RFK Jr. Looted Office of Minority Health for His Own Security Detail
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took millions of dollars away from the Office of Minority Health and used it to beef up his own personal security.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Kennedy moved $12 million from the office, which was created by Republican President Ronald Reagan to address higher Black infant mortality rates. HHS informed Congress earlier this year that it would use the funds to cover RFK Jr.’s security costs, which grew from $10 million in 2025 to $17 million in 2026, according to the Journal’s sources.
In response to the report, HHS spokeswoman Emily Hilliard said the cuts to the key agency “reflect HHS priorities and programmatic assessments—not the Secretary’s security needs.” .
“Secretary Kennedy faces a security environment that differs significantly from that of previous HHS secretaries,” Hilliard added. “His protection reflects the threats he faces, his extensive travel, and the security required for him to safely carry out his duties nationwide.”
When he first started, Kennedy Jr. requested to be protected by the U.S. Marshals Service rather than the security the Office of the Inspector General provided to him.
Kennedy stopped speaking at outdoor events after a man wearing a bike helmet rushed at him last year.
Republicans lie to themselves as polls predict midterm devastation
With six weeks until Election Day, there’s not much hope for Republicans. Gas prices are climbing thanks to the wars in Iran and Ukraine. Inflation is outpacing wage gains, pinching Americans’ pocketbooks. President Donald Trump’s approval has hit yet another new low. And polls show Republicans either losing or tied in states and districts that Trump won by wide margins in 2024.
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Brad Bird’s Future Noir RAY GUNN Drops First Trailer
- Brad Bird’s upcoming animated feature Ray Gunn, a future-noir detective adventure, drops its first dazzling trailer.
- The film will debut on Netflix in December, with select theatrical and 70mm screenings.
- Sam Rockwell voices the titular character with a star-studded cast including Scarlett Johansson, Tom Waits, Patton Oswalt, and Michelle Rodriguez.
- Nerdist take: It looks pretty incredible, like if Metropolis met Coruscant, but with Rick Deckard’s dress sense. What more do you need?
Brad Bird might be the filmmaker with the best eye and mind for retro-futurism. Before we had a deluge of it from video games, TV, and movies, Bird was out here giving us animated fare like The Iron Giant and The Incredibles. I kind of think he’d be the perfect person to helm a Rocketeer reboot. Disney, let’s do it, shall we? Until that happens, however, at least we have Bird’s latest. It’s a glorious, Art-Deco-inspired riff on things like Blade Runner and ’40s film noir about a private investigator. Behold the first trailer for Ray Gunn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL-xjzQFWsY
The synopsis for the movie is as follows:
In Metropia, a gigantic city in an alternate future as seen from 1939, private eye Raymond Gunn (voiced by Sam Rockwell) is drawn into a case involving aliens, murder and a multimedia star named Venus Nova (voiced by Scarlett Johansson).
In addition to Rockwell and Johansson, the voice you hear the most in the trailer is legendary musician Tom Waits playing Ray’s grizzled alien partner, Eyera. Get it, like Ira, but he has a big eye? The rest of the stacked cast includes Alan Tudyk, Matt Berry, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Chernus, Kether Donohue, Michelle Rodriguez, Aasif Mandvi, Matt Jones, Kathryn Hunter, John Ratzenberger, Justin Peck, and Patton Oswalt.
Netflix/Skydance Animation
I’ve always been a huge fan of this kind of science fiction landscape. It’s not dissimilar from the ahead of its time Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, itself taking inspiration from the Fleischer Superman cartoons from the 1940s. Unlike a lot of Bird’s earlier animated work, however, this isn’t a “kids” movie, as Ray Gunn deals with murder and contains violence, action, language, and suggestive themes. Shudder! These themes are so suggestive!
Netflix/Skydance Animation
This movie is apparently a passion project of Bird’s for nearly 30 years, dating prior to The Iron Giant. I think it looks pretty incredible, like if Metropolis met Coruscant, but with Rick Deckard’s dress sense. What more do you need?
Ray Gunn will premiere on Netflix on December 18, 2026. The film will also debut in select theaters and in limited 70mm on December 4.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.The post Brad Bird’s Future Noir RAY GUNN Drops First Trailer appeared first on Nerdist.
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Trump-Appointed Judge Smacks Down EPA’s Termination of Clean Energy Grants
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
A federal judge has declared that the Trump administration unlawfully terminated $7 billion in grant funding for clean energy programs in disadvantaged communities.
The Solar for All (SFA) program, established during the Biden administration as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, provided dozens of grants for states, municipalities, tribes and nonprofits designed to reduce electric bills, create jobs, and address the greenhouse gas emissions warming the global climate.
“They don’t have any excuse for sitting on this money anymore..”
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) canceled the program after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2025. The Conservation Law Foundation, Southern Environmental Law Center, Lawyers for Good Government, and Lawyers’ Committee for Rhode Island sued in the US District Court for the District of Rhode Island on behalf of workers, businesses, nonprofits, and individuals harmed by the withdrawal of funding.
“Congress’s clear intent was that EPA continue to administer the already obligated SFA grants,” Judge Mary S. McElroy, a Trump appointee, wrote in her ruling, issued Friday. “Defendants acted contrary to this intent, and with no other statutory authority, when they terminated the SFA program.”
The ruling means the EPA will have to release the funding, said Nick Torrey, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center.
“We have seen this administration try to resist and appeal and fight,” Torrey said. “They don’t have any excuse for sitting on this money anymore. They have to get this money out.”
The One Big Beautiful Bill repealed “unobligated” funding aimed at greenhouse gas emissions—but this funding wasn’t unobligated.
The EPA argued the court lacked jurisdiction over the plaintiffs’ claims and that the claims were meritless. The federal agency told Inside Climate News it is “reviewing the decision and considering options for appeal.”
The EPA awarded the grants in 2024 and said at the time the program would save families $350 million a year on electricity bills and support 200,000 jobs and workforce training opportunities. Among the recipients was a coalition of nonprofits in Florida, which received $156.1 million to create new and expand existing solar programs for low-income communities in the state.
The program was canceled before much of the funding could reach communities, according to the groups involved in the litigation. In 2025 Congress approved the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which repealed unobligated funding aimed at greenhouse gas emissions. The groups argued the program’s termination was unlawful because the funding was already obligated.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf not of grant recipients but what the litigation described as “downstream beneficiaries.” Among them were solar companies that invested in personnel and equipment based on funding awarded to the states of Georgia and Pennsylvania, a labor union that helped develop an implementation plan in Rhode Island, and a nonprofit that received a sub-award from a grant to the state of Indiana.
Grant recipients filed two subsequent lawsuits against the EPA. State grant recipients also filed challenges in the Court of Federal Claims.
Newsom Vetoes Bill That Would Ban Extraditions for Abortion and Gender-Affirming Care
When Louisiana authorities tried to extradite a California doctor last winter for sending abortion pills to women in their state, Gov. Gavin Newsom pushed back—hard. “We will not allow extremist politicians from other states to reach into California and try to punish doctors based on allegations that they provided reproductive health care services,” Newsom declared. “Not today. Not ever.”
Yet nine months after that ringing defense of abortion providers and reproductive freedom, Newsom has blocked Democratic efforts to enshrine the same anti-extradition policy into state law.
The soon-to-be-ex-governor has vetoed a bill that would have prohibited future governors from handing over abortion providers, helpers, and patients to red states for criminal prosecution. The bill also barred extraditions involving transgender care. Newsom’s decision was “incredibly disappointing” and “certainly not what we were expecting,” says Pavitra Abraham, director of state campaigns for Reproductive Freedom for All.
The veto of AB 2164—also known as the Care Without Fear Act—has alarmed reproductive rights advocates around the country because of California’s critical role in preserving abortion access since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. The state is home to telemedicine providers, mail-order pharmacies, research organizations, and other groups that have helped keep abortion pills flowing even to the most conservative parts of the US.
Much of that abortion infrastructure is built on so-called shield laws that protect reproductive care across state lines. California has some of the most robust shield laws in the US, protecting providers, helpers and patients from out-of-state legal action over abortion and gender-affirming care.
Newsom signed California’s first shield laws in 2022 and has consistently backed legislation to strengthen those safeguards. But he has resisted efforts to codify one key protection: a ban on extraditions in criminal cases, like the one Louisiana authorities sought earlier this year. Instead, Newsom argues that decisions on extradition should remain an “executive function”—a prerogative of the governor rather than the legislature, preferably addressed by executive order rather than written into state law.
That distinction doesn’t matter much as long as California has a chief executive who supports reproductive rights. But it could be disastrous if a Republican won the governorship.
“Legislatively enacted laws are just on firmer footing when there are political changes at the executive level,” says Amanda Barrow, senior staff attorney at the UCLA Law Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy. An executive order of the type Newsom has used to fight extraditions “could be revoked by a governor who is anti-abortion or anti–gender-affirming care.”
So, with Newsom winding up his second term as governor and widely expected to run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, California reproductive advocates made a ban on extradition one of their top legislative priorities for 2026. Eighteen other Democratic-run states have enacted laws prohibiting extradition of abortion providers and patients.
“California cannot call itself a safe haven for reproductive freedom while leaving abortion providers just one election away from extradition.”
AB 2164 would have gone even further than most of those statutes, extending California’s shield-law protections to providers and helpers based in other blue states where abortion and gender-affirming care are legal.
Supporters seemed confident that Newsom would sign the bill into law. After all, this is the same governor who, when faced with President Donald Trump’s extraordinary effort to gerrymander red-state congressional seats to rig the midterm elections, responded with his own redistricting plan, in the form of last year’s Proposition 50. Four years ago, he signed a law making California the first sanctuary state for trans minors seeking medical care.
