living their best life.
(20:15):
My point is Tim tried really hard to wrap up
his secrets and put them away. I've gotten the therapy
in two eight, right around Thanksgiving, really triggered by marital problems,
work problems. Everything is sort of coming to a head,
(20:36):
and I was sort of a taking time bomb. I
couldn't keep this sort of house of cards I built.
I couldn't keep it together any longer. I was really
really struggling. If I hadn't of gotten into therapy and
really done the work that I need to do, um,
I probably would not be alive today. And I know that.
(20:57):
I know that. But either I was going to know
myself or I was going to run off the road
driving to New York at three o'clock in the morning
to meet somebody asleep with them after working a twelve
hour day and putting my kids to bed. We're going
to pause for a moment. Even though Tim felt comfortable
(21:24):
with his therapist, he didn't talk about the sexual abuse.
By that Alton, he was trying to keep it all going,
his marriage, his family, his practice, his attraction to men.
And I was in a lot of denial. And I
didn't and I didn't want to talk about it. I
wanted to deal with the problems at hand. I didn't
really see this that you were that they were all related,
but obviously they were just really hard to admit that.
(21:46):
It really wasn't so much much later that I realized
that I liked being with men because I liked being
with men and had nothing to do with the fact
that that I was molested as a child. Tim's therapist
asked him to create a timeline of the abuse. The
writing unleashes his memory and also begins to give him
(22:08):
a sense of purpose. So every Friday I started taking
off and I would sit at the Westport Library and
I was basically writing for therapy, and it would lead
me to sort of finding people. Well, let me think, well, man,
that kid was next to me in the tent, and
this guy went to camp with and you know, Wow,
where where are they all now? And so I accumulated
(22:32):
a list of fifty or sixty names. Half were other
children that I knew for a fact were abused, noe,
more kids I suspected the restaurant or parents who I
felt probably knew. And then there were teachers who was
extremely cathartic to put it on paper. And I started
reaching out to people. I traveled, and I went to
(22:52):
visit some of these guys that I grew up with
to connect, to bond with him, to talk about this,
because I've been thinking about this in my brain for still.
It was like a like a tape cassette's on a loop. Finally,
I just wanted to be able to talk to somebody
about who was there to validate because I thought I
was going crazy. So I was starting to really be
(23:14):
aware and read about stories. I'm somebody who hates picking
up the phone to call a person who may not
want to hear from me, which is why I'm a novelist,
a memoirist, and now a podcaster and not say an
investigative journalist. So when I think about what Tim did next,
(23:35):
I'm pretty blown away by the courage it took. I
think you will be too. But that's what sort of
led me on the path. And I did talk to
a few of these guys, some of them who told
me to funk off. Who is my number. One of
the guys have become like a brother to me, like
one of my dearest friends in my life, who when
I actually ended up hiring this law firm, this one
(23:56):
friend basically told me, he said, look, I'm I'm proud
of you, but I can't talk to you anymore. I
don't want this in my life. Good luck to you,
but do not ever call me. And it was hurtful,
but I also knew that I needed to go forward
and do this. And fast forward a year later and
being his brother, both point us and it has been
the best thing that he has ever done in his life.
(24:19):
And I'm so proud of him. So the Pingree Survivors,
the band of boys who had once been methodically groomed
by Ted Alton, become a band of men hell bent
on transcending their history of abuse. And it all started
with Tim reaching out, picking up the phone, trying to
make contact. You remember, I was out in Napa at
(24:41):
a friend's wedding, and I took the time out to
drive down to Monterey to have drinks with one of
these guys. And that was the first time I've seen
him with sweer children. I had actually, you know, paid
like people finders dot com or something like that to
figure out where he lived prior to that, and I was,
I guess I was sort of cyber stalking these people. Um.
(25:04):
But I called him up, said, hey, look, I'm gonna
be in California. I want to come down there and
I want to go out of the beer And that's
exactly what we did, and quickly, I don't know how
it started, um, but I brought it up. I said,
do you ever think about what it was like when
we were kids or the effect has had in your life?
And and that became two three four or final I
(25:26):
don't even remember, of alcohol and tears and hugs and
a little bit laughter. Tim continues his detective work. His
children are wondering why their father is all of a
sudden taking trips, spending late nights talking on the phone
behind closed doors. So finally he decided that he's going
(25:46):
on a reconnaissance mission, and he returns to Pingry, the
scene of the crime with his oldest daughter, Zoe, I
took her one weekday during the must have been off
school school break, and we went down to pingry Do.
I wanted to go look at old yearbooks to remember
names and faces and teachers that I couldn't remember. So
(26:09):
we were driving down there and I said, well, I'm
doing a little research. When I went to the school,
I told him the story that my brother had died,
which is true, and I wanted to find some old
photos of my brother at his time at Pingary It's
a really important time from So that was my execuse
to get into the school library. And Joe and I,
my my oldest daughter, we went down to the school. Yeah,
(26:31):
I hadn't been there since, you know, the sixth grade
or seventh grade or whatever it was, and uh, it
was really really uncomfortable. But they had renovated the school,
so at least his office was gone. I didn't have
to see that, but they were the cross fields and
the soccer fields and the building and this sweet little
(26:51):
wonderful school. We're always awful has happened. Tim begins to
understand that Ted Alton's abuse is not lim did to
a small group of boys. The yearbook photographs Joga's memory
and he reaches out to another boy, now grown man,
who he remembers from that time. The two men reconnect
and for the first time Tim hears and understands that
(27:14):
there were adults, many adults, not only his parents, but teachers, administrators,
board members who had suspected Ted Alton of abuse and
done nothing. Once Alton's behavior had become impossible to ignore,
a meeting of prominent fathers was called for in a
board member's home, and a psychiatrist was brought in to
(27:35):
advise them, and we actually have a notes and meeting,
and basically a psychiatrist his recommendation that these fathers was
that bas need to get the scuy at the school
and not discuss it and just move forward, but basically
deny the whole thing. Don't put the kids through the
trauma of a trial. Remember earlier when I said that
(27:57):
this story is ultimately about the failure of adults, Well,
this is even more than a case of good men
doing nothing. These men, and they did all seem to
be men, knew they needed to get rid of Alton.
