Zero Shades of Gray

When I was 14, I was witness to a sexual misconduct scandal. It didn’t involve me and as I sit to write this, I wonder if it’s even my story to tell. I’m also not really sure what I’m hoping to achieve by telling it, but I know that it keeps bothering me. I’d actually all but forgotten about it until I saw a post on Twitter about the Roy Moore bullshit. Some delightful person tweeted something along the lines of “people are forgetting that not all 14-year-old girls are innocent.” Somehow, this idiotic Twitter rando got me to think deeply about shades of gray in sexual misconduct cases.

During my freshman year of high school, my chorus teacher got arrested for having a sexual relationship with a student. The girl was 16, also in chorus, and I didn’t know her, but I do remember she was chosen to sing in a trio with our teacher and one other student at one of our concerts. I remember noticing his hand on the small of her back while they sang. It wouldn’t have been noticeable to anyone sitting directly in front of the stage. I wrote it off at the time, thinking maybe he wasn’t actually touching her and he just had his arms out while he sang the high notes, or he was trying to remind her to watch her posture. Posture is important to singing, so that would have been a normal teacherly thing to do. Even if his hand did linger.

The city had passed a law not too long before his arrest making it illegal for teachers to sleep with their students, even if the student was over the age of consent. Our teacher was the first to be prosecuted under this new law. I wish I could tell you that we were all incredibly woke teenagers who rallied around our fellow student. But we did not. In fact, most of us were angry that our beloved teacher was being so unfairly punished. I personally was not as angry as some of the others, who had been taking classes with him their entire high school careers, but the way my teenage brain processed it, I did feel like the teacher had been wronged in this situation.

Here are the facts as I understood them at 14: He was 28, so it wasn’t like he was a creepy old man preying on young girls. To my knowledge, he did not make a habit of sleeping with his students, not even flirting or acting in any way other than a teacher should. The most important thing was that their relationship was consensual—I’d seen American Pie, so I knew teenagers had sex. And at 16, were you even considered a child anymore? So to me it seemed that she was fully capable of having mature sexual relationships, and that since she had decided to sleep with the teacher and then turned him in, she was some sort of vindictive bitch who took pleasure in ruining our teacher’s life.

Flash forward to today. I can almost understand where my younger self was coming from. He was not really that old and they had only a 12 year age difference—normally not that big of deal. I’m with someone almost eight years older than me (holla), my mom is married to a man 10 years older than her, and I know several people who have even bigger age differences with their partners. I don’t remember anything coming out to suggest that my former teacher was a serial pedophile. (Full disclosure, I didn’t really read the newspaper back then. It seemed like a lot of work.) For all I know, in his mind this was a love to end all loves.

But what I understand now is that there is a big difference between someone in their late 20s and a teenager. A 28-year-old dating a 16-year-old is fucking creepy. Sure, teenagers consent to sex with each other all the time—but they are usually both at the same inexperience level, learning awkwardly together. Just because a teenager might be ready to have sex with another teen doesn’t mean they’re ready to have sex with an adult.

As if that wasn’t squicky enough, he was her teacher. He was in a position of power over her. I don’t remember any details coming out suggesting that he had threatened her into sleeping with him, but now I see that he should have been aware that this would factor into her decision to do so. Even if she was excited about all the perks that would come from banging the teacher, she was put in a position that made it hard for her to say no. My teacher was supposed to be the grownup. He should have known better.

I didn’t know better, but I still regret how I judged the girl and how I kept silent when others talked about her. My brother became friends with the girl’s brother about a year later. He told me the girl had switched schools because things were so bad for her. My heart hurts at how unbearable it must have been. To hear the students at my school tell it, she was a harlot toppling dudes left and right with her vagina of destruction. But the reality is she was just a girl, in that weird phase between child and adult, who got in a situation way over her head with someone who was supposed to protect her.

In the wake of all the sexual harassment stories breaking in Hollywood, there is an impulse to think that surely some of these cases are blown out of proportion. Maybe some of these men truly didn’t know better. What if they just had romantic feelings they thought would be returned, or they never grew out of a juvenile sense of humor that no one ever reprimanded? Every time I see someone else’s name in the headlines, I scour the news hoping for blurry lines and tinges of gray. Maybe that’s why I keep thinking of this story. Maybe I’m still holding on to that teenage analysis that let me forgive my teacher 17 years ago. I notice that as I write about it, I’m avoiding condemning him even while knowing he was to blame. I’m avoiding painting the girl as a total innocent while knowing she was a victim.

But this is where I land—even though most of the women coming forward today weren’t underage when they experienced harassment and abuse in Hollywood, many were still very young, just starting their careers, and lacking experience not just in the industry but in the world. And many of their abusers knew they held considerable power over them, putting the victims in situations where it was hard to say no. And regardless of their intent when they behaved inappropriately, they should have known better.