But instead, Newsom vetoed the bill, announcing the move in a Sunday legislative update. In his statement explaining his decision, Newsom pointed to his strong record on reproductive health issues, including privacy. But he said he was “troubled by the precedent that would be set if an outgoing administration agreed with the Legislature to erode the executive authority of an incoming Governor based on their shared policy preferences, regardless of how righteous and well-intentioned those actions may be.”
That stance “is cold comfort to Californians living and working in the real world post-Dobbs,” Lizzy Hinkley, legal director of Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, the bill’s lead sponsor, responded in a statement. “A high-brow, academic justification for refusing to codify legal protections only reveals an ignorance for the lived reality of patients and providers—and does nothing to help them.”
Newsom’s veto—which some social media commenters criticized as pandering to conservatives ahead of a presidential run—also seems to reflect the widespread assumption that Democrat Xavier Becerra is a shoo-in to defeat Republican Steve Hilton in November’s gubernatorial election. Becerra—a former California attorney general and President Biden’s secretary of Health and Human Services in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision—has been a staunch defender of reproductive and trans care, while Hilton has said he would have extradited California abortion doctor Rémy Coeytaux to Louisiana as requested in January. Hilton later walked back that position. Texas and Louisiana attorneys general have also targeted telehealth abortion providers in New York and Delaware.
But Becerra’s widening lead in the polls doesn’t mean a ban on extraditions isn’t needed, the bill’s supporters counter. “That mentality of people saying, ‘It’s going to be fine, a Democrat’s going to win, it’s California, blah blah blah’—it’s just really dangerous,” Abraham says.
“California cannot call itself a safe haven for reproductive freedom,” she adds, “while leaving abortion providers just one election away from extradition.”
Newsom still has not acted on several other important reproductive-related bills this session, including AB 2540, which would make medication abortion available to community college students in the state, and AB 1973, which would expand the ability of non-physicians to provide abortion care.
Decades of Harm: New York Schools Named in Nearly 2,000 Child Sex Abuse Claims
This article was co-published with The 74, a nonprofit news outlet covering education in the US.
Warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of child sexual abuse.
Going to high school in Dutchess County, New York, in the 1960s, there was no late bus. For one star athlete at Our Lady of Lourdes High School, that meant regularly hitchhiking the 25 miles between school and home after practice.
It was during those lonely treks, he said, that his new coach and gym teacher, Vincent Dutkowski, would stalk him in his car, offering to give him a ride, trying to coax him back to his apartment. By this point, Dutkowski had already sexually molested him multiple times, he said, grabbing his buttocks and his testicles in pickup basketball games in the school gym, plucking out his pubic hair. A few times, when he was alone with Dutkowski in his office, the coach would pull down his gym shorts and his jock strap and fondle him.
“I’d be walking down Market Street in Poughkeepsie and he’d pull up next to me,” the man, in his 70s, told The 74 in March, asking not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of his story. “He called me Irish. ‘Irish. Get in the car.’ And I’m a 17-year-old kid trying to maintain my varsity status, starting status, and he’s the coach. Also he is — was — 6’3”, 240 pounds. At the time, I’m barely 6 feet and 160. So he’s a huge man.”
Once trapped in the car, he said, Dutkowski’s hands were everywhere, groping his genitals through his clothes and “talking all sorts of really filthy sexual talk.” The young athlete started altering his route home, taking different downtown streets so his coach wouldn’t find him. But sometimes he did.
The last ride he took, he said, Dutkowski turned left toward his own apartment instead of right toward the bridge and flipped open his coat to expose his penis. The student yelled at the 36-year-old man to stop the car and let him out and he scrambled away.
Coach Vincent Dutkowski (center) with Our Lady of Lourdes High School basketball team, Poughkeepsie, NY, 1966Courtesy The 74
After that, he said Dutkowski benched him, even though it was his senior year and he had started every game of his high school career. He was humiliated and couldn’t understand why no other adult ever asked him what happened. When he tried to quit the basketball team, he said, the coach told him he wasn’t going to play him but if he stayed, “I’ll leave you alone and you can pitch (baseball) in the spring time—and we keep this between the two of us.”
That’s where it sat for 39 years until the alleged victim, by then a successful lawyer and civil litigator, decided to confront it. He said he deposed himself for two hours on videotape and sent a verified statement to the Archdiocese of New York and Our Lady of Lourdes. It was 2004 and he got a letter back from the archdiocese’s general counsel telling him the statute of limitations had run out on his complaint.
It was too late.
Vincent Dutkowski was a gym teacher and coach at Our Lady of Lourdes High School in Poughkeepsie in the 1960s.Courtesy The 74
An ‘insane’ number of cases
In 2019, New York state passed the Child Victims Act, which allowed any living survivor of childhood sexual abuse to bring a civil case during a two-year lookback window and permanently extended the statute of limitations from age 23 to 55 for future civil cases.
That opening resulted in 10,787 cases being filed by 14,592 plaintiffs. Among them is the former Our Lady of Lourdes student, one of at least five who named Coach Dutkowski, a convicted sex offender who died in 2012 at age 83, as their abuser.
Elements of the complaints against Dutkowski—an alleged serial predator who moved among schools, using his power and authority to coerce and silence his victims—run throughout the Child Victims Act cases. To understand the full scope of the role schools played in those nearly 11,000 lawsuits, The 74 searched all 62 New York counties and combed through thousands of court documents, identifying at least 1,973 complaints that accuse a school, educator or other district personnel.
That means that more than 18 percent of all the New York state cases—or nearly 1 in 5—attest that a child was sexually abused, assaulted or raped by an adult who had access to them through their school.
In many counties, that share was even higher: In Suffolk County, for example, 36 percent of all cases involved schools and in the Bronx, nearly 40 percent. And in Franklin County, on New York’s far northern border, survivors in an overwhelming 75 percent of the CVA cases filed accused school employees of abuse.
“That’s an insane number for one period of time where a window was open. And how many possibly couldn’t file after the window had closed.”
The numbers from The 74’s analysis are considerably higher than the 13.4 percent of cases attributed to K-12 schools in a more narrowly focused review of the New York Child Victims Act cases done by the advocacy organization Child USA. They also provide greater context to the frequently cited estimate that 1 in 10 K-12 students will be subject to sexual misconduct by an adult by the time they graduate, according to a 2014 government report and 2004 research mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act.
“That’s an insane number for one period of time where a window was open,” said Kathryn Robb, director of the Children’s Justice Campaign at the advocacy organization Enough Abuse. “And how many possibly couldn’t file after the window had closed.”
Robb, who spent over a decade helping to draft and pass the New York bill, added that because so few survivors ultimately report their abuse, the tally of school-based complaints is likely a significant undercount. But the number who did come forward, she said, “allows a justified alarm to be sound[ed] for both the public—parents, grandparents, people, guardians—and also our lawmakers and leaders.”
The 74’s investigation reveals the sheer magnitude of cases involving New York educators although the vast majority of teachers, administrators and school personnel do not sexually harm the children in their care. At the same time, the cases present a rare level of visibility for the former students whose pain and trauma went unrecognized when they were young.
By delving into scores of cases, The 74 was also able to glean what it is about schools themselves—their physical structure, their institutional practices, the dynamics among the adults who work there—that contributes to children being preyed upon, year after year and decade after decade, in a place where they are legally required to be.
The alleged abusers in these cases held an array of roles across all types of schools—public, private, residential and religious. The accused were classroom and special education teachers, bus drivers, school psychologists, priests, maintenance workers, coaches, principals, school doctors and occupational therapists. Victims ranged from pre-schoolers in a special needs program in New York’s Catskill Mountains to high schoolers in a drama class on Long Island.
In the most egregious cases, alleged perpetrators assaulted students for decades, amassing hundreds of victims. Multiple teachers were credibly accused of sexual abuse in one school, and then permitted to quietly move on to a new one.
“He crawled into your life. He got complete trust.”
The abuse detailed in the complaints spanned nearly 70 years, with some reported incidents dating as far back as the 1950s and others as recently as 2018. In many cases, school leaders had reportedly been told of previous or ongoing abuse and turned a blind eye, allowing it to continue unchecked, The 74 found.
Numerous students alleged their teachers facilitated their abuse by allowing their adult perpetrators to regularly pull them out of class and take them to a private office, empty classroom or other secluded area in the school where they were sexually assaulted.
Complaint after complaint describes how the physical abuse came after periods of
grooming, some that lasted years. This included encouraging students to stay back after school for extra help, offering rides home and finding ways to get enmeshed in young people’s personal relationships. “He crawled into your life. He got complete trust,” one survivor told The 74 of his alleged abuser.
In extreme cases, the students either babysat for or lived with their abusive teacher or principal.
All the complaints state that the victims suffered lasting harm from what they endured as children. A key underpinning of the Child Victims Act is that those who are subjected to sexual abuse at a young age are often unable to speak of it publicly until well into adulthood and long after the civil statute of limitations would have lapsed.
“The number one (pattern) is that they all feel it was their fault. That they feel guilt. That they feel that they caused this. They feel they can’t trust anyone in authority.”
“The number one (pattern) is that they all feel it was their fault. That they feel guilt. That they feel that they caused this. They feel they can’t trust anyone in authority,” said attorney Cynthia LaFave, who is handling some 470 Child Victims Act cases in partnership with the firm Jeff Anderson & Associates. “It has given them so much depression, anxiety. A lot of them now have substance abuse disorders because that’s their way of escaping it.”
The former Our Lady of Lourdes student, a grandfather of five, passed away in late August without seeing his case resolved. He told The 74 earlier this year, that he had yet to share what happened to him in high school with his adult sons, and the way he told his wife was to have her watch his self-made deposition. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and traced addiction issues he developed in his 40s to his teenage years.
