A flurry of sex-abuse allegations is rocking a Long Island high school where 2 accusers say lines between teachers and students were blurred in a 'cult-like' environment

cheap car insurance quotes - #1:A flurry of sex-abuse allegations is rocking a Long Island high school where 2 accusers say lines between teachers and students were blurred in a 'cult-like' environment

 

 Long Island's Babylon Junior-Senior High School is in the grips of a sexual-abuse scandal.
Brittany Rohl's account of being groomed by a teacher ignited a cascade of similar allegations.
Rohl and another accuser told Insider about the "reckoning" ahead of an outpouring of allegations.
When the Babylon, New York, school district announced earlier this month that a high-school teacher had resigned amid unspecified allegations, Brittany Rohl thought of about six names that could fit the bill.
The district never detailed the allegations against the unidentified teacher, and the Suffolk County police on Long Island said they found no evidence of a crime. But the incident motivated Rohl, now 28, to speak out about her own experience with a different teacher at Babylon Junior-Senior High School.
"I felt like this was the time, if ever, to come forward," she told Insider in an interview Monday.
On November 8, Rohl wrote an eight-page letter to the Babylon Board of Education, alleging that a former teacher at the school groomed her from the age of 16 and initiated a two-year sexual relationship with her once she turned 18. The relationship left her feeling suicidal, she wrote in the letter.
Rohl told Insider she had always dreamed of a "reckoning" at her alma mater but didn't have "much hope that that would happen."
She said it was a "surreal" experience seeing just how wrong she was.
Rohl's letter prompted a wave of women to come forward with their own allegations against staff members at the school. Dozens told their stories in a dramatic six-hour school-board meeting on November 15.
Rohl told Insider she expected a few other women to show up and speak that day but was surprised when even more stepped up to the microphone. She said some even showed up during the meeting after watching it unfold on Zoom and deciding to get in their cars and drive there to speak.
"I really thought that no one would bat an eye about this" or would try to discredit her, Rohl said. "To see so many people show up to the meeting — the venue was moved from the library to the auditorium — and then I got a standing ovation at the end of my speech, it just felt like a dream come true."
One of the women who spoke was Darcy Bennet, who graduated in 2009. Bennet alleged that a former teacher at the school, who also coached the tennis team, had touched her inappropriately at a summer camp between her seventh- and eighth-grade years and then tried to kiss her when she was in the ninth grade and attending a different school. Bennet told Insider that when she later described these unwanted sexual advances to a Babylon guidance counselor, the man was relieved of his coaching duties but allowed to continue teaching. (The teacher did not return a request for comment.)
Neither Bennet nor Rohl pressed charges over their claims, which date back to the late aughts and early 2010s, and some evidence that might have corroborated them has most likely been lost over the past decade.
Rohl told Insider she spent a lot of the meeting crying as she heard Bennet and the other women's stories.