So they passed the trash in Tim's words, and write
Alton a glowing letter of recommendation to another new Jersey
(28:17):
Prep School, essentially making Alton somebody else's problem, and not
seeming to consider that this would mean he would continue
to abuse kids elsewhere. And these were dads, who fathers,
who worked on Wall Street, who were the CFO of
huge companies. And I think that there is a part
(28:38):
where they wanted to let's just put this to bed.
Nobody wants to be the father who is working while
their son is off in the woods being abused. Here's
where a very strange coincidence enters the picture. While I
was working on this story, I happened to run into
a man who had been a teacher at Pingree long ago.
And by the way, this never happens. I can count
(29:00):
on one hand the number of times I run into
anyone I had known it Pingry in my entire adult life.
It just doesn't happen. This guy was well aware of
the controversy and the twenty one survivors. I asked him
if he had ever suspected anything. And here's what he said.
We knew, he said, We all knew that something very
wrong was going on in Ted Alton's office. I debate
(29:22):
about whether to tell him this because it's just such
a slap in the face. But I have to, I
have to tell him, well, you know, he just gave
me chills, and and and I don't really if this
stuff get me angry anymore, But this is what makes
me so angry, so angry, because we know they all knew.
(29:43):
We know the athletics director who hired Ted to be
his coach, who who owned the camp at Loganoki. We
know he knew. Fathers spoke to him about this, but
nobody did anything. Camp Waganaki is perhaps the darkest part
of a very dark story. Waganaki was owned by Pingree's
Director of Athletics, award winning soccer coach, biology teacher. In fact,
(30:07):
he had been my biology teacher and responsible for bringing
in some of the largest donations in the school's history. Yeah.
So for four years, um from fourth to you know,
I don't know, fourth to seventh grade summers, I my
two brothers spent at Camp Waganoky in East Waterford, Maine,
which was owned by uh, you know, Pingree athletic director.
(30:32):
You know, so you have this wonderful, rich summer and
I was up there for seven weeks every summer. My parents,
you know, need to get rid of all the boys,
you know, building his wonderful relationships. And on the flip side,
it was having had all non steroids because you know,
gave him a free license to for five days in
the woods with him. Trip you know was to be
five days at a time the Alegash I think trip
(30:53):
was almost a week and there was no adult supervision
other than him. So um, it was really this very
strange time because it was so wonderful, but then it
was also so dark, and I remember falling into this
sleep in his tent with the cries from one of
my friends who was abused for the first time. I
(31:14):
was a kid from Pennsylvania, you know, if he didn't
go to Pingary and where the rest of us was like, oh,
this is all that We've been doing this for years
as boy scouts, So what are you crying about? Get
used to it. After the school's independent report, the survivors
were each interviewed by Pingree's attorneys and insurance provider. They
were questioned as to why they hadn't complained at the
(31:36):
time to a responsible adult. So when when they had
that argument of why didn't you complain to somebody who
knew They all knew who were going to complain to
you know, Ted Dalton's mother in law was the vice
principal of the school. Who we're going to complain to you.
We're gonna plain the administration. He was the administration. It's
ludicrous to think that that we had any voice whatsoever.
(31:59):
So finally, at you know, efty years old, I finally
have a voice. And that, for me is what this
has all been about, is giving me a voice. That
the writing was about. That's what our conversation is about,
is giving you know, a boy who never had a
voice in his home, this family, in the school. That's
that's what I think about. Pingry also sent a letter
(32:22):
to the whole school community. I received one myself. In it,
the school denied prior knowledge of its history of abuse. Ironically,
this denial is ultimately what made many of the men
step forward. They had understandably been reticent about being public
about reliving the worst chapter of their lives. But the
letter was a punch in the face to some very
(32:42):
strong willed people. We had a joint call, and maybe
only eight of us were on a call. We all
went around and you know, people all live all over
the place, and men on for like two hours and
everybody told their stories and just hearing you know, these
guys some of them, somebody didn't know something. These guys
didn't know it all. Some of them. I remember, God,
(33:03):
he was the guy who was like, you know, he
was my water skia coach at camp, and I thought
he was the coolest guy. You know, and he's on
the call and you know, and you're talking to me.
The guy who was the captain of the football team
is great athletes. He was on the call. But hearing
everybody's stories and it just made me so freaking sad.
(33:23):
But I also think it's somebody that finally, for the
first time for many of us and in all these years,
like people that can we can identify with. Because as
much as you can explain this to your friend and
you know, your your wife or your lover or whoever,
you hear the same things like, oh well, I hope
you get closure, And you never get closure on this stuff,
you evolve. The Band of Men came to New York twice.
(33:50):
The first time they were individually deposed. After those depositions
were taken, there was a lot of stalling until the
two sides agreed to discuss the matter. Kingley knew that
the survivors had a strong case. Some of the survivors
wanted to go to court, some didn't. We had to individually,
over the course of the week tell our stories to headmaster,
(34:14):
representatives from the boarders, trustees, attorneys for the school, attorneys
for the insurance company, representatives from the insurance company, and
then our attorneys that we're all in this room sort
of reliving our story specifically. And also we were asked
to write our what they call our impact statements. How
(34:36):
did this abuse affect your life? Is what they're trying
to do, and they're trying to meet a settlement and
figure out what is this case worth? Does this guy
have a case? And I'll tell you writing that impact
statement was really was trouming them of itself. Yeah, but
the similar things is depression, anxiety to a side attempts,
(34:58):
ex editions, huge sexual identification problems, marital discord, job failures.
