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| Principal Don Reiter, right |
I’ll start by saying I know absolutely nothing about Maine Principal
Don Reiter, or what happened in his office when he met, privately, with a
student at Waterville Senior High.
But isn’t that where we arbiters of sexual misconduct always
begin? Peering through tightly shut windows where the shades are drawn, then
drawing conclusions about what happened? We take dueling narratives, leaven
them with our opinions about the narrators (he’s a predator/angel/victim; she’s
a liar/heroine/victim, take your pick) drop them onto the roulette wheels of
“justice” and watch … as lives are wrecked.
Here’s the only thing we do know: somebody’s lying. One of
two people is an unreliable narrator. And in the absence of any evidence beyond
he said/she said, which story do we choose to believe?
Principal Don Reiter’s tale: on the first day of classes this
fall at Waterville Senior High he was meeting with a female student in his
office. They were sitting on the couch. She propositioned him. The meeting
ended, and he reported the incident to school authorities. And his wife. Who
filed for divorce a few weeks later.
What little we know from the student: during a meeting alone
with the principal, he told her that he had a secret: every year he chose a
student with whom to have sex, and that this year he’d chosen her. He threatened
her … she’d never graduate … if she revealed this secret. She was upset, and promptly
reported the incident.
Because of legal issues surrounding privacy, further
information is sketchy, but if news reports are credible, other details
include:
· Shortly before classes began this fall, the
student and her mother had appeared in Reiter’s office to discuss the student’s
credits because it didn’t look like she was on target to graduate. He said they
needed to meet with her guidance counselor.
· After conferring with guidance, the student
reappeared at the principal’s office, where she was told she needed to make an
appointment.
· On the first day of school the student was
called out of class, down to Reiter’s office. At this point the closed-door
meeting in question took place.
Within days of this incident, the superintendent placed Mr.
Reiter on paid leave, called the cops, and investigations began. Two months and
many, many interviews with staff and students later, the superintendent has recommended
that Mr. Reiter be dismissed, the police have filed a report upon which the
District Attorney has yet to act (she says she’ll wait to see what the school
board will do) and the school board is now grappling with whether to accept …
or reject … the superintendent’s recommendation to fire Mr. Reiter. As the
board met this past week, crowds of Mr. Reiter’s supporters gathered outside
their doors. When, after many hours of deliberations they emerged undecided and
scheduled a subsequent meeting, folks were upset.
You can’t make this stuff up. Well, you can … but it’s
called drama. Approaching the level of Greek tragedy. Because everyone loses.
Everyone. Either Mr. Reiter is a predator, a wolf who has been prowling,
undetected for years, among our innocents … or he is a cruelly, unjustly accused
victim whose career and personal life have just gotten trashed. Either she’s a traumatized victim, a
child whose doe-eyed view of life has just been shattered… or a psychopath
along the lines of the borderline-personality-disordered character Amy in Gillian
Flynn’s bestselling novel (also a movie) Gone
Girl.
If that weren’t bad enough: enter the Greek chorus. Lawyers,
from both sides. The administrators who just want to make it all go away,
crying for his job on a plate. The mobs of friends of the accused rallying in
his support. The victims’ rights advocates claiming: see? See how difficult it
is to speak out against sexual predation? This is why so many cases of rape and
sexual misconduct go unreported.
My head spins. So does my imagination. Which is why I
usually retreat to poetry at times like these, because what constitutes hard
and fast, legal and the fair, eludes me here.
Edwin Arlington Robinson, a son of Gardiner, Maine, wrote,
in his poem Eros Turannos: “We tell
you, tapping on our brows, the story as it should be. As if the story of a
house were told, or ever could be.”
If ever a line reaches out and grabs you by the throat, it’s
that one. All of us, the readers of these disparate stories, tapping on our
brows. As if we know. Could know. Perhaps the true tragedy is that we don’t
have the slightest idea what went on behind that door, yet are required to
judge. Life demands it. Continuing to rise and shine and work and go to school
together demands it: a choice. A decision. Justice.
Someone is lying. And that lie is a Molotov cocktail thrown
into the living heart of a community. Regardless of how this sad business
concludes, everyone gets burned.