“Somewhere along there, towards the 1990s, I became an alcoholic and that affects your marriage, your kids and my job,” he said. “(The abuse) was the impetus. If I was on the edge of a cliff, genetically or whatever, those events pushed me off to become an alcoholic.”
The New York archdiocese declined to comment on the allegations against Our Lady of Lourdes or Dutkowski. The coach’s accuser did note that the church offered to pay for therapy sessions after he first notified them of his complaint in 2004.
At least 30 states have passed similar lookback windows or age limit revival laws for child sexual abuse claims in the last 20 years, including California and West Virginia. But New York, which is now looking to strengthen its laws against school-based child sexual abuse, has produced by far the greatest number of cases. Seven years later, the vast majority still await resolution.
Of the 10,787 CVA cases filed in New York courts, roughly 8,000 had progressed beyond the initial filing as of February 2026. Of those, just under 3,000 had been settled or otherwise disposed of, leaving nearly 63 percent still pending, according to The 74’s analysis of public records obtained from the New York State Office of Court Administration. That means victims, who may now be in their 60s or 70s and have waited most of their lives to seek justice, are still waiting.
Marci Hamilton, a University of Pennsylvania professor and Child USA’s founder, sees great value in the civil cases. They get at not just the alleged perpetrator, she said, but the institutions, like schools, that protect the abuser and their own reputations. That creates an opportunity to change a deep-seated culture of secrecy and self-preservation.
“What we’re trying to do with these windows is catch up: catch up to all those victims that were abused and were given no access to justice. But the real goal is to make sure it doesn’t happen again, so that we’re not just seeing a wave of thousands of lawsuits, (one) after another.”
“What we’re trying to do with these windows is catch up: catch up to all those victims that were abused and were given no access to justice,” she said. “But the real goal is to make sure it doesn’t happen again, so that we’re not just seeing a wave of thousands of lawsuits, (one) after another.”
James MarshCourtesy The 74
‘Where’s the justice?’
James Marsh is a leading attorney in child sex abuse cases whose clients include survivors of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. His Manhattan-based Marsh Law Firm has represented roughly 1,000 of the Child Victims Act plaintiffs.
“The fact that there were so many cases in so many different places really illustrates the scope of this problem, both historically and ongoing,” Marsh told The 74, referring specifically to school-based abuse. “This is a problem that has not gone away.”
In July, the Trump administration launched what it called “a national K-12 initiative to crack down on sexual predators in schools,” citing instances where schools failed to investigate credible reports of abuse or allowed accused perpetrators to change roles or transfer schools. The administration, which recently gutted the office within the U.S. Department of Education that investigates sexual abuse claims, said it was targeting 20 districts it suspected of falling short. None are in New York.
The 1,973 CVA cases involving New York schools were spread over 54 counties with the largest number in Manhattan, or New York County, with 345; the Bronx with 256 and Brooklyn, or Kings County, with 227.
When looking at all the CVA cases, the highest volume can be found in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Nassau counties. Those places also have among the most cases that were still unresolved. Nearly 80 percent of all complaints that were at one point active in Brooklyn were still pending, as were 79 percent of those in Manhattan and three-quarters of those in the Bronx, according to The 74’s analysis.
The exception is Nassau County on Long Island where the courts have cleared more cases than anywhere else in the state, resolving 606 of 681 cases, leaving just 11 percent still pending. Over 100 of the Child Victims Act cases brought in Nassau name schools.
Attorneys and advocates say the long delays are due to a backlog created by the pandemic, a dearth of judges, battles between defendants and their insurance companies over who is liable for payment and an otherwise overwhelmed court system.
That’s of little comfort to Bob Druger, who first filed his case against the Syracuse City School District in 2019, alleging years of abuse by a counselor and track coach nearly 40 years earlier. Over the past seven years, he said, his case has dragged on, cycling through numerous judges.
He gave the first part of his own deposition—a grueling process for many survivors—two years ago, and is still waiting to complete that critical pre-trial step.
“I’m so disappointed in the legal system. They made these laws to get some kind of justice—whatever that is—but where’s the justice?”
“I’m so disappointed in the legal system,” he said. “They made these laws to get some kind of justice—whatever that is—but where’s the justice?”
Druger’s case is one of 26 school-based complaints filed under the Child Victims Act in Central New York’s Onondaga County. Of the 163 total number of cases that had moved forward there by February 2026, 74 percent remained outstanding.
In 1965, at the time of this Our Lady of Mount Carmel School class photo, Rudy Tremaroli was running a community center that served both the church and the Bronx Catholic school. By the mid-1970s, he had been moved exclusively to the school, according to court documents. Facebook
Serial predators and serially abusive schools
Of the school-based abuse cases, 1,003 involve public schools, 179 nonsectarian private schools and 791 religious institutions. The last category is dominated by Catholic schools, which account for 724 of those complaints. Twenty-three accuse Protestant schools and 44 name Jewish schools.
One man alone figures in at least 64 of the Catholic school cases, all of them filed against Our Lady of Mount Carmel School in the Bronx. Rudy Tremaroli first ran a church- and school-affiliated community center in the 1960s and then moved over to Mount Carmel school where he was given a private office and worked as a janitor and basketball coach.
Tremaroli is accused of abusing hundreds of children over three decades. Several of the CVA complaints describe him as “one of the most prolific pedophiles in the history of the Archdiocese of New York.”
Other court documents recount: “In the middle to late 1980s, in an effort to convince a victim that his repeated sexual assaults were appropriate, Tremaroli bragged that he had seen the penises of most of the male students at Our Lady of Mount Carmel School for the past thirty (30) years.”
“In the middle to late 1980s, in an effort to convince a victim that his repeated sexual assaults were appropriate, Tremaroli bragged that he had seen the penises of most of the male students at Our Lady of Mount Carmel School for the past thirty (30) years.”
In his various roles, he would allegedly befriend and groom students who were using the gym before and after school and on weekends, ask them about their interest in girls, isolate them from their peers and sexually assault and abuse them. The abuse ranged from groping and kissing to forcing children to perform oral sex and sodomizing them with a cigar holder, a sports trophy and a screwdriver handle, according to court records. It took place on school and church grounds, at the community center and at Tremaroli’s home.
He also forced his victims to pose for naked photos, creating a substantial collection of child pornography, which the complaints allege church officials removed from Tremaroli’s apartment after his death. He was later accused of distributing the images to Mount Carmel’s principal, James Irwin, who allegedly helped Tremaroli photograph his victims. In the CVA cases, Irwin is accused of sexually assaulting one of his students, a second grader in 1991. He was arrested in a separate sting operation in 2000 in Westchester County and criminally charged with seven felony counts of promoting an obscene sexual performance
by a child. He later pleaded guilty, according to court records.
Court documents allege that both the school and the New York archdiocese were aware of Tremaroli’s ongoing abuse, yet they did nothing to stop it. The complaints say Tremaroli’s “reign of terror” did not end until his death in 1992. Lawyers for Mount Carmel and the archdiocese denied any wrongdoing in their court filings.
The archdiocese declined to comment on the Tremaroli cases for this story. The sprawling entity, which encompasses Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island and seven counties north of New York City, in May offered to pay $800 million to settle claims filed by 1,300 survivors under the Child Victims Act.
Arthur Werner was an innovative teachers, lauded for his creative class projects.
30 former students say he sexually abused them.
5pm @WGRZ #OnlyOn2#2Investigates pic.twitter.com/DQJB53y0nw
(@Steve_Brown_TV) November 29, 2019
Accused serial abusers like Tremaroli can be found across all types of schools in the CVA cases. According to court records, they include:
- Arthur Werner, a fifth-grade teacher in Erie County’s Kenmore-Town of Tonawanda Union Free School District, who was named in 35 Child Victim Acts cases, accusing him of sexually abusing dozens of boys from 1962 until 1992. Werner’s behavior was allegedly so bold that his 11- and 12-year-old victims said they and their classmates had to “regularly and repeatedly” watch as he assaulted boys in the classroom. At least one survivor recounted another teacher walking into the room, seeing him being fondled by Werner and walking out. Without the benefit of insurance money, the district paid $17.5 million to settle the cases in 2022, borrowing $10 million of that sum. It acknowledged that the alleged misconduct by Werner, who died last year at age 91, “is reprehensible — both now and back then.” They said multiple administrators from 30 years ago testified that if they had known about their colleague’s alleged abuse, they would have acted. A district spokesperson told The 74 no witnesses could identify evidence that the district was notified about Werner’s alleged misconduct prior to the CVA lawsuits being filed and it was a “business decision” to settle given the “extreme costs” of facing 35 separate trials. Chris O’Brien, the plaintiffs’ attorney, said a former PTA mom gave a sworn deposition where she recounted telling Werner’s principal around 1973-74 that the teacher had molested her 11-year-old son and being assured by him that it wouldn’t happen again. The principal died in 2015, according to The Buffalo News.