The list goes on. But so that's the kind of
thing we had to talk about, which is, you know,
hard enough to do with our therapists, but then to
do it with in front of a people, a group
of people who obviously, for me, I would target on
(35:21):
my back because I know they all hate naked. I'm
the one who brought all this diffruition in the end
Ingry settlement. Yes, right, yes, and yet there is a
thorn in the side of that settlement, one that may
never be put right. The owner of Camp Waganaki, who
just had the most expensive building in Pingree's history named
(35:42):
after him. Right, that is one of the first things
that was discussed amongst the plaintiffs, and it's a recurring
theme in all of our stories, is that how could
he have not known? And you know, we we know
that one of the fathers spoke to him know about Ted,
and everybody at the camp knew, and so we did.
(36:04):
We asked, we said, have some compassion for us. You know,
let's let's do our investigation. Let you do your investigation.
Please don't shove it in our face. And the name
of sixty million dollar building after someone that let this
go on. I'd like to quote from the letters signed
by the survivors and addressed to the Pingree community after
(36:26):
the report first came out. So in it it's written
that we hope that revealing the truth about the abuse
of Pingree will serve as a first step in the
healing process. Do you feel now that there have been
steps taken towards your personal healing, towards the healing of
the men who were those abused boys? Absolutely, I um.
But it's really about I think the conversations and connections
(36:46):
between us, which is all elevated everybody else up. I
spoke to one gentleman today and talked him a few
months and you know, he had written that he had moved.
You have to be closer with son and and so
I know that he connects with you know, another planet,
become good friends, and they traveled together. And then this
summer I spent a week in Florida with the one
guy went the Jersey Shore was another one. And I
(37:09):
think it's those moments of that camaraderie, you know. And
again I think if you look at us, a lot
of us don't have strong family connections or um and
maybe some resentment. I mean, hey, where are my parents
when this is going on? The last thing I would
ask is like now moving forward, like moving forward in
(37:31):
your life where this is starting to be something that
you feel ready to move on from in the sense
that you've had There's no such thing as closure, but
you do have a certain degree of what would you say?
You know, I just said, there's one day where my
and my kids have been through a lot because of
all this um and I hope there's one day where
(37:55):
they can really get back and reflect and think, Hey,
my dad as much a bad guy, he did a
lot of good and maybe here's a reason now why
he wasn't there. He was disconnected. You know, I don't
want to be a survivor. I want to be a
thriver and I need to and I want to move
from this and I feel good about that every single day.
It's a wonderful feeling. I'd like to thank my guest,
(38:24):
Tim Rlick for his courage and sharing his story with
us today. You can find out more about Tim's work
to make the Pingree School and other institutions safer and
healthier for children at Pingree survivors dot org. Family Secrets
is an i Heeart media production. Dylan Fagan is a
supervising producer, Andrew Howard and Tristan McNeil are the audio engineers,
(38:47):
and Julie Douglas is the executive producer. If you have
a family secret you'd like to share, you can get
in touch with us at listener mail at Family Secrets
Podcast dot com. You can also find us on to
Gram at Danny Writer, and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod,
and Twitter at Fam Secrets Pod. That's fam Secrets Pod.
(39:09):
For more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot
com
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. The
following episode contains explicit details of sexual abuse. Listener discretion
is advised. It was the assistant headmaster. He was our
soccer coach, he was our lacrosse coach, um, and he
(00:20):
ran the boys acounts. This is Tim Erlick, a fifty
year old bariatric surgeon, looking back on his childhood. As
a ten eleven twelve year old boy, Tim was methodically,
relentlessly sexually abused, along with dozens of other boys, by
a middle school teacher named Sad Alton at the Pingree School,
an elite New Jersey day school. This is a story
(00:43):
about the worst sort of secret, the kind that festers
and grows over the course of a lifetime until it
becomes unbearable, impossible to hold. I'm d Ni Shapiro, and
this is family secrets. The secrets that are kept from us,
(01:05):
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. In June, Tim, along with twenty other men, bankers, lawyers,
real estate developers, a social worker, a high school principal, psychologist,
approached the Pingree School. They called themselves the Pingree Survivors,
(01:27):
and they were looking for some kind of justice, if
justice was even possible. On a fall afternoon, Tim and
I spent hours and hours on the phone, me hunched
over my recording equipment and my son's old playroom. My
son is now a college freshman, but during those hours,
I looked around the room at football posters, plastic bins
of legos, dented abandoned boxes of board games, scrabble, Monopoly,
(01:50):
shoots and ladders, and I thought about what it is
to be a boy ten twelve, all knobby knees, skinny
shoulder blades and downy cheeks, still a child just beginning
to stretch and yearn to be bigger, older. So my
mom is from Stylingtown. My grandmother family was all from Vienna,
(02:13):
and almost all of them except for her, her mom
and her three sisters and my great aunts and my
great grandmother immigrated to the United States, but the rest
of the family was all lost in the Holocaust. Tim
is the fourth out of six kids, part of a
Jewish family who moved to suburban New Jersey and were
fortunate enough to be able to send their kids to
private school, the Bucolic campus of Pingree's Lower School. In
(02:36):
short Hills is about as far away from his mom's
New York City Stuyvesant Town or his dad's Southwestern Georgia
as you can imagine. It's a place that looks safe,
constted by manicured privilege, as if nothing bad could ever
happen there. I know this because I was also a
student at the Pingree School during that time. I knew
(02:57):
many of these boys. I even dated one of them
when I was in seven grade. This is Tim's story,
but imagine it amplified by so many boys in this
one school, and then again in schools all over America.
