by Mark Bowden
The following year, John Hardwicke arrived at the school as a twelve-year-old seventh-grader. The son of a prominent Maryland lawyer, Hardwicke had no special love for choral singing; he enrolled in the school because his father encouraged him to do so. “What turned my dad on was that beautiful mansion, the idea of me associating with good families and touring around the world,” Hardwicke says. “A stupid decision, in retrospect, but he had my best interests at heart.”
One night in his first year, Hardwicke was visited in his room by a man he recognizes from pictures today as having been John Shallenberger, who was following the Vienna Boys’ Choir on a tour of America at the time. It was bedtime, Hardwicke recalls, and although Shallenberger did nothing untoward, he offered a piece of advice: “He told me that I really oughtta not sleep with underwear on.”
In the fall of 1970, the music director Shallenberger recommended, a Canadian named Donald Hanson, took up residence at Albemarle. In his late twenties, terrific-looking, with a thick shock of dark hair, he was just about the coolest adult the boys had ever encountered. He was a brilliant pianist, he drove a Jaguar, and the women who worked at the school all seemed to have a crush on him. “He was very charismatic, like a teen idol, a rock star,” says Hardwicke. “He was an incredibly charming master manipulator.”
About a week after Hanson’s arrival, the music director asked Hardwicke to lend him a hand washing his Jaguar. As Hardwicke remembers it, Hanson touched him suggestively on the shoulder—and from there the contact escalated into a horror show.
Over the next several months, Hardwicke says, he and Hanson had sex “two, three, maybe even four or five times a day.” Sometimes Hanson would masturbate on Hardwicke’s body. Sometimes he would urinate on the boy in the shower. Hardwicke says that Hanson read to him from pornographic books and showed him child pornography. Also that Hanson once had sex with him inside his parents’ house.
Nor was Hanson the only perpetrator, Hardwicke says. He claims he was fondled once by the headmaster and twice by a proctor. He claims to have been masturbated on by one of Hanson’s friends. And he claims that, during a spell the next summer when he was visiting Hanson at Albemarle, the school’s cook came upstairs and raped him in his sleep.
The morning Hardwicke awoke with his underwear off and the cook still in his room, Hanson drove him back to his family’s home in Maryland. Because Hardwicke’s voice had started to change, he wouldn’t be returning to the Boychoir School that fall. He said good-bye to Hanson, walked into the house, and thought, Nothing will ever be the same.
THAT SAME SUMMER, Larry Lessig first came to Albemarle. He had just turned ten, a sweet-voiced kid who sung at his church at home in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He’d come to attend a summer camp that the school conducted for choirboys. And after auditioning, he was invited to stay and enroll as a fifth-grader.
Lessig’s father, who ran a steel-fabricating firm, was adamantly opposed. “There’s no way I’m going to send you away to school!” he thundered on hearing the suggestion. But Lessig was seduced by what the school promised, and the next summer, he asked again. His father was torn, but finally relented for the sake of his son’s future. “It was a kind of Billy Elliot moment,” Lessig says. “You could see him making this sacrifice—just hating the idea of losing me.”
Lessig’s first hint of Hanson’s proclivities came one day when another boy scaled a wall outside the mansion. Climbing down, the boy told Lessig he’d seen Hanson in bed with a student. Lessig’s response was total disbelief. “I remember thinking I could no longer trust this kid,” he says. “It was obviously so ridiculous.”
In the fall of his eighth-grade year, Lessig learned otherwise. On a Friday night, after Hanson had taken the boys shopping at the mall in Princeton, they all came back, as they often did, and gathered in his quarters to watch TV. As Lessig sat beside Hanson on the couch, the music director covered their laps with a blanket and proceeded to fondle him. Forever after, Lessig would remember the movie that was playing on TV: Run Silent, Run Deep.
The following June, on Lessig’s fourteenth birthday, after the choir had returned from touring in California, Lessig was preparing to head home for the summer when Hanson pulled him into his room—“to give me a ‘birthday present,’” Lessig says. “I remember feeling totally overwhelmed by him. It wasn’t forcing in the sense of violence…It’s not like I was afraid. But there was this recognition of, wow, there’s nothing I can do. Here I am. Bam. It’s over.”