- Vincent Festa a child psychologist at a New Hyde Park middle and high school on Long Island whose sexual behavior toward students was so blatant that both kids and teachers openly referred to him as “Festa the Molester.” More than 20 former male students brought cases naming Festa and the Herricks Union Free School District and multiple complaints assert that in 1978, ’79 and ’81, students and parents separately reported sexual abuse and assault by Festa to school administrators, but nothing was done. Festa remained in his job for a dozen years,
allegedly abusing multiple students, until his 1993 arrest and indictment in
separate case involving 11 child sex-abuse charges. Festa, who died in 2011, pleaded guilty to three counts of sodomy. The district, which denied any wrongdoing in court filings, declined to comment on the Child Victims Act allegations. - Thomas Bernagozzi, a third-grade teacher, was the subject of 44 complaints filed against him in Islip’s Bay Shore Union Free School District. Bernagozzi is accused of abusing male students in the classroom and when he would take them on outings to baseball games, local beaches and Broadway shows. In February, he was convicted in a separate criminal case of sexually assaulting three former students, with the Suffolk County district attorney describing him as “one of the most prolific serial pedophiles of our time.” In May, the 77-year-old Bernagozzi was sentenced to 33 ⅓ to 50 years in prison. As of January 2025, the Bay Shore district had paid out just over $55 million to settle 17 of the CVA cases naming the former longtime teacher. It has since settled an additional 24 cases for an undisclosed amount, according to the plaintiffs’ attorneys. A case that went to trial resulted in a $25 million verdict against the district in November 2024. In March 2025, a judge threw out that award; his ruling is currently being appealed.
Former Bay Shore elementary school teacher Thomas Bernagozzi (right) with his attorney Steve Politi, in Suffolk County Court on Jan. 20, 2026. James Carbone/Newsday RM/Getty
Bernagozzi is one of a number of predatory teachers accused of leveraging his charisma and connections to garner a reputation among families as “the teacher to get,” as one victim, L.J., recently described him to The 74.
L.J., who had Bernagozzi as a teacher in the mid-1980s, requested to be identified only by his initials, saying his children don’t know what happened to him as a boy. L.J. recalled his initial excitement to learn he’d be in Bernagozzi’s third-grade class and “very quickly (being) made the teacher’s pet.” His seat was at the front of the room—directly in front of Bernagozzi, sometimes even sitting on his lap—and he gained special privileges not bestowed on other students.
Swiftly smaller boundary crossings escalated into full-blown sexual abuse, he said, both in the school building and on outings Bernagozzi would plan for L.J. and other boys. He would also put on plays that required the boys in his class to wear tights, and “during lunch break or after school he would put the tights on you,” L.J. said. “He kept baby powder with him. So he powdered you up, skin-to-skin, and let his fingers go wherever.”
“I swear to God, I still am getting chills right now, that there were multiple victims after me — after they knew. And then I found out that other people before me had told them, and some teachers or (the) principal had said something. And that, to me, is evil.”
After one particularly traumatizing encounter, L.J. said he reported the abuse to his mom, who promptly went to the school to confront both the principal and Bernagozzi. L.J.’s mom gave a sworn deposition and also testified about those conversations with Bernagozzi and
the principal, who is now deceased, at a 2024 civil trial brought by another Child Victims Act plaintiff against Bay Shore schools.
After his mother took action, L.J. said the physical abuse stopped immediately, but
Bernagozzi was not fired and he had to remain in the man’s class for the rest of the year. The report also came at a cost: He said Bernagozzi cornered him in a hallway, grabbed him and “put the fear of God into me,” asking, “What did you say? Who did you tell?” His doting affection disappeared.
“I was no longer the fair child I was earlier. I was moved away from his desk. No attention,” he said. “It went from having access to a candy drawer and marking your own papers to being completely ignored and isolated.”
L.J.’s reaction to this shift as a small boy has led to lasting shame and confusion: “I almost craved his attention—all the attention, whether it be the abuse and everything else—when he shunned me. I would try to rub his back and all this stuff. That fucked me up for a while, just in my own head,” said the now-lawyer, who recalls decades spent self-sabotaging and questioning his worth.
L.J. at a park on Long Island on July 15, 2026, not far from where he said he was sexually abused by his third-grade teacher, Thomas Bernagozzi, in the 1980s. He told The 74 Bernagozzi also abused his older brother.Eamonn Fitzmaurice/The 74
Today, he describes his school’s action as “the exact playbook of what not to do,” saying it facilitated and enabled not only his abuse, but that of dozens of other boys.
“I swear to God, I still am getting chills right now, that there were multiple victims after me—after they knew,” he said. “And then I found out that other people before me had told them, and some teachers or (the) principal had said something. And that, to me, is evil.”
Neither the Bay Shore school district nor its attorney responded to requests for comment.
Bernagozzi’s criminal attorney, Steve Politi, told The 74 that his client “vehemently denies ever doing anything sexually inappropriate to anyone ever. So that covers anyone who is saying anything from any time period…That includes males, females, adults, children, everyone. He’s never done that in his whole life.”
When asked about Bernagozzi’s recent conviction on five charges, including sodomy and sexual conduct against a child, Politi said “an appeal will be starting immediately,” because the trial was “unfair.” He said his client was deprived of his right to a fair trial, including “a distortion of the evidence and horrific rulings by the court.”
The Child Victims Act cases reveal instances where a single individual, like Bernagozzi, is at the center of the alleged sexual abuse for many years and others where the alleged abusers change over time, but the school remains the constant factor across decades.
The sign outside the 172-year-old LaSalle School in Albany.Lasalle School/Courtesy The 74
This is especially true of residential schools where the abuse seems endemic to the institutions where it allegedly occurred. The 74 found over 200 CVA cases filed against residential treatment centers and facilities. These plaintiffs, sent there as children by social services, Family Court or their home districts to live and attend school, were highly vulnerable. Many were already traumatized, dealing with various disabilities or mental illnesses, while the adults who worked there had full control over their young lives.
These cases include:
- McQuade Children’s Services, founded in 1862 as a boarding school for troubled children, operated a therapeutic residence and a special education school on its New Windsor campus until it was shut down by the state Education Department in 2009. The state found an ongoing host of safety and educational violations that it deemed “clear and present dangers.” In 2007, the institution came under fire when two female staffers were arrested on charges of raping two 16-year-old male students. One of the women pleaded guilty to statutory rape and was sentenced to three months in jail, while the other was convicted of endangering the welfare of a child and sentenced to a year in jail. While the CVA complaints maintain such alleged acts were part of a decades-long pattern, McQuade’s then-CEO told a local newspaper he thought it was the first incident of its kind in the school’s 145-year history. McQuade has since been named in at least 11 Child Victims Act cases with allegations of sexual abuse involving multiple staffers spanning from the 1960s to the 1990s.
- The LaSalle School, founded in 1854 by the De La Salle Christian Brothers as a place for “orphaned and abandoned boys,” is named in at least 34 complaints that spanned from 1950 to 2010. The victims, who ranged in age from 8 to 18, were sent to the Albany therapeutic residence and school by the courts as an alternative to juvenile detention or by social service agencies. Their alleged abusers were both male and female and comprised religious and lay staff members, including priests, brothers, counselors, teachers, adult head dorm prefects, a teacher’s aide and a coach. One became a trustee of the school and another was honored with a memorial service at LaSalle after his death in 2007. The school bills itself as offering “specialized treatment” for families and youth dealing with trauma, including sexual abuse.
- The Children’s Village, located on 180 acres in Westchester County, was founded in 1851 as the New York Juvenile Asylum to provide residential care to orphans and “delinquents.” It moved to a farm in Dobbs Ferry in 1901 where a state special act public school district was created to educate its at-risk, all-male population. Children’s Village is named in at least 52 CVA complaints, spanning from 1965 to 2009. The cases allege ingrained patterns of sexual assault and rape, where younger, weaker boys were preyed upon both by older students and adult staff in a ritual called “plucking.” Many of the complaints attest that the victims told adult employees — counselors and teachers, among others — about the attacks, but that nothing was done. In at least one instance, a victim says he sought protection from an adult, who then started sexually abusing him as well. One lawyer whose client arrived at Children’s Village in 1987 at age 6 describes the abuse he allegedly suffered there as occurring at “a stunning scale over a period that amounted to pure torture.”
Neither Children’s Village nor its attorney nor the lawyer representing McQuade Children’s Services responded to requests for comment. St. Christopher’s, Inc., which also operated a residential treatment center and school in Westchester, took over McQuade and then filed for bankruptcy in 2024 in the face of multiple Child Victims Act cases. Children’s Village, which contracts with the Office of Refugee Resettlement to house and care for unaccompanied minors, is also now under federal investigation for alleged mistreatment and physical abuse of these young people.
A LaSalle spokesperson pushed back against any assertion that students placed in its residential school were particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse, saying throughout its 172-year history LaSalle “has not wavered from its core values and role as a refuge for troubled youth. It has offered care and support to tens of thousands of young people. It is well-known and respected in both local and national circles for its program and treatment of youth suffering from childhood trauma.”
Throughout its 172-year history LaSalle “has not wavered from its core values and role as a refuge for troubled youth. It has offered care and support to tens of thousands of young people. It is well-known and respected in both local and national circles for its program and treatment of youth suffering from childhood trauma.”
He said the school did not become aware of any sexual assault allegations against its employees—including the staffer who went on to become a trustee or the one who had their memorial service at the school—until the CVA cases were filed many years later.
Amos Guiora is a law professor at the University of Utah and director of the Bystander Initiative, which works to criminalize bystanders and enablers of abuse. He argues that in not directly responding to these alleged violations, schools and their employees actively empower those who do harm.
“If we don’t address the ecosystem of enabling, not a damn thing will change,” he said. “The teachers know they can get away with it, because they know the school’s prioritization is not the child, but the school. The perpetrator is the indirect beneficiary.”
Hamilton, of UPenn and Child USA, sees far-reaching reverberations when institutions place the adult first.
“When someone is identified, you’re potentially protecting 100 children,” she said. “So it’s not just this one important adult, it’s all the children—in the past, present and future.”
Bob Druger, left, around the time he was a senior at Nottingham High School in Syracuse and began working with former Olympian Conrad Mainwaring, right. Mainwaring’s role as coach and counselor soon turned into sexual predator, Druger told The 74.Courtesy The 74
‘Grooming is a process, not an act’
In the fall of 1980, a Syracuse University graduate student named Conrad Mainwaring started coaching and counseling students at the local high school, a quick seven-minute drive from campus, according to court records.