Just in the past two years, haras Man Rama's taft
Hot Guests, St. Paul's, and other institutions charged with the
education and protection of their students have been embroiled in
(03:19):
controversies as the truth tumbles out, as truth tends to do.
Tim entered Pingree in the fourth grade on the heels
of his older brother Andy. Andy at that time was
in seventh grade, and Andy was the king of the Hill.
He was captain lacrosse team, buying for student body president.
So when I started at Pingery, my mom was like,
(03:41):
you know, you need to meet Teddalton, need to be
a boy Scout and automatically, you know, coming from a
big family like that, all the teachers know you. Everybody
at Pingrey knows you. You're little to me early, you know,
and that's how people still call me that. And it
was kind of nice because the older girls that you
know that Andy was friends with, you know, we're talking
(04:01):
to me, and the older guys are cool to me.
And he was great. Now. I started with the Boy
Scouts in fourth grade, when usually it was probably like
the fifth or sixth grade kind of thing that my mom,
you introduced me to Ted Alton, gave me Tiddleton, I'm
a golden platter. One of the things that struck me
again and again in all of the descriptions of Ted
Alton was how charismatic and respected and how much he
(04:28):
was considered to be this kind of golden teacher, and
also that he was everywhere. That to me was one
of the most chilling aspects of this was that it's
almost as if he designed life, or not almost as
if he It seems like he did design a life
in which he would be present in every possible way
(04:49):
for the boys that he was going after. I didn't
have them to a teacher until sixth grade. He was
a sixth grade like social studies teacher um, but for
soccer and lacrosse and obviously both scouts. It was our
quote unquote tripping counselor, so he was in charge of
(05:10):
taking us on these amazing I mean, I dream about
these excursions through the woods and waters of Maine, and
we would go whitewater canoeing on the Penobscott and the
Allagash and the Saco River, and running down the bluffs
at the Socco and and see buried villages Black staff. Honestly,
(05:35):
that's what makes this all again so pray, is that
they were probably some of the best members of my life.
In the Pingree survivors approached the school in search of answers.
They wanted the school to take responsibility for the history
that had so traumatized them. Pingree's lawyers retained a private
(05:57):
security firm to conduct an independent investigation. The cover page
of the ensuing report carries a warning that the material
is sensitive, personal and graphic and not intended for children. Quote.
The evidence demonstrates that between nineteen seventy two and nineteen
seventy eight, while employed by Short Hills Country Day and
(06:18):
Pingree Thad Alton sexually assaulted at least twenty seven students.
Alton's behavior permeated multiple facets of the former students lives,
since some former students simultaneously attended Pingree, Camp Wacanaki and
were part of Boy Scout Troop number sixty four that
regularly met on school grounds in a number of different locations,
(06:42):
including his office at school during the school day, after
school in the evenings and on week ends, the school
gymnasium and the girls locker room, the home of his
in laws, his own school owned home at times when
his wife and children were present, the home of a
former student on Boy Scout camping trips, his summer home
(07:02):
in Martha's Vineyard, his truck and Camp Waganaki, including on
camping trips, and inside his own cabin. In particular, the
sexual contact that occurred inside Alton's office and elsewhere included
Alton's touching a student's naked penises with his hands, the
students touching of Alton's naked penis with their hands at
(07:23):
Alton's request, Alton's placement of student's hands on his naked
penis to masturbate him, Alton masturbating in front of students
while encouraging students to masturbate the mutual touching of students
naked penises. Alton often invited groups of boys into his
office as well, and had boys touched each other's penises
(07:44):
and then coaxed them to perform oral sex on him
and or each other. In addition, Alton used heterosexual pornographic
magazines and movies to entice the boys to touch their
own penises, those of each other, and that of Alton.
For my mom, here's my mom. You know these kids,
(08:06):
work aholic husband, We've never ever involved in my life,
never coached any of mine, little league or anything. Um,
I didn't really know him growing up. And so for me,
Ted Alton was sort of a savior because here's this masculine,
outdoorsy guy, lacrosse coach, soccer coach. My mom it was
(08:26):
he's a father figure, you know. And it was probably
about sixth grade, and she said to me, she said,
I know Ted Alton. He she had she knew that
something's going on. She's not a fucking idiot. She knew
that that Ted Alton, you know, I was doing something
with boys. But she said to me, she said, Ted
Alton will never touch you because he doesn't like Jewish boys.
(08:47):
But it was more important for her to have him
in my life as a father figure, even though she
knew that he was probably, you know, doing something sexual
with these boys. And it really didn't think into me,
like until last year, of how she sort of navigated
that situation. At the point when she said that to
(09:07):
you that he wouldn't touch Jewish boys, had he already
made an approach to you? Oh yes, I've already been
two years as a boy scout. I was like, yeah, mom,
you know, Okay, No, he's already made his mark. We're
going to take a quick break. We'll be back in
a moment. This is a story at its core that
(09:34):
is about the failure of adults, or, in the words
of Edmund Burke, the only thing necessary for the triumph
of evil is for good men to do nothing. What
did Tim's mother know? What did other mothers or fathers suspect?
A question that emerges again and again. How could this
abuse have gone on right under the noses of so
(09:55):
many grown ups? Yeah it was. I mean, I'm a
short Jewish kid and this powering, six three big guy
who's in the military, but with a big smile, and
he was known for his bear hugs. That's how he
got the nickname Bear. But I remember the pants he wore.