And yet, of course, it wasn’t.
Lessig had been a bright light at the school since his first year there. With a perfect-pitch soprano voice, he’d been a soloist next in line behind Bobby Byrens (“My idol,” Lessig says). And with a sharp and probing mind already in evidence, he soon emerged as an academic star and student leader, a striver, intensely driven. Now, in his ninth-grade year, Lessig was named head boy, which made him “in charge of taking care of the kids,” he says. “There was no proctor when I was head boy; I was discipline. And there were kids who were real shits—it was a Lord of the Flies–like experience.”
Being head boy also signified something else: He was Hanson’s favorite. And accordingly he was assigned a room next door to the music director’s, at the far end of a hallway on the third floor. By midway through the year, the two of them were essentially living together. “We put up a door in front of our rooms, blocking off the hallway, blocking out the rest of the world. We created a suite. And there was a classroom right next to it. So every day the teacher comes up, watches me come out of that door—which is also Hanson’s door—and walk into class. There’s no way anybody doesn’t know what the hell is going on. But nobody says anything.”
Lessig may have been head boy, but he wasn’t Hanson’s only prey. All along, Lessig says, he knew that Hanson was sleeping with “at least ten” other boys. “The weird thing about the sexuality was that there was no jealousy attached to it at all,” he explains. “It was totally recreational. It was just like playing squash. He’s playing squash with me, he’s playing squash with him. Who cares? What does it matter?”
Among the boys, Hanson’s promiscuity was well known, Lessig says. He would call students out of class to satisfy his cravings. The private voice and piano lessons he administered were especially notorious: “It was five or ten minutes of music, then it would turn into other things,” Hardwicke recalls. And while none of this was ever spoken of explicitly among the boys, there was ribbing, teasing, nodding, winking—constant signals of in-the-knowness. As for the teachers, Lessig says, “Hanson was the boss. What was going to be said?”
Sometimes on trips home, Lessig felt faint stirrings of unease. But it never occurred to him to tell his parents. His relationship to Hanson, unlike Hardwicke’s, was tender, sustaining; his parents would never understand. “Like all pedophiles, Hanson was really good at connecting with kids,” Lessig says. “You just felt you were together; there was no ambiguity about it. He was a friend. A deep, close friend. We talked about everything. He told me about music. He told me about the world…. For a kid cut off from everyone else in this weird universe, to have the most important person in the world give you love and approval is the greatest thing you can imagine. What else is there?”
On some level, Lessig realized that the relationship was “fucked up and shouldn’t happen,” he says. But he also had a precocious fourteen-year-old’s exaggerated sense of his own maturity. “I felt that I could handle it,” he says. “That everything was under control.”
There were moments, however, when reality came crashing through. In Lessig’s final year, he found himself gripped by “an insane depression,” he says, over “the insanity of what was happening.” In his closet he’d found a hatch in the ceiling that led to a crawl space above. He climbed up there and crouched alone for hours in the dark.
One evening near the end of Lessig’s final year at the school, he went with Hanson for a walk around the grounds. As darkness descended on Albemarle, Lessig
finally, tentatively, gave voice to his gathering misgivings about Hanson’s behavior.
“Is this really right? Should you really be doing this?” Lessig asked.
“You have to understand,” Hanson replied, “this is essential to producing a great boychoir.” By sexualizing the students, he explained, he was transforming them from innocents into more complicated creatures, enabling them to render choral music in all its sublime passion. “It’s what all great boychoirs do,” Hanson said.
AFTER LESSIG MOVED BACK to Williamsport for high school, he brooded on what had happened in Princeton. Two years later, he contacted the boychoir’s headmaster, Stephen Howard, and persuaded Howard to appoint him as the alumni representative to the board of directors. Then Lessig went and told Don Hanson that what he was doing was wrong—wrong for the kids, wrong for the school, even wrong for Hanson.