There, Mainwaring, a former Olympic track athlete for Antigua and Barbuda, began working with a 17-year-old Nottingham High School senior: Bob Druger, the plaintiff who has spent the last seven years awaiting a resolution to his Child Victims Act case.
As a swimmer and cross country runner, Druger, now 63, remembers his early excitement to work with Mainwaring, who he described as “very well-spoken and fast talking,” with an English accent. Druger was impressed by his Olympic career and purported connections to other acclaimed athletes. If you wanted to be a star, Mainwaring told students, you had to work with him.
Mainwairing quickly “infiltrated” Druger’s friend group and life, he said, giving him books to read, telling him he was “number one in his squad, you’re above, you’re different from other people,” and even attending family dinners at his house, including with his father, who taught biology at Syracuse for 50 years.
“Looking back at the amount of energy and time he put into me—I don’t know how he could do anything else,” Druger said, recognizing the groundwork that was being laid for his abuse.
Quickly, the interactions turned sexual—both in the counselor’s office at the high school and back at Mainwaring’s Syracuse dorm room. The 29-year-old would tell Druger it was all part of his training to build mental fortitude and ultimately help him succeed as an athlete.
“It was more like emotional, mental, spiritual abuse than anything else. He just kind of put a spell on you, and made you believe.”
Sometimes, the abuse would occur “in the middle of the school day in the office, giving me a blow job and hypnotizing you to make you think it’s OK,” said Druger. “Masturbating you or whatever.”
Druger describes the sexual assaults as “almost mechanical.” While Mainwaring was abusing Druger, he’d talk to him, telling him the acts would “push you to uncomfortable situations and the more you can tolerate it mentally, you can use that for your…sport,” he said.
The manipulation was so powerful that for years, Druger said he didn’t realize that what happened to him was abuse. Until recently, when he connected with other survivors and identified his experience as assault, he hadn’t told a soul about it—not even his wife. Coming to terms with the reality, he said, has meant his “whole world is sort of rocked apart.”
And even now, the physical element feels like “a tiny part of it.”
“It was more like emotional, mental, spiritual abuse than anything else,” he said, adding, “He just kind of put a spell on you, and made you believe.”
Druger describes his response as “hard to understand, unless you’re in it,” yet his story shares a trait seen throughout the roughly 2,000 accounts reviewed by The 74: a potent grooming process.
Authors of one 2025 study found that grooming behaviors were present in 100 percent of the 24 school-based abuse cases they examined.
Based on court documents and interviews with dozens of experts, it is more common than not for survivors to take years—even decades—not just to report abuse, but also to recognize it as such, at least in part because of that calculated and predatory process.
While there is no universally accepted legal definition of grooming—and federal law doesn’t designate it as a distinct crime at all—20 states have moved to pass laws specifically defining it as the process of manipulating a child in order to gain their trust and sexually abuse them. It is criminalized as a felony in 18 of those states, including Wyoming and Missouri, which passed legislation in March 2026, according to Enough Abuse.
New York is not one of them, and doesn’t currently criminalize or define grooming children, though there are a patchwork of laws that criminalize elements of it, like enticing a child under 17 into a secluded area or car for sexual purposes.
“What I see anecdotally with my education cases is a lot of grooming. A lot of stuff that’s hard for me to prove,” said attorney Kat Thomas, who represents Druger and other survivors. The Child Victims Act didn’t close any of New York’s grooming law loopholes, Thomas said.
Even in states where legislation does exist, it can be challenging to recognize and prosecute it on the ground.
“Grooming is a process, not an act, and it involves behaviors that looked at individually—like gift-giving, emotional dependency —… [are] ambiguous,” said Jessica Schidlow, senior policy analyst and legislative counsel at Enough Abuse.
These behaviors only become legible as grooming once they are looked at in retrospect or as a pattern, she said. And legislation that requires proof of sexual intent, “misses the window where intervention could actually prevent abuse. So it’s really that fine line in the middle that is very difficult to get at,” she added.
Even four decades later, it’s hard for Druger to parse through exactly what impact
Mainwaring had on his life.
“I always thought I did better because of Conrad” he said, because through his grooming process, Druger got more invested in school.
Now an acclaimed eye surgeon in Syracuse, Druger has degrees in biology, psychology and chemical engineering from Syracuse, as well as an MD and a Ph.D. in molecular biology and biochemistry. He also owns a martial arts gym and “work(s) out like mad.”
“I just have a million things that I’m doing, and so you sort of say, ‘Well, that’s successful.’ But, you know, maybe I’m doing that, ” he paused, his voice breaking, as he began to cry. “Sorry. It’s hard to talk about all of this,” he added, pausing again. “Maybe I’m doing that to block out the other shit.”
“Especially this thing,” he said. “It’s just too overwhelming.”
Faith Colson, left, around the time she said she was being sexually abused by her high school physics teacher in Illinois and today when she has become an advocate for survivors of school-based abuse. Courtesy Faith Colson
Crossing boundaries
The grooming process frequently begins with seemingly innocuous conversations or texting that can eventually escalate into physical abuse, said Charol Shakeshaft, distinguished professor emerita at Virginia Commonwealth University and a leading researcher on childhood sexual abuse. Her early work for the U.S. Department of Education includes the widely cited 1-in-10 students statistic on the incidence of K-12 sexual misconduct.
To stop the practice in schools, it’ll take a combination of thoughtful laws and mandatory institutional policies that define grooming behaviors and require training and reporting, she said.
“I’m not saying that it’s the fault of the school that people cross boundaries and sexually abuse kids, but … by not doing the supervision, the training, we provide an environment in which abuse can occur.”
Without those, it’s easy for other adults in the building to dismiss behaviors they might flag as questionable, but not necessarily identifiable as abuse—a practice numerous advocates, survivors and experts reported as common.
Shakeshaft, who authored Organizational Betrayal: How Schools Enable Employee Sexual Misconduct and How to Stop It, said adults in schools will cross a boundary and, if they’re not called on it, they’ll normalize their behavior and then cross another boundary and another until they “end up in a physical, sexual relationship with the students.”
“I’m not saying that it’s the fault of the school that people cross boundaries and sexually abuse kids, but what I am saying is that by not doing the supervision, the training, we provide an environment in which abuse can occur,” she added.
This common practice of “turning a blind eye” to childhood sexual abuse comes from a number of places, experts told The 74. In some cases, it emanates from a misconception about who typically abuses kids: so many have been taught to fear “stranger danger,” that they’re “not going to ever question the teacher in the next classroom,” said Faith Colson, a survivor advocate who made a delayed report to police seven years ago about the abuse she experienced as an Illinois high school student in the early 2000s.
In others, teachers are fearful that a report could ruin their colleagues’ future and they don’t feel they have sufficient evidence to risk that. And even when complaints of inappropriate behavior are escalated, schools often choose to handle them internally because they don’t “want the scandal,” said attorney Jeff Herman, whose firm Herman Law has handled some 2,000 Child Victims Act cases.
“I don’t think that the people in my school acted with malice. I don’t think there was a cover-up,” said Colson. “I don’t think they wanted me to be abused or (were) actively trying to help him abuse me, but by ignoring those inappropriate behaviors…by doing nothing, they were communicating to him they would do nothing. And so that emboldened (him).”
In other cases, however, it appeared the accused teachers acted with complete license, flaunting their sexual abuse of students. One particularly egregious complaint, alleges that three teachers across a middle and high school in Central New York ‘s Oswego County, separately and together, sexually assaulted four girls, ages 12 to 15, between 1967 and 1974.
On some occasions, one of the accused teachers, James Middaugh, would allegedly assault two of the girls at once, forcing them to both perform oral sex on him then vaginally rape one in the other’s presence. In two separate incidents, Middaugh and another of the teachers, Jerry Frare, are accused of abusing two of the victims simultaneously in the back of Middaugh’s car.
Marsh, whose firm represented the women, called it “one of the most shocking cases I think I’ve ever seen.”
Middaugh, Frare and the third accused teacher, Ronald Smith, behaved so carelessly and flagrantly, according to the complaint, that the sexual abuse was essentially an open secret in the Phoenix Central School District. At one point, another teacher approached one of the girls and allegedly said, “Ron Smith said you weren’t a virgin.”
Middaugh also once publicly confronted one of the girls “in a jealous rage” about “another boy,” according to the court documents, screaming that she was a “fucking slut” and a “goddamn whore.” The complaint says this was observed by another teacher and that other district employees and volunteers knew Middaugh and Frare were meeting the underage girls at a local bar “to fraternize outside of school.”
During a long phone interview in June, Frare forcefully denied all the allegations against him, saying, “There is not a single thing in that whole report that’s true about me. Every single sentence that my name is in, is untrue.” The first time he read the complaint back in 2020, he said, “My lungs collapsed. I lost my breath.”
He confirmed having taught one of the plaintiffs, Janet Russo, and remembered her as a good student, but denied ever having any inappropriate contact with her. “I have no idea,” where the allegations came from, he added.
Frare acknowledged having been close friends with Middaugh—he recalled them going bowling together on snow days and the older teacher being in Frare’s 1983 wedding party—but said charges that the two simultaneously sexually assaulted students in Middaugh’s car were “ridiculously untrue.” He said Middaugh drove a “little sports car” back then, a two-seater. He laughed and said “untrue” about the assertion that he and Middaugh would socialize with their female students at a local bar.
Frare, who taught with Middaugh at Dillon Middle School, said he never saw or had any knowledge of him engaging in inappropriate relationships with students, describing him as a “very well-respected” and “charismatic” teacher. He said he did not remember Smith, a music teacher and the band director, at all. The complaint alleges that in 1974, when she was 13, both Smith and Frare sexually abused Janet Russo.
