The Gordon School, a private elementary and middle school in East Providence, informed about 1,300 alumni in a letter Monday that several former students had reported being sexually molested, and in two cases raped, by a former teacher in the 1970s.
The alleged victims were girls between the ages of 11 and 15.
The school described the allegations as credible and said they had been corroborated by other former students who told a school investigator or an East Providence police detective that they had “witnessed or were aware of the abuse.”
The letter identified the former teacher as Andrew D. Cohen, now of Coventry, who taught at Gordon between 1972 and 1977 until he was placed on paid leave after “one of the rape victims went to the police,” the letter said.
Cohen, now 69, was never charged, police say. And while the school says it has forwarded these recent reports to East Providence police for possible prosecution, the statute of limitations appears to have expired, law enforcement officials say.
The allegations included “numerous instances of inappropriate touching and digital rape that occurred on campus and in two cases allegations of rape that occurred off campus,” the letter stated.
In an interview at his house, Cohen, more recently the chairman of the board of the now defunct Ocean State Theatre Company, declined to address the allegations directly:
“I can’t see where there is any merit to me saying anything that’s what, forty-something years ago? I don’t even know what they [the allegations] are so, so no, I don’t want to say anything about them. I don’t want to stick my foot in my mouth and say something I don’t know anything about.“
The Gordon letter said Cohen had denied all the allegations when contacted in recent months by a lawyer hired by the school to investigate.
Last June — months before revelations of high-powered men sexually assaulting women swept the nation — the Gordon School publicly announced it was launching an investigation of possible sexual molestation by a former teacher in the 1970s after one former student notified the school.
The announcement prompted “numerous” other former students to contact the school and at least three other women, now in their 50s, spoke to an East Providence detective and said they had been personally molested or raped by Cohen.
The detective’s September 2017 police report names Cohen as an alleged sexual perpetrator. It quotes four former students who say Cohen had repeatedly molested them in school hallways, classrooms, and the French Room, during special math tutoring sessions held at students’ home, and at his East Providence apartment.
Three of Cohen’s alleged victims spoke with The Providence Journal and consented to being identified: Laura Browder, now a professor of American Studies at the University of Richmond, in Virginia; Lisa Kantor, a licensed psychologist outside Boston; and Lori Kahler, of Lincoln, a consultant for a bio-med company.
Each described Cohen as a dogged predator whose conduct was known to school officials at the time.
Kantor said Cohen repeatedly molested her throughout her entire seventh grade, in 1974.
He would walk up behind her in the hallway or the coat room and put his hands under her clothes. She remembers one specific attack in the school’s French room when she froze and read the French alphabet on the wall to dissociate herself from what Cohen was doing.
“This happened to me,” Kantor said. “And so here I am, a 55-year-old woman, and not only have there been 40 some odd years in my own life with this as part of my childhood, but more importantly, there have been 40 years where Andrew Cohen has been free to continue sexually molesting pre-teens girls without having been called out on it.”
Browder said, “I was 12 in the summer of 1976 when Mr. Cohen organized a special math class.” The math group met after school at students’ houses. “Over the course of that class, Mr. Cohen started groping me and eventually invited me to his apartment, smoked pot with me, got me really high and raped me.”
“Before and after that,” said Browder, “he continued to molest me in my own living room, my own kitchen when my parents weren’t around. So he was very bold.”
Browder said she told no one except her best friend because “I didn’t know how to process it as rape. He told me, ‘Don’t tell anyone because while you’ll get a slap on the wrist it would ruin my career.’ So I felt duty-bound to keep silent.”
But in the spring of 1977, Browder, then an eighth grader, began to hear that Cohen was molesting other girls, she said.
She told her parents what had happened at Cohen’s East Providence apartment and they reported it to school officials. Gordon’s then head of school, Laurance Miller, put Cohen on paid leave, according to the letter, as police began an investigation.
But Browder says the East Providence police didn’t take her complaint seriously. A detective she spoke with, now deceased, accused her of leading Cohen on.
“It was so tough for me after I went to the police, that I was not believed,” she said. “I faced a lot of ostracism.”
Kahler said Cohen’s groping of her during one math class — he leaned over her from behind and put his hand down her shirt, she says — terrified her so much that she eventually transferred to Bay View Academy, in East Providence.
“I just remember being in shock. I couldn’t get him off me,” Kahler said, adding that the episode only ended when another classmate saw what was happening and called loudly for Cohen to help him with his coursework.
Cohen “always tried to get me to miss my bus and say, ‘I’ll drive you home.’ But I learned to just bolt as soon as he started talking to me,” Kahler said. “People definitely knew.”
All three women say they are only speaking publicly about what happened to them because they believe there were other victims who may come forward if they hear their stories.
While Gordon School acted appropriately when another former student raised allegations against Cohen last year, the three women say school officials did little at the time.
“I know it was discussed in the PTO,” said Kantor. “I know there were teachers who indicated at the time to the police that they knew something. When there are this many victims, there are an equal number of people who are complicit.”
Gordon officials say in their letter that they had spoken with two former administrators, two former faculty members and two former trustees. None, the school said, could confirm that the school administration had been alerted about Cohen’s behavior until Browder went to the police in 1977 with her rape allegation.
“At what point in our collective memory,” asks Kantor, “did everybody forget that this was something that ever happened?”
The three former Gordon students are represented by Boston lawyer Eric MacLeish, who represented hundreds of victims of sexual abuse by priests during the 1990s.
Concerning Cohen, MacLeish said, “Even though it may well be too late for prosecution, the message from today is that because of courageous women like the three I represent, the days are over when perpetrators of childhood sexual abuse can take refuge in comfortable hiding places, secure in knowing that the horrors they inflicted will effectively silence their victims.”
In a statement Monday to The Journal, Gordon's Head of School Ralph Wales said he was "saddened to learn how this case was handled by former school administrators decades ago. This would not stand today. ... We remain fully committed to meeting that essential and basic expectation to provide a safe and healthy learning environment for all our students."
Cohen told The Journal he had taught school elsewhere. But he refused to say where.
“You know, I’d rather not. Why? Because it’s going to give you other paths to follow. I just don’t see the merit to me.”
— tmooney@providencejournal.com
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On Twitter: @mooneyprojo