He always worthy, sort of like polyester pants, which we
(10:16):
had laugh at nowadays, you know nowadays in blue shirts
and a black tie and a certain smell. When Tim
is in sixth grade, he runs away from home a
couple of times, and instead of getting on a train
or a bus and going to New York, he calls
Ted Alton, and Ted caused him his parents and talks
(10:37):
him into going back home. And then in wood Shock,
I made him a plaque. I said thanks, and he
kept that in his office, you know, for all the
you know, probably for years, probably still has it for
all I know. And how fucked up is that? And
I guess in some ways he was kind of a
first love, maybe the father figure who crossed the line.
(10:58):
But we all felt loved by him. And that's why
no one said anything, because if we don't want him
to get hurt, and we also got something out of it.
It was there was a pleasure to it. What kind
of a crush in sixth grade. But on the flip side,
I would also being gratified by ten Alton and other
boys because the boy scouts and it was very confused,
(11:19):
extremely confusing. There's a psychological theory called imprinting, in which
a young animal learns the characteristics of a desirable meat.
Just think of ducklings following their mother. There are key moments,
vulnerable moments, when his imprinting can occur, and when it does,
it can have lasting, even permanent consequences. Tim hates this theory,
(11:41):
which was mentioned to him by a therapist. He quickly
fired and I get it. He doesn't want to think
of himself as permanently branded altered forever by the abuse
of Ted Alton. But what is the sexuality of a ten, eleven,
twelve year old boy? In many religious traditions, thirteen is
the age when manhood first begins. What does it do
to a psyche to have powerful sexual feelings triggered before
(12:05):
a boy is ready and in the hands of a
skilled predator who was an honor to be invited into
t and there would be other boys there, And it
all started out very tame is game truth or dare?
And then it was then it became you know, more
dares and less truths. And what happened is it sort
of spawns these relationships with these other boys, and for years,
(12:27):
these other boys do things without head around. I slept
with multiple sets of brothers, not at the same time,
but a brother my age, and you know, one kid
my age and his older brother want the brother who
slept at each other. So it's really really dark and dirty,
and it's it's the conversation that nobody wants to have.
(12:50):
So having all that be so knitted together with love
for this, you know, seemingly loving a father figure year
and then everybody else who's in this kind of chosen
band of boys, I mean, it would be impossible to
be anything other than just horrendously confused. One of the
(13:14):
things that I found in in digging into the material
was the way in which Ted said to many of
the boys, this is our secret. And there was some
combination both of loyalty to him and of almost a
kind of implicit threat of no one can know about this,
but also the potent combination of I've got the report
(13:39):
in front of me, um language like reasons for the
lack of reporting by former students, right, you had in
the in the mix of UM for me and some
of the guys, I know you know, the really deep
doing to loneliness, because again what leads us into Ted's hand.
But you know, an absent father, you know, I mean,
I mean I came from a large family and who
(14:01):
had time for me. I mean, thank God for my grandparents. Um,
but I never felt loved in my house, you know,
I think my parents ever said that to me. And
that's that's what he gave you. He showed us love.
Here's another quote from the report. It is a well
known and well documented fact that child victims of abuse,
especially sexual abuse, rarely report that abuse while they're still children.
(14:25):
In other words, even if they are able to hold
on to it or remember it, it seems like there's
just this feeling of responsibility and shame and so many
complex feelings that are all tied up in it. I
think I spent thirty plus years of my life, h
thirty five plus years really thinking that it was my
own fault, that I thought this out, that I needed
(14:46):
a father figure, that I enjoyed it, that I wanted it.
And then there's also to be honest with your boys.
There's two reasons why you know, boys never talked about this,
and it's because number one, you're going be accused of
being gay, and number two, you know you're gonna they're
gonna think you're gonna be a child molester one day.
(15:07):
And in nineteen seventy four, seventy five or seventy six
or whatever, this is being gay is essentially you know
your death tennis, So that is just not gonna happen.
And you get near forties and your fifties and Eve
internalize all this stuff. And for me, if I didn't
deal with it, I probably wouldn't be alive right now.
(15:28):
When Tim finishes the eighth grade, his family falls on
hard financial times, which precipitates a move to Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
But Ted Alton had already done all the damage you
would ever do by the time the boys hit puberty.
He was kind of done with them. By eighth grade,
Tim had aged out. Everybody deals with trauma in a
(15:50):
different way. Some people turn to sports, some to drugs
and alcohol. Tim just kept himself busy with his studies.
He graduated at the top of his class in high school,
got into a great university. He kept busy with front life,
government bita Kappa. He eventually went to medical school and
shose surgery one of the most difficult of all residencies.
(16:11):
He was involved in everything because if he had free time,
if he was alone with his thoughts, he would go
to a very dark place. There's moments when there was
a holiday or vacation, I'd have a hard time because
I would just think too much. And I even to
this day, I don't do well by myself. So that's
(16:32):
how I sort of coped, which you know, I think
it's better than most when I look at some of
the very high achieving guys. But then there's then there's
also a group of guys. There's two guys who were
teenagers who killed themselves. They killed themselves when they were teenagers.
Or you mean they killed themselves later, No, they killed
themselves when they were teenagers. Correct. Tim embarks on his
(16:59):
life as a quote on successful adult. At least on
the outside. He has girlfriends, dates women, enjoy sex with women.
Eventually he gets married and has three children, but there
are instances in which he finds himself attracted to men.
Because here's the thing, Tim is gay. You know, I
(17:20):
always had attraction to women. I always had long term girlfriends.