Middaugh, who died in 2018, taught in the Phoenix schools for 13 years. Public records obtained by The 74 show he lost his license in January 1994 on “moral character” grounds after the New York state Education Department learned that during his time there he “provided two 8th grade students with cigarettes and alcohol and had sexual contact with said students which included sexual intercourse and oral sex.”
That same month, Smith’s license was revoked on the same grounds after the department found that during his 1976-77 school year at Phoenix “he engaged in a sexual relationship with a tenth grade student, which included several instances of sexual intercourse and oral sex which occurred on school grounds. Some two years later similar allegations were made by several additional complainants which resulted in Ronald L. Smith’s resignation from the district effective April 23, 1979.” Smith died in 2025.
Frare, now in his mid-70s and retired after a 30-year teaching career in another district, did not go through the same process, although public records show he voluntarily surrendered his license in February 2025, not long before the Phoenix CVA cases were apparently settled.
In a September phone call, Frare said he agreed to relinquish his license based on “bad advice” from an education lawyer. Again denying the abuse allegations, he said he made the choice thinking it would allow him to avoid a legal fight, that it “wouldn’t come to light” and would have no real impact on his life since he stepped away from the classroom years ago.
“I think back now, and I certainly made a mistake in doing that,” he said. “I should have just stood my ground—like I will have to do now—and make sure that the truth comes out.”
“I think back now, and I certainly made a mistake in doing that,” he said. “I should have just stood my ground—like I will have to do now—and make sure that the truth comes out.”
Attorneys with Marsh Law Firm would not discuss the cases’ disposition.
Christopher Byrne, then-interim superintendent of Phoenix Central School District, said in May that while they take all allegations “very seriously,” the district was not able to comment on specific legal cases. “Over the years,” he added, “school policies, reporting requirements, employee training, and student protections have evolved significantly, and the district continues to follow all state-mandated child protection and reporting protocols.”
The state Education Department findings on Middaugh and Smith suggest that others in the small, rural district with fewer than 2,000 students may well have been aware of the alleged abuse. Colson, the Illinois survivor, wants educators to understand the need to act in those circumstances.
“You have to say something, because you may be the only person that sees it and doing nothing keeps the child trapped,” she said. “They cannot save themselves.”
This is particularly true because perpetrators often target the most vulnerable students with the fewest resources, according to a number of attorneys who represent survivors.
“Young people who are already fighting to just make their way in the world and get a leg up are the ones who often are subjected to the worst, tragic abuses.”
This includes, “kids who are poorer, who are on scholarships, who are the youngest in their class, who don’t live in the same part of town, whose home lives aren’t stable, etc.,” Daniel Mullkoff, a partner at Wang Hecker, wrote in an email to The 74. “Young people who are already fighting to just make their way in the world and get a leg up are the ones who often are subjected to the worst, tragic abuses.”
Evading punishment, time after timeAfter graduating from Nottingham High, Druger enrolled as a freshman at Syracuse University, where Mainwaring’s abuse continued for at least another three years, he said. It didn’t stop until the coach left Syracuse in 1985 to work in admissions at Colgate University, about 40 miles away.
What Druger didn’t know at the time was that his schools weren’t the first places
Mainwaring reportedly had gone to abuse boys. Nor would they be close to the last.
A 2019 ESPN investigation uncovered 52 survivors of Mainwaring’s abuse across two continents, four states and dozens of years—though Druger said he’s since connected with scores more.
“Every place he went, he was found out, kicked out and he would set up shop (at) the next place,” said Druger.
In this way, Druger’s story embodies another commonality of countless cases of educator sexual abuse: a practice colloquially known as “passing the trash,” in which the accused adult is allowed to quietly resign or retire before moving onto another school. According to one widely cited estimate, perpetrators on average move to three different school districts before they are stopped.
The 74 discovered dozens of such cases. According to court records, they include:
- Michael Carletta, a band teacher at Stokes Elementary School in Rome, New York, was offered “retirement with no criminal charges filed against him,” after an 11-year-old student reported that he sexually abused her in 1989-90, according to court records. A separate filing alleged that Carletta similarly abused other elementary school students while teaching at another school within the same district 15 years before. While Carletta was able to move onto yet another school — this time a pre-K — without ever facing accountability, the student was punished and “forced to be in a separate self-contained class room,” according to the complaint. When reached by phone in June, Carletta sounded confused at times, saying “it’s a little hard to remember” events from three decades ago. But he adamantly denied all allegations, saying they were “completely untrue. I have never sexually abused any student.” He also asserted his belief “that entire situation” is “dead and buried by now.” In an affidavit, a school counselor said she interviewed the plaintiff at the time she first came forward about the alleged abuse by Carletta and then, at the district’s request, five other female students who described the same “inappropriate sexual ‘TOUCHING’ and ‘RUBBING’“ by the band teacher. She said she took copious notes, which she was directed to hand over to the assistant superintendent. She never saw the notes or the students again, she stated, adding, “To my knowledge, no action was taken against Mr. Carletta nor to protect female students from what he was doing to them.” The case was settled in 2021.
- Three former students alleged they were abused repeatedly in the late 1970s and early ’80s by Donald Wales, who was hired to teach in their elementary school less than a year after being criminally charged and sentenced for sodomizing a student at his previous New York school. When he applied to Tri-Valley Central School District in rural Sullivan County in 1972, Wales was still on criminal probation, according to the complaint, and he asked in writing that the district not contact his employer — a home builder where he took a job after being forced to leave teaching and where his boss was aware of his arrest record. Tri-Valley apparently honored that request and also did not attempt to contact his former district. Wales was arrested again in 1984, this time at school, and charged with sexually abusing male students. As part of a plea deal where he served one year in jail, Wales provided the district attorney with a list of more than 25 boys he admitted to sexually abusing over his years at Tri-Valley Elementary School, including the three CVA plaintiffs. The district prevailed in the case, both in the lower court and on appeal. The appellate court ruled Tri-Valley didn’t have an obligation to further investigate Wales’s background when they first hired him because his teaching license was valid and he provided letters of recommendation from his old district. It also found there was not enough evidence to show the district could have foreseen that Wales was a sexual threat to children, notwithstanding community speculation about why he spent so much time alone with young boys outside of school, taking them fishing and having them come to his house. The district did not respond to requests for comment. When reached in July at his Florida home and asked about his child sex abuse convictions and his teaching career, Wales responded, “That’s very nice, but I’m 91 years old and I’m not interested.”
- Dutkowski, the coach and gym teacher from Our Lady of Lourdes High School, was hired there despite having been charged and convicted of molesting two students at a Wayne, New Jersey, public school three years before, according to court records. He eventually went to prison for “predatory conduct” while teaching in South Carolina — decades after allegedly abusing the former player who he benched and other students at Our Lady of Lourdes and Seton Catholic High School in New York in the 1960s and ’70s.
A case involving New York City’s prestigious Dalton School shows not only how an accused abuser can escape accountability, but continue to prosper. A former student at the Manhattan private school alleged that in 1986, when she was 14 years old, she was offered free tuition and housing at the home of the headmaster, Gardner Dunnan. As part of the arrangement, she was supposed to act as the family’s helper.
The girl’s childhood had been difficult, so when this opportunity arose, her family leapt at what seemed like an unrivaled chance to “fundamentally…improve (their daughter’s) prospects in life,” according to court records.
In the fall of her freshman year, without any formal application process, the Brooklyn teen enrolled at Dalton and moved in with the approximately 45-year-old headmaster and his family. At first she was grateful for this setup, which provided “the first real stability she experienced in her childhood,” according to records. But this false sense of safety was quickly shattered when Dunnan began sexually assaulting her in September 1986, according to the complaint.
Dunnan sexually abused her on four separate occasions between September and January of the following year, in his apartment and at the family’s second home in New Jersey, the complaint says. The first time it happened, the girl alleged she was walking from the bathroom back to her room in a towel, just after showering. The headmaster was lying on the couch in the living room and called her over. He pulled her on top of him, removed her towel and began to grope her and “rub her naked body.”
The plaintiff alleges that while at the family’s N.J. beach house she fell asleep late one night on the couch, only to be awakened by Dunnan, lying on top of her and “fondling her breasts.” J. S. v. Dalton Schools, Inc. et al
The night Dunnan assaulted her for the final time, he allegedly entered the girl’s darkened bedroom in the Manhattan apartment, climbed on top of her and thrust his genitals against hers through their clothes. It was then that his wife walked past the room. Moments later, the complaint states, Dunnan ran out and the girl heard shouting. Later that night, his wife kicked her out.
The girl moved back in with her father—nearly two hours away from Dalton—and after her academics took a hit that spring, transferred to a different high school. In the decades since, she has “suffered intense emotional harm,” according to court records, believing the assaults were her own fault and keeping the abuse a secret.
A decade later, in 1997, Dunnan was forced to resign from Dalton after he had an affair with a married teacher whom he supervised. The board cited “concerns about…his personal life,” in pushing him out. The headmaster, meanwhile, chalked up the professional violation to his “emotional and personal needs.”
Despite the circumstances of his exit, the president of the board of trustees praised Dunnan for his work, and he was immediately hired as an adviser to the provost of Columbia University, who was then a Dalton board member. He went on to run The School at Columbia University, a private K-8 school created by the university, according to his LinkedIn. As recently as 2017, Dunnan was working as the academic dean at another New York City private school, Avenues, followed by a one-year stint as a senior advisor at Success Academy Charter Schools. He lists himself as still working as a college admissions consultant.
