蜜桃影视

Early in my career as a high school English teacher, I was chaperoning a field trip to Six Flags when a 9th-grade student asked me to hold her phone while she rode the roller coaster. After she walked away, her phone began to buzz as notifications filled the screen: an older, male employee at our school was sending her Snapchats. 

This was just the latest in a string of disturbing incidents involving this educator that I had witnessed and reported to my bosses throughout the school year, hoping they would investigate and intervene. To my knowledge, nothing was ever done: the educator was protected; the school was protected; the student was not.

My interest in writing an investigative story about school-based sexual misconduct 鈥� and the systems and players that allow it to persist 鈥� was largely born from that experience. New York鈥檚 Child Victims Act opened an avenue to do that deep-dive reporting. First passed in 2019, the law extended both the criminal and civil statutes of limitations for child sex abuse claims moving forward while creating a lookback window for adult survivors to sue their alleged childhood abusers and the institutions that shielded them.

That second chance was seized upon by more than 14,000 plaintiffs who filed nearly 11,000 complaints between 2019 and 2021. We wanted to know the extent to which schools and educators were implicated in those allegations, which went as far back as the 1950s and stretched to as recently as 2018. For me, that meant manually combing through thousands of court records using the New York State Court Electronic Filing system. 

Between January 2024 and May 2026, I searched Child Victims Act cases in all 62 New York counties, asking the filing system to identify those that included the word 鈥渟chool鈥� in the defendant鈥檚 title. I read through those complaints to determine whether it fit our definition of school-based abuse, meaning the alleged perpetrator had access to the child through their role as a school employee.

In a vast number of cases, the alleged assault also occurred on school grounds 鈥� an empty classroom, private office or other secluded area in the building 鈥� but it often carried over to other locations: a teacher’s car, a class outing or an overnight school trip.

Recognizing some cases had been missed in that first attempt, I later asked the AI tool Claude to make a list of all residential treatment centers in New York state either currently operating or that had been operating at some point over the past 75 years. I then searched the court filing system for each of these facilities to see if they had been named in a Child Victims Act case. Once those cases were identified, either my editor, Kathy Moore, or I read through those additional complaints.

After culling out duplicates, I was able to identify at least 1,973 complaints that accuse a school, educator or other district personnel. That means that more than 18% of all the New York state cases 鈥� or nearly 1 in 5 鈥� attest that a child was sexually abused, assaulted or raped by an adult who had access to them through their school. In some counties, that percentage was much higher. 

We were able to create an interactive map showing how all these cases were distributed across New York state, the country鈥檚 fourth most populous and a widely divergent place that encompasses New York City, home to , and Hamilton County in the Adirondack Park, the most in the eastern United States with just 5,000 people. The five counties that comprise NYC accounted for 5,285 CVA cases; Hamilton County had just one.

We also created a searchable database so that readers can examine the scores of school-based complaints and other related court filings on their own.

A further analysis allowed us to break down the school-based cases by type: public, private, residential or religious. Catholic schools played an outsized role in the last category. One of the most painstaking parts of the process involved cases where the accused abuser was a priest, who served roles in both the church and its parish school. We only included such examples if the clergy member was clearly identified as acting in a school-based capacity 鈥� as a teacher, counselor or administrator, for example 鈥�  and primarily had access to the student because of that position. In most of these cases, we also confirmed that the abuse occurred on school 鈥� rather than church 鈥� grounds.

For over 100 of these more convoluted cases, I did a second review and then Moore did a third.

We counted almost all abuse allegations that occurred at residential treatment or private boarding schools where the line between students鈥� living and educational space is fluid and accused abusers often move freely between the two. We did not include cases in those settings where the alleged abuse was solely student on student, though many of the residential treatment complaints assert that children were being simultaneously raped and assaulted both by their peers and the adults on campus charged with protecting them. We did count the cases that also implicated adults.

The narratives in all the Child Victims Act complaints are disturbing, but reading through nearly 2,000 of them gave me visibility into the victims鈥� pain and trauma. It also allowed me to detect patterns that underscore alleged school-based abuse: adults who dismiss or ignore complaints, enabling the worst serial predators to abuse children for decades; the institutional set-up that seemingly turns some schools into breeding grounds, meaning the adults and the students change, but the abusive behavior does not; and the instinct to protect the adult鈥檚 career and the school鈥檚 reputation over the child鈥檚 safety. 

This tendency allowed accused abusers to quietly resign rather than be held accountable, the complaints charge. Many of them moved on to new schools, only to repeat the alleged predatory pattern. 

We made extensive efforts to reach out to every school, district and living person named in our story at least twice, by phone and email, when contact information was available. In cases where this wasn鈥檛 possible, we attempted to locate individuals through personal websites, their former employers, LinkedIn, LexisNexis and other people search engines. We also used the court records to identify attorneys for each defendant we name in the story and reached out to them at least twice, by phone and by email, with a detailed list of our findings. 

For cases where we did not successfully make contact, or where the individual is deceased, we noted that in the story. For some alleged perpetrators, I filed public records requests with the state Education Department for their licensure information, discipline records and retirement payouts. For one, I traveled to Central New York to question him about the allegations in person. I tracked down and spoke to another, a 91-year-old retiree criminally convicted of child sex abuse in two separate New York public school districts, now living in Florida. 

I interviewed over three dozen advocates, attorneys, professors and survivors across the state and country. Finding CVA plaintiffs in school-based abuse complaints who were willing to be part of this story was challenging. Victims carry heavy shame 鈥� two of the survivors in our story have yet to tell their own children what happened to them 鈥� and they run the risk of possibly harming their ongoing legal fight or endangering their financial settlement, many of which have confidentiality or nondisclosure agreements attached. 

The identities of all anonymous survivors quoted in our story are known to me and my editor, and all of their legal cases were reviewed.

For a majority of these plaintiffs, there is no end in sight to their civil cases. The law was meant to give victims, who were dismissed or silenced as children, another chance at justice, but five years after the lookback window closed, that promise remains unfilled. Public record requests I filed with the New York State Office of Court Administration asking for the total number of cases filed by county and their disposition allowed us to reveal for the first time that nearly 63% of all the Child Victims Act cases that moved beyond the initial filing were still pending as of February 2026. In some counties, 75% to 80% or more remained unresolved.

New York is one of at least 30 states that have enacted lookback windows or age limit revivals laws, but it has by far produced the greatest number of cases. I wanted to determine if there are particular elements to New York鈥檚 laws that have led to such high levels of sex abuse accusations against educators. I waded through statutes to determine the patchwork of prevention and enforcement regulations that exists in different states around sexual abuse in schools. It turns out that New York鈥檚 fall short by several measures, including a failure to recognize how child victims are groomed by their abusers or to protect students once they reach age 17.

A now pending in the state Senate would criminalize grooming and predatory misconduct toward a child enrolled in school. In first-degree cases, school-based abusers would be added to the sex offender registry. Schools would be required to train staff on grooming and update their mandatory reporter training for sex abuse offenses. And it would strengthen background screenings for prospective hires, requiring schools to review employment history.

Many thanks to the attorneys, advocates and experts who spent countless hours helping me to understand this complex and ongoing issue. My deepest gratitude goes to the survivors who trusted me and 蜜桃影视 with their stories and encouraged us to share them in the hopes they will make schools 鈥� and the young people in them 鈥� safer from sexual abuse than they were.

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