You know, there was a part of me that was
attracted two men after I moved. I never acted on
it all through college. I wasn't still he in the
medical school. I had one incident and then had such
negative feelings about it afterwards, felt so much guilt and
(17:42):
shame and nausea. To be honest with you, I don't
think I vomited, but I just felt so shitty that
I didn't do anything again for years. Tim, did you
at the time recognize that you're really negative? Almost visceral
physical response was directly tied to that childhood abuse? Not
(18:05):
at all, Not at all. I still think you know
my brain when I thought about Ted and the boy,
I thought about that man. I was lonely, I was
looking for a father figure. I enjoyed the sexual gratification.
And that was the script that I told myself. But
I still probably tell myself, but maybe that was a better,
a safer place, that narrative and the reality you know
(18:27):
in nineteen four that I'm gay and that I was
sexually abused and my family fucking sucks. So for me,
I think that narrative for me was very self protective
and un't I don't mean to laugh, but no, I
think that that's true. And and there's something really powerful
and interesting about adaptation, you know, being able to be
(18:47):
adaptive under even really really extreme circumstances. Tim goes through
the motions he digs into his bariatric practice. He and
his wife welcomed two girls into the world, and then
his son is born. But there's something about having a
boy that really, um kind of rocked my world, remember
when he was born, and that really led to more
(19:12):
feelings of my life, of thoughts about me as a
boy and Pitt and the Voice Scouts and my adventures
and you know what happened to me. And I mean, look,
I always, I always knew what happened. You know, I didn't.
I'm not one of these people who said, you know,
I never thought about it, and boom, you know, I
read about it and all put it back to me.
Yet I knew every day it happened. I probably thought
(19:32):
about it every single day in my life. But when
he was born, it really became pervasive. At the time,
Tim lived in Westport, Connecticut. Westport is not too far
from me, I know it well. If you look up
effluent suburb in the dictionary, Westport's picture would appear, well,
not really, but you know what I mean. It's a
(19:54):
place where mom's in Lulu lemon yoga pants, push strollers
down Main Street and tanned fit dad's take their kids
to jiu jitsu and tennis lessons on weekends. A place
where if there is some aspect of your world that
is secret or painful, you might feel like you're the
only one. Everybody looks like they're living their best life.
(20:15):
My point is Tim tried really hard to wrap up
his secrets and put them away. I've gotten the therapy
in two eight, right around Thanksgiving, really triggered by marital problems,
work problems. Everything is sort of coming to a head,
(20:36):
and I was sort of a taking time bomb. I
couldn't keep this sort of house of cards I built.
I couldn't keep it together any longer. I was really
really struggling. If I hadn't of gotten into therapy and
really done the work that I need to do, um,
I probably would not be alive today. And I know that.
(20:57):
I know that. But either I was going to know
myself or I was going to run off the road
driving to New York at three o'clock in the morning
to meet somebody asleep with them after working a twelve
hour day and putting my kids to bed. We're going
to pause for a moment. Even though Tim felt comfortable
(21:24):
with his therapist, he didn't talk about the sexual abuse.
By that Alton, he was trying to keep it all going,
his marriage, his family, his practice, his attraction to men.
And I was in a lot of denial. And I
didn't and I didn't want to talk about it. I
wanted to deal with the problems at hand. I didn't
really see this that you were that they were all related,
but obviously they were just really hard to admit that.
(21:46):
It really wasn't so much much later that I realized
that I liked being with men because I liked being
with men and had nothing to do with the fact
that that I was molested as a child. Tim's therapist
asked him to create a timeline of the abuse. The
writing unleashes his memory and also begins to give him
(22:08):
a sense of purpose. So every Friday I started taking
off and I would sit at the Westport Library and
I was basically writing for therapy, and it would lead
me to sort of finding people. Well, let me think, well, man,
that kid was next to me in the tent, and
this guy went to camp with and you know, Wow,
where where are they all now? And so I accumulated
(22:32):
a list of fifty or sixty names. Half were other
children that I knew for a fact were abused, noe,
more kids I suspected the restaurant or parents who I
felt probably knew. And then there were teachers who was
extremely cathartic to put it on paper. And I started
reaching out to people. I traveled, and I went to
(22:52):
visit some of these guys that I grew up with
to connect, to bond with him, to talk about this,
because I've been thinking about this in my brain for still.
It was like a like a tape cassette's on a loop. Finally,
I just wanted to be able to talk to somebody
about who was there to validate because I thought I
was going crazy. So I was starting to really be
(23:14):
aware and read about stories. I'm somebody who hates picking
up the phone to call a person who may not
want to hear from me, which is why I'm a novelist,
a memoirist, and now a podcaster and not say an
investigative journalist. So when I think about what Tim did next,
(23:35):
I'm pretty blown away by the courage it took. I
think you will be too. But that's what sort of
led me on the path. And I did talk to
a few of these guys, some of them who told
me to funk off. Who is my number. One of
the guys have become like a brother to me, like
one of my dearest friends in my life, who when
I actually ended up hiring this law firm, this one
(23:56):
friend basically told me, he said, look, I'm I'm proud
of you, but I can't talk to you anymore. I
don't want this in my life. Good luck to you,
but do not ever call me. And it was hurtful,
but I also knew that I needed to go forward
and do this. And fast forward a year later and
being his brother, both point us and it has been
the best thing that he has ever done in his life.
(24:19):
And I'm so proud of him. So the Pingree Survivors,
the band of boys who had once been methodically groomed
by Ted Alton, become a band of men hell bent
on transcending their history of abuse. And it all started
with Tim reaching out, picking up the phone, trying to
make contact. You remember, I was out in Napa at
(24:41):
a friend's wedding, and I took the time out to
drive down to Monterey to have drinks with one of
these guys. And that was the first time I've seen
him with sweer children. I had actually, you know, paid
like people finders dot com or something like that to
figure out where he lived prior to that, and I was,
I guess I was sort of cyber stalking these people. Um.