“I’m particularly proud of the fact that almost all of the students I have worked with have found a school that is a perfect fit for them,” he boasts on his profile.
Dunnan, who “adamantly” denied the allegations in court filings, did not respond to requests for comment. The plaintiff settled her case sometime around 2021 for an undisclosed amount.
Gardner Dunnan in the 1981 Dalton School yearbook.Courtesy The 74
A Dalton spokesperson said in a written statement that he was limited in what he could share about specific allegations because of the litigation and out of respect for student privacy. He went on to describe the safeguards now in place.
“Dalton has clear policies and boundary guidelines for appropriate interactions with students, which are published annually in the employee handbook. In addition, we conduct pre-employment screening and ongoing training of all employees,” he said. “Currently, at the time of hire, all employees are fingerprinted, and we conduct a background check. Every two years all employees complete a mandated reporter training, and annually they attend boundaries and sexual harassment prevention trainings.”
Many of the incidents of alleged abuse in the CVA complaints occurred before New York state made criminal background checks mandatory for public educators in 2000, but numerous experts and advocates say background checks alone do not go far enough. Since many allegations are handled internally or are never prosecuted, they leave no criminal paper trail.
A 2010 US Government Accountability Office report found four key factors that lead to “passing the trash,” including performing inadequate background checks and failing to follow up or inquire about “troubling information regarding criminal histories” on job applications.
The 2015 Every Students Succeeds Act was meant to help combat this practice by including a directive that any K-12 institution receiving federal funding needed to institute safeguarding policies, yet most states have yet to respond, according to research conducted by Enough Abuse.
Only 18 states have passed legislation to strengthen hiring practices and screen out educators who might be sexual safety risks or to make sure current employees engaged in misconduct are disciplined appropriately. Of those, only 13 states require school administrators to contact former employers to ask about a candidate’s history.
New York is not one of them. To this day, the state has no law beyond traditional
fingerprinting, and private school employees are not always included in that mandate.
Druger, the former Syracuse student, holds his high school’s hiring practices “blatantly responsible for a lot of what happened. It was their job to protect me and they didn’t…If anyone had done even a half-ass job, I would never have met Conrad, and I wouldn’t be involved in any of this.”
The Syracuse City School District did not respond to requests for comment. At the time of the 2019 ESPN investigation, school officials said they found no record of Mainwaring ever having been a staff member or a sanctioned volunteer in the district. Syracuse University told The 74 it could not comment because of the ongoing litigation.
After decades of being passed from school to school and state to state, Mainwaring was eventually sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2024 for abusing young boys decades before at a Massachusetts summer camp. Even then, the criminal conviction was only possible because of a stipulation that stops the clock on the commonwealth’s statute of limitations if the perpetrator leaves the state.
Survivors of child sexual abuse were in attendance when Gov Andrew Cuomo signed the Child Victims Act into law on Feb. 14, 2019, in the newsroom of the New York Daily News. New York Governor’s Office
New York is a legal outlier
While advances in code of conduct policies, criminal background checks and mandated reporting laws have helped to protect some students over the past three decades, The 74’s reporting found that significant loopholes still remain—especially in New York.
In October 2025, Enough Abuse and Prevent Child Abuse America did a state-by-state comparison of five recommended types of child abuse laws. New York had passed only three: mandating child sexual abuse education in schools; establishing a child sexual abuse task force and requiring student safety poster laws. Missing was employing standard screening tools, beyond a criminal background check, to prevent schools from hiring abusers.
The state is also a significant outlier in that it doesn’t specifically criminalize educator sexual misconduct. This means that once a student turns 17, the age of consent in New York, it is no longer illegal for their teachers to engage in a sexual relationship with them. This leaves older students, who can remain enrolled in public school up until they’re 21, unprotected. Many of these students tend to be those with disabilities, leaving young people already at a heightened risk with the fewest protections against abuse, said Terri Miller, president of the advocacy organization S.E.S.A.M.E.
“You have some really murky law and litigating it can get complicated.”
It also puts the Child Victims Act, which seemingly protects all children until they’re 18, at odds with the age of consent, meaning, “You have some really murky law and litigating it can get complicated,” according to Helene Weiss, a partner at Marsh Law Firm who represents survivors.
In comparison, 39 states and Washington, DC, have adopted statutes that specifically criminalize the sexual abuse of children by anyone working in or associated with schools and by people in positions of authority over a student, many beyond the age of consent, according to Enough Abuse. In Massachusetts, where the age of consent is 16, the governor signed similar legislation into law in July.
While New York has no such prohibitions on educators, the state does criminalize sexual relationships in so-called vulnerable “treatment-provider” contexts, like doctors and patients.
“A patient, by law, is incapable of consent…but that doesn’t exist with teachers (and students)?” said an incredulous Thomas, Druger’s attorney. “Like what? How the hell? If anything, it’s even worse.”
The state also does not collect or publish data on the prevalence of child sexual abuse. And once abuse has been found, educator disciplinary records are particularly challenging to access in New York, unlike in 12 other states where that information is easily found online.
“While you can get the disciplinary records of (NY) podiatrists, hairdressers, lawyers, doctors, you cannot get the disciplinary records of teachers online,” said Marsh. “There’s no place to even look for them … regarding the professionals that have the most contact with children.”
Further obscuring access to information about many of these cases are the nondisclosure clauses written into some settlement agreements, according to numerous attorneys and survivors who spoke with The 74 about this issue.
“Confidential settlements are not out of the ordinary, but ones that limit survivors from speaking about their experiences, even with family members, can have a chilling effect,” said Weiss. “They can discourage other survivors from coming forward, shield institutions from accountability and prevent communities from understanding whether misconduct is isolated or systemic.”
While some attorneys argued that NDAs can help to protect survivors, most interviewed by The 74 pointed to them as yet another tool for silencing victims, one that allows abuse to occur behind a veil of secrecy. Private schools almost universally request these confidentiality agreements when settling CVA cases, multiple attorneys said.
“We’re worried about our wallets instead of fixing our culture.”
As these cases have worked their way through the courts, critics have raised concerns about how expensive settlements are for public school districts, sometimes jeopardizing funding for today’s students in order to hold accountable teachers from decades ago.
As of October 2024, New York City alone paid over $160 million to settle more than 150 general Child Victims Act cases—most of them filed against its Department of Education, according to an investigation by the news organization City & State. They found that in some cases, the educators named in suits were still employed and teaching, even as the city paid to settle abuse claims.
Some schools are insured for these types of incidents, but a number of insurance
companies have refused to make payments, citing the school’s negligence or the age of the cases—a practice advocates and legal experts have criticized.
In November, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a bill that allows school districts to issue bonds for up to 30 years—instead of 15—to pay for CVA claims, in an attempt to give schools greater flexibility and financial stability.
Advocate Michelle Denault, a survivor of school-based sexual abuse in Illinois, said critiques around the high costs of settlements are disturbing, noting, “It’s one of those things that I really struggle with—that we’re worried about our wallets instead of fixing our culture.”
Witnessing decades of past abuse and a steady drumbeat of ongoing allegations, those close to the issue argue hefty financial consequences may be the only thing capable of forcing change or accountability.
“The reality in this space is that adults prefer and protect adults, and the need of the adult being accused is always so much more important than the need to make sure they don’t do it again,” said Hamilton. “That’s why we have an epidemic of cover-up, not just child sex abuse.”
Marci Hamilton , a University of Pennsylvania professor and founder of Child USA, and former Pennsylvania state Rep. Mark Rozzi (behind Hamilton on her left) at a June 13, 2016, rally in support of creating a lookback window for adult survivors of child sexual abuse. Rozzi has said he was sexually abused by a priest when he was 13. Photo by Susan L. Angstadt MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle/Getty
If you, or someone you know, is an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse, help is available.
- Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network RAINN (RAINN) is the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization and operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline (800.656.HOPE, rainn.org) in partnership with more than 1,000 local sexual assault service providers across the country.
- The Army of Survivors is the only national organization advocating for and supporting child athlete survivors of sexual violence.
- After Silence and After Silence – En Español are designed to help victims become survivors, and communicate in the recovery of sexual violence.
- SNAP – Survivors Network of those Abused By Priests is the oldest, largest and most active support group for women and men wounded by religious and institutional authorities – priests, ministers, bishops, deacons, nuns, coaches, teachers, and others.
- If you’re looking to support a survivor, RAINN has resources to help in that process. 1 in 6 has a page specifically dedicated to family members or friends of male survivors
Credit: Enough Abuse
Disclosure: Amanda Geduld attended Dalton School and graduated in 2011. Her father, Buzzy Geduld, is a former member of Dalton’s board of trustees and led its investment committee. Their involvement with the school came after former headmaster Gardner Dunnan’s tenure.
Whites Only
On May 8, hundreds of civil rights protesters, carrying signs that said, “No Jim Crow Maps” and “Hands Off Our Vote,” descended on Baton Rouge to oppose a plan by Louisiana’s Republican-controlled legislature to dismantle one or both of the state’s majority-Black congressional districts. They packed a Senate hearing, occupied three overflow rooms, and spilled into the Capitol’s halls.
Just 10 days earlier, the Supreme Court had destroyed the Voting Rights Act in its Louisiana v. Callais decision, triggering a mad rush to eliminate majority-Black districts across Southern states. The next day, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, despite 42,000 already-cast ballots, suspended Louisiana’s House primaries to give his party time to push through a new map reducing Black representation in Congress before the 2026 midterms.