“It’s harmful, it’s destructive, you’ll get caught, you’ll get hanged,” Lessig said. “It’s really got to stop.”
Hanson didn’t argue. Instead, he told Lessig that he had a boyfriend now, a former student who’d left the school with whom he was carrying on. All of his needs were being met.
Lessig wasn’t satisfied. “You should recognize that I’m now on the board,” he said. “If it doesn’t stop, I’m going to out you.”
“You’re right,” Hanson said. “Absolutely, I promise, it will never happen again.”
Lessig believed Hanson utterly. He had yet to learn that pedophilia is an illness, an all-consuming compulsion. At seventeen, he was flush with the sense of his power to defuse such a delicate situation. “I knew all these things that nobody else did,” he recalls. “I was keeping the institution together. I really wanted it to succeed. And the picture of the institution succeeding with Hanson continuing as choir director was really what I thought should happen.”
But in the fall of 1981 Lessig got a call from Stephen Howard: Hanson had been accused of molesting two students. Lessig by then was an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, studying economics and management with an eye to following his father’s path and going into business. Lessig drove up to Princeton for an emergency board meeting, where he learned that Hanson had tried to kill himself by putting his head inside a gas oven. Lessig thereupon told Howard everything he knew about Hanson’s history of abuse.
In March 1982 Howard sent a letter to the school’s parents, informing them that Hanson had resigned “for reasons of personal health.” Without mentioning the scandal, the letter lauded Hanson for his service: “He alone held the school together in the early seventies…hiring and firing staff, running the admissions and concert offices, from time to time driving the bus and even washing the dishes…His story at the Boychoir School is one of total devotion to the boys and dedication to the best interests of the School.”
After his dismissal, Hanson retreated to Canada, while Lessig gave up his seat on the board and got on with his life. His academic brilliance now unfurling in earnest, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied philosophy for three years before entering law school. For a time, his attitude to what Hanson had done, he says, was, “No harm, no foul.”
Then, at Yale Law School, Lessig took a course taught by arch-feminist Catharine MacKinnon and began to ponder his relationship with Hanson in a different, more sophisticated light. “There was this moment when I realized that I had been, in the traditional way, a woman in all relevant respects—totally passive, an object of sexual aggression,” he says. “I’d adopted this supportive, protective role with respect to him.” Among his many other afflictions, Hanson was an alcoholic. “There was this one time I literally saved his life,” Lessig recalls. “I came into his bedroom and he was passed out, vomiting, and I had to flip him over to stop him from suffocating. And this, I felt, was my role. I was his wife.”
Lessig had been involved with a number of women in college and graduate school. And he began to see self-destructive patterns in his relationships. “I remember throwing tantrums,” he says, “as I recognized how this thing had intruded in my life.”
After landing a plum professorship at the University of Chicago Law School, Lessig entered therapy. “The therapist was really great,” he observes with an ironic chuckle. “He said, ‘This is very significant, but you’re lucky—at least you didn’t become a homosexual.’”
What happened next is something Lessig refuses to discuss. But according to Hardwicke’s lead attorney, Keith Smith, Lessig sued the Boychoir School and received a settlement. Both the suit and the settlement are officially under seal, with a confidentiality agreement that bars either side from disclosing their existence, let alone any of the details. What Lessig can say, however, is that the school and its lawyers are aware of his abuse by Hanson. And that, in his interactions with them before the Hardwicke case, he thinks that “they behaved well.”
In the next decade, Lessig had almost zero contact with the school, as his legal career went supernova and his personal life settled happily. From Chicago, he moved on first to Harvard Law School and then to Stanford. He married, had a son, and set up digs in a rambling Spanish house not far from the ocean in San Francisco. Soaking in the hot tub on his balcony at night, watching the fog creep in, Lessig believed, with good reason, that he had put the Boychoir School behind him.
And then one day in 2001 came the e-mail from John Hardwicke.
