At Horace Mann—the prestigious Bronx private school rocked by allegations of sexual abuse from the 1960s into the 1990s—former students recall a pattern of abuse from one eccentric English teacher:
“And what about Mr. Berman—this odd, secretive man who frightened away many students, yet retired to a house that former students bought for him? He wasn’t mentioned in the Times stories, but he may have been the greatest enigma of all. I talked to more than a hundred alumni, to many teachers who worked with him in the sixties and seventies, and to administrators who dealt with complaints about teachers. Berman stood out for his extraordinary control over boys’ lives. Several of his former students have spent decades trying to grasp why they yearned to be close to him, and why they remained silent for so long after, by their accounts, he abused them. ‘Berman counted on everyone’s silence,’ one of the men who lived with him after graduating from Horace Mann told me. Like some of the others, he asked not to be named. ‘He assumed that our own humiliation would keep us quiet,’ he said.”
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