(25:04):
But I called him up, said, hey, look, I'm gonna
be in California. I want to come down there and
I want to go out of the beer And that's
exactly what we did, and quickly, I don't know how
it started, um, but I brought it up. I said,
do you ever think about what it was like when
we were kids or the effect has had in your life?
And and that became two three four or final I
(25:26):
don't even remember, of alcohol and tears and hugs and
a little bit laughter. Tim continues his detective work. His
children are wondering why their father is all of a
sudden taking trips, spending late nights talking on the phone
behind closed doors. So finally he decided that he's going
(25:46):
on a reconnaissance mission, and he returns to Pingry, the
scene of the crime with his oldest daughter, Zoe, I
took her one weekday during the must have been off
school school break, and we went down to pingry Do.
I wanted to go look at old yearbooks to remember
names and faces and teachers that I couldn't remember. So
(26:09):
we were driving down there and I said, well, I'm
doing a little research. When I went to the school,
I told him the story that my brother had died,
which is true, and I wanted to find some old
photos of my brother at his time at Pingary It's
a really important time from So that was my execuse
to get into the school library. And Joe and I,
my my oldest daughter, we went down to the school. Yeah,
(26:31):
I hadn't been there since, you know, the sixth grade
or seventh grade or whatever it was, and uh, it
was really really uncomfortable. But they had renovated the school,
so at least his office was gone. I didn't have
to see that, but they were the cross fields and
the soccer fields and the building and this sweet little
(26:51):
wonderful school. We're always awful has happened. Tim begins to
understand that Ted Alton's abuse is not lim did to
a small group of boys. The yearbook photographs Joga's memory
and he reaches out to another boy, now grown man,
who he remembers from that time. The two men reconnect
and for the first time Tim hears and understands that
(27:14):
there were adults, many adults, not only his parents, but teachers, administrators,
board members who had suspected Ted Alton of abuse and
done nothing. Once Alton's behavior had become impossible to ignore,
a meeting of prominent fathers was called for in a
board member's home, and a psychiatrist was brought in to
(27:35):
advise them, and we actually have a notes and meeting,
and basically a psychiatrist his recommendation that these fathers was
that bas need to get the scuy at the school
and not discuss it and just move forward, but basically
deny the whole thing. Don't put the kids through the
trauma of a trial. Remember earlier when I said that
(27:57):
this story is ultimately about the failure of adults, Well,
this is even more than a case of good men
doing nothing. These men, and they did all seem to
be men, knew they needed to get rid of Alton.
So they passed the trash in Tim's words, and write
Alton a glowing letter of recommendation to another new Jersey
(28:17):
Prep School, essentially making Alton somebody else's problem, and not
seeming to consider that this would mean he would continue
to abuse kids elsewhere. And these were dads, who fathers,
who worked on Wall Street, who were the CFO of
huge companies. And I think that there is a part
(28:38):
where they wanted to let's just put this to bed.
Nobody wants to be the father who is working while
their son is off in the woods being abused. Here's
where a very strange coincidence enters the picture. While I
was working on this story, I happened to run into
a man who had been a teacher at Pingree long ago.
And by the way, this never happens. I can count
(29:00):
on one hand the number of times I run into
anyone I had known it Pingry in my entire adult life.
It just doesn't happen. This guy was well aware of
the controversy and the twenty one survivors. I asked him
if he had ever suspected anything. And here's what he said.
We knew, he said, We all knew that something very
wrong was going on in Ted Alton's office. I debate
(29:22):
about whether to tell him this because it's just such
a slap in the face. But I have to, I
have to tell him, well, you know, he just gave
me chills, and and and I don't really if this
stuff get me angry anymore, But this is what makes
me so angry, so angry, because we know they all knew.
(29:43):
We know the athletics director who hired Ted to be
his coach, who who owned the camp at Loganoki. We
know he knew. Fathers spoke to him about this, but
nobody did anything. Camp Waganaki is perhaps the darkest part
of a very dark story. Waganaki was owned by Pingree's
Director of Athletics, award winning soccer coach, biology teacher. In fact,
(30:07):
he had been my biology teacher and responsible for bringing
in some of the largest donations in the school's history. Yeah.
So for four years, um from fourth to you know,
I don't know, fourth to seventh grade summers, I my
two brothers spent at Camp Waganoky in East Waterford, Maine,
which was owned by uh, you know, Pingree athletic director.
(30:32):
You know, so you have this wonderful, rich summer and
I was up there for seven weeks every summer. My parents,
you know, need to get rid of all the boys,
you know, building his wonderful relationships. And on the flip side,
it was having had all non steroids because you know,
gave him a free license to for five days in
the woods with him. Trip you know was to be
five days at a time the Alegash I think trip
(30:53):
was almost a week and there was no adult supervision
other than him. So um, it was really this very
strange time because it was so wonderful, but then it
was also so dark, and I remember falling into this
sleep in his tent with the cries from one of
my friends who was abused for the first time. I
(31:14):
was a kid from Pennsylvania, you know, if he didn't
go to Pingary and where the rest of us was like, oh,
this is all that We've been doing this for years
as boy scouts, So what are you crying about? Get
used to it. After the school's independent report, the survivors
were each interviewed by Pingree's attorneys and insurance provider. They
were questioned as to why they hadn't complained at the
(31:36):
time to a responsible adult. So when when they had
that argument of why didn't you complain to somebody who
knew They all knew who were going to complain to
you know, Ted Dalton's mother in law was the vice
principal of the school. Who we're going to complain to you.
