It Happens All the Time

A vulnerable fifteen-year-old, a trusted teacher, and the reason I write

For survivors of sexual abuse and those who love them, here’s my story, and the launch of my new website, Minors Can’t Consent, where you can tell your own stories. I’m listening. ❤️

One bright fall day in the beginning of my junior year my social studies teacher caught up with me walking fast down the long main hall at my all-girls Catholic high school. He grinned at me and started walking faster, and I sped up to outpace him. Pretty soon we were both running down the hallway, panting and laughing, looking only at one another all the way down the hall and out into the breezeway. Feeling his eyes on me, and being chased, was exhilarating. Here was a grown-up man paying attention to little nerdy me. The running, the chase, the carefree laughter felt like busting out of a cocoon.

My teacher made me feel special. He was the first person to ever tell me I was smart. He was a witty intellectual who shared his knowledge of the arts, music, and good writing with his students, stimulating us to read, pay attention, and question everything. During the unfolding of the Watergate scandal in 1972 he turned me and my Nixon-supporting classmates into critical thinkers who engaged in active civic discourse.

He also groomed me and welcomed me into the home he shared with his wife, where we had sex regularly until I graduated high school, and beyond.

I kept detailed records in those days. I was the only child of an alcoholic mother so there was lots of disorder in my life and much to write about. My dad was busy compensating for being the only guy in his company without a college degree in an executive position. He was often in evening classes or on business trips, devoted but distracted. For six years I wrote down everywhere I went, everything I did, and with whom, in tiny print every day in a calendar book. Writing things down helped me keep my life in order. Often I wrote quotes from conversations in the margins.

The fact that my teacher was becoming my friend allowed me to take liberties that I normally would have never dared to do. The day after the chase down the hallway I wrote in my diary that my teacher yelled at me and a friend in his class, probably for giggling or talking. “I got up and walked out,” it says. What high school girl storms out of a class when reprimanded by her teacher? What teacher chases a fifteen-year-old student down the school hallway?

Was no one watching?

Today, as the news explodes with countless stories of people in positions of power harming others, including politicians, pedophile priests, and the thousands of other “Me Too” revelations, I am struck by the universality of adults sexually abusing minors. Many of the stories are horrifying accounts of children and youth being coerced or raped. Others start with a trusted family member or friend inappropriately touching a child, whose confusion makes them particularly vulnerable in that moment.

What’s rarely discussed, however, is when the sexual contact feels good to the victim. We don’t like to think of children as sexual beings, or as experiencing pleasure from their sex parts being stimulated. When I was growing up in the ’60s masturbation was considered shameful and most parents certainly did not encourage it. Regarding sex, I was told not to talk to strangers, and that if anyone touched me “down there” that I should run home and tell my parents.

But no one ever warned me against the allure of a trusted teacher who claimed he was in love with me and who called me at home to tell me he wanted to go to bed with me. No one schooled me in how to refuse something that felt so flattering and affirming.

My parents trusted my teacher, who gave me rides home from the debate tournaments where he served as our coach. They even sent me to Europe on a four-week group trip the summer after my junior year, chaperoned by my teacher and his wife. By then the relationship had become sexual, the encounters mostly taking place on weekends in my teacher’s home when his wife was working. In my teenage mind, it was kind of like playing house. I’d borrow my mother’s car on a Saturday morning, say I was going shopping, which I would do briefly, and then drive over to his house. We’d talk or read, he’d fix me lunch, and then we’d have sex, in their room, in their bed. I was fifteen. He was twenty-seven.

The puzzling thing about this is that no one seemed to notice. I now know my friends suspected but didn’t know for sure. I learned at my 25th high school reunion how angry one of them had been at me, believing that surely if this thing had happened, it must have been my fault, I must have instigated it. For other friends, there was the question of why I had been chosen by our adored teacher, and not them.

Me, two months after my fifteenth birthday

Robert Dupont was very popular among his colleagues at Mt. Carmel Academy in New Orleans. He was helpful, smart, and devoted to teaching. He and his wife socialized with the other teachers and their spouses. One time when I was in my late forties, my husband and I walked into a Christmas party and I spotted two of my former female teachers from Mt. Carmel whom I hadn’t seen in thirty years. As I entered the room I saw one turn to the other and whisper. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Was I imagining that they were talking about me and my former teacher? Would I ever be free of this thing that happened to me as a teenager? We greeted one another, introduced our husbands, and made small talk.

Later that week I emailed them, said I wanted to tell them a story from my high school days, and could we meet for coffee?

It wasn’t my imagination. My former teachers had been talking about me. When I told them what really happened, they were shocked and horrified. “We thought it was a schoolgirl crush,” they said. “We had no idea it had become sexual.” They expressed regret, sorrow, and remorse for not noticing, or for noticing but looking the other way.

