EMILY FENG, HOST:
In 1999, two students at Garfield High School in Seattle heard disturbing rumors about one of their school's most beloved teachers, Tom Hudson. He taught biology and led an elite outdoors program that took students scuba diving and mountain climbing.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Being treated as adults as, like, not just as kids, as, like, people who knew things, who had skills, we were able to learn these skills, do these things that are hard, that are complicated. We were proud of it.
FENG: But when two students reported what they heard about Mr. Hudson, chaos erupted. Adults closed ranks, and schoolmates turned on those they believed were responsible for ruining a beloved teacher's career. And then one day, a voice on the school intercom announced that Mr. Hudson was dead.
Isolde Raftery is one of the students who reported Mr. Hudson back then. Today, she is an investigative journalist at member station KUOW in Seattle. And in the podcast, Adults in the Room, Raftery re-reports the story to understand what really happened in 1999. And a warning, this conversation includes sexual content and a mention of suicide. Welcome, Isolde.
ISOLDE RAFTERY, BYLINE: Hi, Emily.
FENG: So this story starts when your principal at the time is put on leave for an inappropriate relationship with a student. What was that relationship? And what did that have to do with the teacher, Tom Hudson?
RAFTERY: So, I was on the student newspaper at the time with my best friend, Ella Hushagen, and we decided to dedicate an entire issue of the paper to this question. What is an appropriate relationship between a teacher and a student? And we learned at that point from a reporter on the paper that a friend of hers was being abused by the outdoors leader, and that was our biology teacher, Tom Hudson. And we were hearing that he was giving boys pornography, that he was taking boys out on his boat. But then we also heard he had kicked a student in anger, and it all together, all pieced together, felt like, we need to tell someone about it. So we actually both told different adults, and that got the ball rolling on this investigation into a very dearly beloved teacher at our high school.
FENG: What happened to the school's investigation, ultimately?
RAFTERY: The investigation went on about 2 1/2 months. There's a school district investigator that is parked at my high school, Garfield High School in Seattle, and he is asking students questions all day long. And then we hear that Mr. Hudson has checked himself into a motel room north of Seattle and died by suicide.
FENG: Twenty-five years later, you and Ella decide to reinvestigate what happened. You set out to find if the allegations you heard back in high school were true. What did you find?
RAFTERY: Yeah, so Ella and I wanted to know if the allegations were true because we'd always felt somewhat responsible. Like, had we forwarded along rumors, and did those essentially drive a man to his death? And you can intellectually know that no one person or thing is to blame for someone dying by suicide. But you can also, in your heart of hearts go, yeah, but did I trigger it? And that's a horrible feeling. So...
FENG: That's a lot to live with.
RAFTERY: It's a lot, yeah. And so we learned pretty early on in this investigation that the allegations that we had heard back then were true, and then we learned that it was much, much worse. The level of depravity that I've since learned about, it's astonishing. For the podcast, I spoke with three men on the record who told us about what they experienced. So in one case was a 17-year-old boy who had to talk Mr. Hudson down from killing himself. He had taken a shower with Mr. Hudson, and Mr. Hudson had been aroused in the shower and had been leering at him. And the trauma is very real. Mr. Hudson traumatized not just those boys individually, but their families, and an entire community is reeling and still thinking about this and processing it.
FENG: But before his death, did Mr. Hudson ever say anything about the allegations against him?
RAFTERY: He denied them to that district investigator who came into Garfield and was interviewing everybody. But really, he admitted to most of it. He admitted to the naked showers, and he chalked it up to horseplay.
FENG: To me, so much of this series is about trust, losing trust and that really scary moment when you find out the adults in the room - to reference the name of your show - that they're not who they appear to be. Are there lessons you learned revisiting this period now that you are an adult that you want listeners to take away?
RAFTERY: For me, the big lesson is a bit of a disheartening one, which is that even when the adults do the right thing, the system may not be there to support them. So just looking present day, you know, I have an example of a girl who brought allegations forward, and they got rid of this teacher. They ousted him immediately, and this is all within Seattle Public Schools. However, now that teacher is at a different school district because the way the system is set up is that that school district cannot get information from Seattle Public Schools about other allegations. There was no investigation. The teacher quit. So for me, it's been a bit of a betrayal, realizing it's not just human fallibility, but also the systems that are not set up to investigate allegations.
FENG: That's Isolde Raftery. She's managing editor at KUOW Public Radio in Seattle. She's the host of Adults in the Room, a new seven-part series, which you can find at kuow.org or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you.
RAFTERY: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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