We're gonna plain the administration. He was the administration. It's
ludicrous to think that that we had any voice whatsoever.
(31:59):
So finally, at you know, efty years old, I finally
have a voice. And that, for me is what this
has all been about, is giving me a voice. That
the writing was about. That's what our conversation is about,
is giving you know, a boy who never had a
voice in his home, this family, in the school. That's
that's what I think about. Pingry also sent a letter
(32:22):
to the whole school community. I received one myself. In it,
the school denied prior knowledge of its history of abuse. Ironically,
this denial is ultimately what made many of the men
step forward. They had understandably been reticent about being public
about reliving the worst chapter of their lives. But the
letter was a punch in the face to some very
(32:42):
strong willed people. We had a joint call, and maybe
only eight of us were on a call. We all
went around and you know, people all live all over
the place, and men on for like two hours and
everybody told their stories and just hearing you know, these
guys some of them, somebody didn't know something. These guys
didn't know it all. Some of them. I remember, God,
(33:03):
he was the guy who was like, you know, he
was my water skia coach at camp, and I thought
he was the coolest guy. You know, and he's on
the call and you know, and you're talking to me.
The guy who was the captain of the football team
is great athletes. He was on the call. But hearing
everybody's stories and it just made me so freaking sad.
(33:23):
But I also think it's somebody that finally, for the
first time for many of us and in all these years,
like people that can we can identify with. Because as
much as you can explain this to your friend and
you know, your your wife or your lover or whoever,
you hear the same things like, oh well, I hope
you get closure, And you never get closure on this stuff,
you evolve. The Band of Men came to New York twice.
(33:50):
The first time they were individually deposed. After those depositions
were taken, there was a lot of stalling until the
two sides agreed to discuss the matter. Kingley knew that
the survivors had a strong case. Some of the survivors
wanted to go to court, some didn't. We had to individually,
over the course of the week tell our stories to headmaster,
(34:14):
representatives from the boarders, trustees, attorneys for the school, attorneys
for the insurance company, representatives from the insurance company, and
then our attorneys that we're all in this room sort
of reliving our story specifically. And also we were asked
to write our what they call our impact statements. How
(34:36):
did this abuse affect your life? Is what they're trying
to do, and they're trying to meet a settlement and
figure out what is this case worth? Does this guy
have a case? And I'll tell you writing that impact
statement was really was trouming them of itself. Yeah, but
the similar things is depression, anxiety to a side attempts,
(34:58):
ex editions, huge sexual identification problems, marital discord, job failures.
The list goes on. But so that's the kind of
thing we had to talk about, which is, you know,
hard enough to do with our therapists, but then to
do it with in front of a people, a group
of people who obviously, for me, I would target on
(35:21):
my back because I know they all hate naked. I'm
the one who brought all this diffruition in the end
Ingry settlement. Yes, right, yes, and yet there is a
thorn in the side of that settlement, one that may
never be put right. The owner of Camp Waganaki, who
just had the most expensive building in Pingree's history named
(35:42):
after him. Right, that is one of the first things
that was discussed amongst the plaintiffs, and it's a recurring
theme in all of our stories, is that how could
he have not known? And you know, we we know
that one of the fathers spoke to him know about Ted,
and everybody at the camp knew, and so we did.
(36:04):
We asked, we said, have some compassion for us. You know,
let's let's do our investigation. Let you do your investigation.
Please don't shove it in our face. And the name
of sixty million dollar building after someone that let this
go on. I'd like to quote from the letters signed
by the survivors and addressed to the Pingree community after
(36:26):
the report first came out. So in it it's written
that we hope that revealing the truth about the abuse
of Pingree will serve as a first step in the
healing process. Do you feel now that there have been
steps taken towards your personal healing, towards the healing of
the men who were those abused boys? Absolutely, I um.
But it's really about I think the conversations and connections
(36:46):
between us, which is all elevated everybody else up. I
spoke to one gentleman today and talked him a few
months and you know, he had written that he had moved.
You have to be closer with son and and so
I know that he connects with you know, another planet,
become good friends, and they traveled together. And then this
summer I spent a week in Florida with the one
guy went the Jersey Shore was another one. And I
(37:09):
think it's those moments of that camaraderie, you know. And
again I think if you look at us, a lot
of us don't have strong family connections or um and
maybe some resentment. I mean, hey, where are my parents
when this is going on? The last thing I would
ask is like now moving forward, like moving forward in
(37:31):
your life where this is starting to be something that
you feel ready to move on from in the sense
that you've had There's no such thing as closure, but
you do have a certain degree of what would you say?
You know, I just said, there's one day where my
and my kids have been through a lot because of
all this um and I hope there's one day where
(37:55):
they can really get back and reflect and think, Hey,
my dad as much a bad guy, he did a
lot of good and maybe here's a reason now why
he wasn't there. He was disconnected. You know, I don't
want to be a survivor. I want to be a
thriver and I need to and I want to move
from this and I feel good about that every single day.
It's a wonderful feeling. I'd like to thank my guest,
(38:24):
Tim Rlick for his courage and sharing his story with
us today. You can find out more about Tim's work
to make the Pingree School and other institutions safer and
healthier for children at Pingree survivors dot org. Family Secrets
is an i Heeart media production. Dylan Fagan is a
supervising producer, Andrew Howard and Tristan McNeil are the audio engineers,
(38:47):
and Julie Douglas is the executive producer. If you have
a family secret you'd like to share, you can get
in touch with us at listener mail at Family Secrets
Podcast dot com. You can also find us on to
Gram at Danny Writer, and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod,
and Twitter at Fam Secrets Pod. That's fam Secrets Pod.
(39:09):
For more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot
com
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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