A page from one of my calendar books

My journey back through my very detailed diaries was disturbing and revealing. Besides keeping an account of every place I went, I also noted the first time my teacher kissed me while at a motel on a debate trip in the fall of my junior year, every time he phoned me at home—including when he called, about ten days after the debate trip—to tell me he wanted to go to bed with me. “Damn!” I wrote in one-inch tall red letters. “Now that I know he’s crazy maybe I can act accordingly… someone or something, please help.” I felt afraid and confused. But I was also intrigued.

A week later he told me he loved me. There followed months of grooming and him helping himself to my virginity. I referred to my teacher as “my man” in my diary, followed by “Not really mine, but it’s not right to own a person anyway.” I drew a black rectangle in my calendar book to denote every time we had sexual contact.

Did this happen because I trusted him so much that I believed what we were doing had to be right? Was it because he got to me when I was so young? I had entered kindergarten early, so I was a full year younger than my classmates all through school, and I always looked even younger. I wrestled with these questions for decades.

Did he force me? No. But he was my teacher and my mentor. Pleasing him mattered to me. And being an impressionable fifteen-year-old, I hung on to his every word, believing that “our love” made it okay.

We continued to be involved for a year after my high school graduation, and then on and off for a few years until he came to me one day when I was in my early twenties and in grad school and asked me to marry him. He said he was determined to leave his wife and child and make a life with me. There followed nine months of broken promises, a dramatic end to the relationship, and a clinical depression that caused me to take incompletes in my classes and delay graduation for half a year.

It was when I turned twenty-seven, the age he was when it started, that I began to realize the magnitude of the harm this man perpetrated on me. I imagined myself teaching in a boys’ high school, maybe even becoming fond of a student who clearly had a crush on me. But I absolutely could not fathom having sex with a vulnerable fifteen-year-old boy.

Once when I was in my early thirties, my former teacher called and asked to see me, “just to talk,” and I agreed to go for a walk with him. He was his usual charming self, breezy and articulate, chivalrous almost. We caught up on each other’s lives and a day or so later he sent me a long letter. In it he ruminates on why it happened and concludes that he didn’t think rationally about it, he just acted. And in one very telling passage he says, “You were part of a bright class, but stood out with a combination of being clever, articulate, little-girl sexy, and razor sharp bright” and he mentions that I “don’t seem to age.”

But here’s the thing: little girls aren’t sexy, or ageless. No sir. I was fifteen. I was a child.

A week after sending me the letter my abuser asked me to go out of town with him. It was at that point that I told him to never contact me again.

I spent most of my twenties and into my thirties having unhealthy relationships with men, begging for the love I needed but never getting it. Then when I was thirty-four, after lots of counseling and soul-searching, and many Al-Anon meetings, I finally let myself fall in love with someone healthy and whole. I got married and had children. I found meaningful work. I created a full, happy life.

But the memories continued to haunt me, coupled with guilt and shame. Deconstructing my beliefs about my own culpability happened in increments, like peeling an onion. For most of my adult life, really until my late fifties, I lived under a cloud of terrible shame, which limited me, made me question my own judgment, and wrecked my self-esteem.

All of this happened because of the pathology of a sexual predator, who believed that his needs trumped mine. It was as if he picked me out of a line-up of girls based on who was the most vulnerable. Then he pounced.

In April of 2021 I read stories in the national press about Blake Bailey, a former teacher from my own grown children’s school, who became a famous biographer. The stories detailed how he systematically groomed his middle school students, then kept in touch with them through high school and college, and ultimately raped one and attempted to rape others once they grew up. I was horrified to see that this kind of sexual predation was still happening, and close to home.

I decided to tell my story and name my abuser publicly.

Ramon Vargas, The Times-Picayune / New Orleans Advocate’s crime reporter, interviewed me, reviewed the years of detailed diaries I had kept as a teenager, and verified my story with two sources who knew about the abuse at the time. The 2,500-word article that appeared on the front page of the paper on May 8, 2021 had a profound impact. My abuser resigned his position as chair of the University of New Orleans’ history department and his name is now mud in this town. Many people contacted me, including other girls and women Robert Dupont abused, one within an hour of the story coming out online.

My hope is that other survivors of sexual abuse, especially those who were minor children at the time but who believe they “consented,” will feel free to share their stories, in whatever way they can. I hope they will come to understand that the inherent power imbalance between a teacher and a student, especially a minor, constitutes prohibited sexual contact. What happened to me was abuse, pure and simple. There is no consent when one person is underage and the other is an adult. I hope other survivors will come to believe that what happened to them was not their fault, and lay the blame where it is deserved—on the shoulders of the predator who abused them.

I am now in my late sixties and I am telling my story. Maybe it will make you look twice if you suspect an inappropriate relationship between an adult and an oh-so-seemingly-grown-up teenager. If you do, please don’t look the other way. Speaking up could save a young person a lifetime of pain and self-doubt and prevent the perpetrator from harming others.

For me, there is liberation in the telling. Finally, more than half a lifetime later, the cloud lifts.

If you know a survivor of childhood or teenager sexual abuse please encourage them to visit minorscantconsent.com, a website created for survivors and those who love them to share their stories, find resources, and begin the healing process.