THE DISTANCE FROM LESSIG’S to Hardwicke’s house is vast in every sense. In deepest rural Maryland, not far from the Pennsylvania line, it’s a small Cape Codder with rickety shutters and a mudslick for a driveway. On the day I visit, in February, the front walk is covered with snow; horses graze in a pasture next door. Inside, John and his wife, Terri, pad around in stocking feet, smoking Marlboro Medium 100s one after another. There are stuffed toys strewn around the house—Terri’s creations. In the living room, a court jester sits amid a metric ton of brick-a-brac, next to a full-size harp.
After a while, the Hardwickes’ fifteen-year-old daughter bounces through the door in a pair of pink Chuck Taylor high-tops. Her father worries about her taste in music—the Velvet Underground—and the fact that she has a steady boyfriend. “When I hear her listening to ‘Heroin,’ well, I don’t know,” Hardwicke says. “There’s only two things that can ruin your life: drugs and sex.”
Hardwicke pours a cup of coffee and sits with his legs tucked underneath him on the floor of the TV room. At forty-seven, he is tall and thin, with pale-pink skin, a snow-white beard, and watery blue eyes. He begins by telling me about the first time he discussed his abuse with a reporter. “I felt this incredible evil hovering around me that I just knew was going to kill me,” he says. “And then this evil communicated, ‘No, it’s not you, it’s your wife. We’re going to start with her.’”
If the effects of Lessig’s abuse were subtle and slow to emerge, for Hardwicke they’re glaring and have plagued him relentlessly throughout his life. After he met Terri at Catholic University, they were married and started a business together doing freelance PR, graphic design, brochures, and such. But Hardwicke, who was told repeatedly by Hanson that he was gay, has struggled for many years with confusion over his sexual orientation. Well into his marriage, he found himself engaging in anonymous trysts with men.
“It made me feel awful,” he says, pulling his knees up to his chest. “It became sort of this thing that I couldn’t control, and I’d literally want to throw up afterward…I was pretty convinced that it was some kind of demonic possession, almost. I mean, I can remember several times after the event where I’d get gas for the car and it would be, like, sixteen dollars and sixty-six cents.”
At one point, Hardwicke concluded he was gay and announced he was leaving Terri. But a friend who knew of his experiences suggested he seek therapy instead. Because he felt complicit in the acts, he didn’t think of them as molestation. But his therapist, Dr. Emily Samuelson, a trauma specialist, disagreed with that assessment.
Within twenty-four hours after Hard
wicke told Samuelson about being raped by the school’s cook, Hardwicke’s mother was killed in a car accident, propelling his paranoia to imponderable heights. His daughter was in the car, too, but she “walked out unscathed,” he says. “And I got to thinking later it was a metaphor for molestation. Some are killed, some are scarred, some are crippled. Others walk out untouched. It all depends where you were sitting in the car.”
After a few months of seeing Samuelson, in 1999, Hardwicke decided to approach the school and asked his father to help him do it. Hardwicke’s father, who by then had become Maryland’s chief administrative law judge, is a faculty member at Johns Hopkins. So they arranged to meet the school’s then-president, John Ellis, at the Hopkins Faculty Club. Ellis arrived with the school’s attorney. Up to that point, Hardwicke had never contemplated suing the school. “My intention was to have them apologize,” he explains. “I was trying to have somebody say, ‘It’s not your fault.’”
Hardwicke takes a long, deep drag on his cigarette. After several months of back-and-forth, he realized that no apology would be forthcoming and decided to explore a lawsuit. His father contacted some friends of his at Piper Rudnick, the largest law firm in Maryland, where he had briefly been an associate in the fifties.
Assigned to handle the litigation was an earnest, thirty-three-year-old, chubby-cheeked associate, Keith Smith, who was startled by the depths of Hardwicke’s depression when they first met in late 2000. “I’ve never seen anyone as black as John was,” Smith tells me. “He couldn’t work, couldn’t get out of bed most days.”
Not long after the firm signed on, the school made a settlement offer of two hundred thousand dollars. Hardwicke considered the sum “insulting.”