Unbelievable.
Via NY Post:
The elite Horace Mann prep school today apologized for decades of sexual abuse suffered at the hands of teachers and administrators and pledged reforms to improve student safety, in its first public comments addressing the sex scandal.
“We sincerely apologize for the harm that was caused by the teachers and administrators who abused anyone during their years at Horace Mann School,” the school said in a statement posted on its web site.
“These unconscionable betrayals of trust never should have happened. But they did, and now we, as a school, must fully accept this reality.”
The elite Bronx prep school has been accused of turning a blind eye to sex assaults on at least 31 children between 1962 and 1996. In today’s statement, the school admitted that “former teachers and administrators in fact did abuse, in various degrees,students.”
Victim Jon Seiger, 51, last month described how eight faculty members used him as a “sex object and personal plaything.”
“Instead of a safe, nurturing place that would educate me, Horace Mann ended up providing a perfect storm of childhood sexual abuse,” he said, claiming he was first raped and forced to give oral sex to headmaster Inky Clark at age 14.
The school said it reached settlements with a “great majority” of former students who claim they were abused. At least one former student has sued the prestigious school, claiming he was molested by a music teacher some 450 times in the 1970s.