The Inheritance of Silence

When generations are exiled from justice

Watching the Epstein survivors hold a picture of the girls they were at 14 takes me back in time. I was 14 when I started running track and fell in love with running, the hard workouts, the sore muscles, the reward of crossing the finish line first. Running was solace from the chaos at home, but what I thought would save me almost killed me. The predatory coach, the school’s complicity and institutional betrayal, and the scam investigation 30 years after I first spoke up have been the wallpaper of my life and my family’s life. In 1996, Maria Farmer went to the authorities about Jeffrey Epstein. In the early 90s, I, too, spoke up to the man in charge, the school’s headmaster. No one listened.

Most people wait to tell, if they tell at all. They wait until their early fifties, or 52, to be exact according to research, but I was 24, a new teacher at my old high school, when I stood in the headmaster’s classroom and asked, “How did you turn a blind eye to coach and what he did?”

The bell was about to ring, and the headmaster finished adjusting the last shade to shield his incoming students from the afternoon sun before he turned and looked at me. “The last thing this school needs right now is to air its dirty laundry like some scandal on the front page of The National Enquirer or Hard Copy.”

He sat back down at his wooden desk and took a long slurp of coffee from a mug as wide as a soup bowl before professing innocence about the scope of the coach’s behavior. He said he had no idea beyond the girl in my class, the school’s open secret. He insisted he’d spoken to the former headmaster but had been ignored.

“What does X say? They lived together.” He waved his hand at me in dismissal as if I were still his student and opened his drawer to find one of his favorite cartridge pens he collected. “Go talk to him,” he said.

In the foyer, the school’s mascot, a knight, the embodiment of the chivalric ideal of protecting women, hung on a banner with the school’s insignia emblazoned with “Truth, Knowledge and Honor” written in large letters. I asked the teacher, the coach’s former roommate, what he knew. With a small laugh of disbelief, he responded, “Coach’s phone was ringing off the hook. Those girls were throwing themselves at him.” His demeanor changed from his usual “Aw shucks Colombo” persona to bristling and defensive.

It was the early nineties, and at the time, I couldn’t see that the headmaster was pawning me off on the younger teacher, and I truly thought the adults, despite their track record to the contrary, would do the right thing. But how could I really think these men were going to admit to knowing about statutory rape, lose their jobs, reputation and the architecture of the lives they’d so carefully constructed because I pointed out the truth they neatly tucked away?

I was naïve. But I stayed because I needed a paycheck, and I believed I could prevent this type of abuse from happening again. For almost a decade, I taught English and introduced a Women in Literature course, which meant I was often called a “Feminazi” by the high school boys.

Eight years after confronting the headmaster, one of my teammates came forward about the coach. At one point, the headmaster asked me, “Considering all the evil involved, don’t you think she’s at fault?” He didn’t look at me. I left at the end of the school year and my teammate and I sought justice outside the insular halls of academia.

That day in the DA’s office, despite my nerves, I could feel something wasn’t sitting right with the DA. She seemed perplexed by my account of the coach. “My brother had a friend with that same name. He dresses up as Santa Claus at our family Christmas party every year. My nephews and nieces sit on his lap. This can’t be the same guy,” she said.

I shook my head, hoping my nervous sweat hadn’t seeped through my silk shirt, and looked at my husband, who raised his dark eyebrows. Surely not, but then Birmingham was a very small town.

She explained to us the statute of limitations had expired. “These cases are always hard to convict,” she continued as she spoke about lack of evidence and unsympathetic juries. She all but said privileged white girls who went to a fancy prep school (I was on a partial scholarship) wouldn’t come across as sympathetic.

My teammates and I, like generations of women, fell into exile from justice due to the statute of limitations in both criminal and civil courts. We couldn’t seek justice because the criminal statute of limitation laws had changed after the time had run out for our cases. I only had until I was 29 in criminal court and until I was 21 in civil court.

In 2017, I thought the school would come clean when they opened an investigation into the teacher the headmaster had told me to talk to the day I confronted him. After the investigation failed the survivors and redacted the truth from the community, seven women and I went to the DA, hoping there was a workaround for the statute of limitations.

In 2019, the newly elected DA consolidated our case into one that dealt with four separate faculty from 1975 to the early 1990s. But he decided he couldn’t move forward because the most egregious cases occurred before 1985, when the law changed to eliminate statute of limitations for criminal cases. While plenty of victims were willing to corroborate, no one else was willing to prosecute, he said. There was also still an earnest resistance law on the book that troubled him. This was the outcome despite the fact the assistant DA said they interviewed over 100 alumni, and they believed there were at least fifty victims.

At the time, my daughter was 15 and in ninth grade. When my husband and I decided to send our children to my alma mater, I thought I’d resigned myself to the past injustices. The many times I’d spoken up, I’d encountered a spectrum of responses from a what-was-I supposed-to do to those-were-the-times shrug to calculated cover-ups. Speaking up had meant enduring the social stigma of being viewed as a liar, a vengeful troublemaker, or worse, just crazy, as in you’re either a “nut or slut” characterization. No one listened, I had no recourse, so I moved on. To the point, I thought the past was far enough behind me to send my children to the school.

When I told my daughter about the school’s termination of a teacher for sexual abuse, I explained to her in detail the scope of systemic abuse through the years I’d recently learned more about by connecting with other survivors.

In the kitchen, she looked up. “Which teacher?” she asked. Her head bobbed right back into her phone’s screen. I wanted to tell her to sit up straight so she wouldn’t get scoliosis.

“X?” she asked.

“Why do you say him?”

“Because he’s creepy.”

Then she paused for a moment before she commented, “It seems to happen to a lot of people, doesn’t it?”

My loss of innocence as a child translated into hers as well, but though I’d imagined I’d need to shield her from my pain, her already jaded view of a woman’s place in the world was more alarming than her imagined vulnerability.

There’s never a real resolution or perfect outcome when the justice system couldn’t hold our perpetrators or the schools accountable and protect children from further harm at the hands of these men. Healing is always an inside job that survivors may or may not have the resources to embark upon.

I did the only thing left to do after decades of speaking up and being disappointed by the school, the community and the law. I, along with a small group of survivors, have advocated for the past four years for statute of limitation reform in Alabama, which would give survivors more time to seek justice in civil court and provide a look-back window, so no matter when the abuse occurred, a survivor has two years to go to court. By some miracle, the Boy Scouts Honor Law passed last year, giving former scouts full access to the settlement funds, regardless of the time barriers.

An entire generation has been silenced due to a bureaucratic loophole, so civil court is our only hope for accountability and protecting children if laws are changed to extend statute of limitations and provide look-back laws. It’s beyond time for justice and accountability to become a choice for all survivors regardless of when the abuse occurred. The 2026 legislative session is upon us and this year we have the most support to date. Now is the time to tell our stories. Now is the time for justice.

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