Democratic Rep. Cleo Fields was on the front lines of this fight. It was his district, stretching 200 miles from Baton Rouge to Shreveport, that Callais had set the stage for invalidating, with Justice Samuel Alito calling it “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”
The Supreme Court’s decision decimating Section 2 of the VRA—which had required that racial minorities have an equal opportunity to meaningfully participate in elections—threatens to return the country to a pre-1965 America, when white supremacy was the law of the land and Congress contained no Black members from the South. “This has sent us back, in my view, over 60 years,” Fields says.
When he appeared before the state Senate that day to testify against the new redistricting plans, he was joined by three other veteran Black politicians. Although Fields, a 63-year-old lawyer, has a reputation as an even-keeled consensus builder, he grew emotional as he spoke.
“To me, it is personal,” he told the Senate committee. “Since Reconstruction, Louisiana has elected four African Americans to Congress. And you’re looking at all of them. Four.” Even though nearly a third of Louisiana’s population is Black.
“You said something very profound,” state Sen. Gary Carter Jr., an African American Democrat from New Orleans, told Fields. “From the 1870s all the way through [the] present, just you four gentlemen—that’s it. And now this body wants to reduce that. ‘We want to cut it. That’s too many.’ How do we not be outraged?”
Before these four men, Louisiana had elected just two Black members of Congress, both during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, America’s fleeting 12-year experiment with multiracial democracy. One, Fields told the senators, was John Willis Menard, who became the first Black person ever elected to Congress in 1868. The other, Charles Edmund Nash, served just one term, beginning in 1875. A vicious white backlash to Reconstruction made it impossible for him to get reelected amid the disputed presidential contest in 1876, which culminated in federal troops withdrawing from the South and the official end of Reconstruction. After Nash, “Louisiana went 114 years without a single African American in Congress,” Fields later explains in an interview.
During Reconstruction, racial equality was written into the Constitution through the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. As a result, from 1865 to 1877, roughly 2,000 Black officeholders were elected. That number dropped to virtually zero once Jim Crow’s racist legal regime took hold just a few years later, as the federal government—led by the Supreme Court—abandoned enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments.
Fields came to the state Capitol to warn that history was repeating itself. As his colleague Rep. Troy Carter—Gary Carter Jr.’s uncle—told the legislature: “The question before us is not merely about lines on a map. The question before us is whether we will honor the principle that every citizen deserves equal protection of the law.”
“The question before us is not merely about lines on a map. The question before us is whether we will honor the principle that every citizen deserves equal protection of the law.”
Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Three weeks later, GOP legislators approved a map designed to oust Fields, changing his district from a solidly Democratic seat whose population was 53 percent Black to an overwhelmingly white one, in which 65 percent of voters cast ballots for Donald Trump in 2024. Immediately after the new map passed, the self-described “non-African American” litigants who brought the Callais case launched a new lawsuit seeking to eliminate Louisiana’s last majority-Black district, represented by Troy Carter, thus leaving the state with no Black representation in Congress.
Amazingly, Fields has fought this battle before. He was first elected to Congress in 1992, but his district was dismantled in 1996 following the Supreme Court ruling in a racial gerrymandering lawsuit filed on behalf of a group of mostly white voters who charged they had been discriminated against. He returned to Congress nearly 30 years later, only to meet the same fate. His political career epitomizes the rise and fall of Black political power in America’s post-civil rights era—a story that darkly echoes the Supreme Court’s shameful elimination of equal rights for Black Americans in the 19th century.
Rep. Cleo Fields after the Supreme Court dismantled his district on behalf of white voters in 1995.Dennis Cox/AP
Fields’ experience in Louisiana last spring was not an anomaly. Other Southern states, including Tennessee and Alabama, also rushed to eliminate majority-Black districts held by Democrats. Thanks to today’s Supreme Court, more than a dozen such seats across the region could be drawn away in time for the 2028 elections, triggering the largest drop in Black congressional representation since the end of Reconstruction.
That’s just the opening act. Up to 140 Black- and Hispanic-majority state legislative districts could also be erased—not to mention seats on city councils, school boards, and some county commissions. Generally, few white voters in the South will cast a ballot for a Black candidate, so losing these districts will effectively wipe out Black power at every level of politics. Black people there will still technically have the right to vote, but no real ability to elect candidates they support and who represent their communities.
Jim Crow lasted for nearly a century. It took the full force of the civil rights movement, from boycotts to marches and laws like the 1965 VRA, to create a Second Reconstruction, meant to redeem the squandered promise of the first. The VRA made America a truly multiracial democracy for the first time in its history. Today, there are more than 10,000 Black elected officials throughout the country, far surpassing the numbers following the Civil War. Yet by destroying the VRA and gutting the 14th and 15th amendments, the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, has essentially ended the Second Reconstruction. Its logic for shredding the country’s most important civil rights law replicates the worst impulses of the Supreme Court in the 19th century. To truly understand the scope and origins of the disaster that the Roberts court has unleashed, you have to return to one of the darkest periods of our history.
Fields grew up with nine brothers and sisters in a rough South Baton Rouge neighborhood known as The Bottom. The family lived in a shotgun house so small that, as he told Baton Rouge’s Advocate, “if you threw a rock in the front door, you’d hit the back door.” Fields was 2 when the VRA passed, and his life is a testament to both how the law revolutionized American democracy and the 60-year conservative counter-revolution determined to roll back its gains.
Fields was 4 when his father, a dock worker, crashed his car after a double shift and died, leaving the family homeless. As soon as he was old enough, Fields worked every possible odd job to help the family survive and made it to Southern University, a local HBCU, where he became student government president. At 24, while still in law school, he passed out material from the trunk of his old Mercury Capri and enlisted his siblings as volunteers, becoming Louisiana’s youngest-ever state senator. He looked so boyish, with large round glasses and a wispy mustache, that another senator asked him to fetch coffee.
“I’m not a page, I’m your colleague,” Fields recalls responding, “but when you see a page, ask him to bring two cups.”
Despite his rapid ascent, the remnants of the past were never far away. During his first state Senate run, he asked his grandmother, who grew up during Jim Crow, to vote for him. She told him she’d been forced to take a literacy test and recite the preamble to the Constitution when she had tried to register to vote and was too scared to try again. His mother had similar fears and had never registered either, even though the VRA had been law for more than 20 years. Eventually, he convinced both to cast ballots for him.
In 1993, when he was 30, Fields became the US House of Representatives’ youngest member. He joined the largest incoming class of Black officeholders in history, elected after Congress strengthened the VRA in the 1980s, leading Southern states to create majority-Black districts.
“When you put a mirror in front of Congress, it should reflect America,” Fields told a group of DC students in 1996. “When that mirror does not reflect the nation, then that means the nation is not fully represented in the most powerful legislative body in the world. So that’s why I feel redistricting is so important. It’s important to give people not a guarantee, but give people the opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice.”
“The issue is whether or not a person like me will have the opportunity to return to Congress and represent the people who have not been represented—the damned, the doomed, the disenfranchised, and the have-nots.”
Yet his promising House career was abruptly cut short. In a federal lawsuit, a few of his constituents successfully claimed it was unconstitutional to consider race in redistricting. His district was redrawn at least three times before, in 1996, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ultimately struck it down through a ruling limiting states’ ability to weigh race when complying with the VRA. It was an early signal of the court’s attack on the Second Reconstruction. “The court took the Voting Rights Act and spun it on its head,” Fields said, as he opted not to run in the reworked district.
Before leaving Congress, Fields attended a town hall held by the Congressional Black Caucus focused on combating threats to civil rights. “The issue is whether or not a person like me will have the opportunity to return to Congress and represent the people who have not been represented,” Fields said, “the damned, the doomed, the disenfranchised, and the have-nots.”
“If there’s any justice, I think he’ll be back, won’t he?” the late Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree asked the crowd.
Ogletree’s prediction took 28 years to come true, and only after civil rights groups successfully petitioned federal courts to create the state’s second majority-Black district in 2024. If Black people constituted one-third of Louisiana’s population, they argued, they should have the ability to elect their preferred candidate in one-third of the seats. “One-third of six is two” became their mantra.
In the meantime, Fields had served twice more in the Louisiana Senate, where, even though he was a Democrat in a legislature dominated by Republicans, he chaired the committee that created the new district under federal court order. Determined to “finish what I started,” in 2024, Fields won what was essentially his old seat.
Once again, his district was immediately challenged, this time by the “non-African American” voters led by Bert Callais, an election denier who attended the “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 Capitol attack. Some of the insurrectionists carried Confederate flags that day—a striking symbol of their mission to overturn not just the 2020 election, but multiracial democracy writ large. Under Chief Justice Roberts, the high court used the Callais plaintiffs to accomplish this goal.
They claimed that the creation of a second majority-Black district was an affront to their “personal dignity”—an absurd argument, Fields says: “Literally, Louisiana elects more white members of Congress in one year than [Black members] we’ve elected in my whole lifetime.”
In a 6–3 decision, the court held that a majority-Black district that gave equal representation to Black people actually violated the rights of white voters under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. In a brazen legal sleight of hand, not only did the court turn the 14th Amendment against Black people, but it used it to nullify Congress’ authority to enforce voting rights protections under the 15th Amendment with laws like the VRA. Thus, the justices weaponized the 14th Amendment against its original purposes twice over, depriving minority voters of the protection of both amendments—and condemned Fields’ second stint in Congress to be even briefer than his first. Fittingly, Louisiana is at the forefront of the court’s crusade to end the Second Reconstruction. It is, after all, where the country’s long legal battle to upend equal citizenship for the formerly enslaved and their descendants began.
At the close of the Civil War, New Orleans was one of the only places with opportunity. The largest city in the former Confederacy, it had escaped the destruction of Richmond, Atlanta, and Charleston, drawing both freed people looking to build a new life and disgruntled rebels not yet ready to give up the fight.
One of the most prominent transplants was John Archibald Campbell of Alabama. A former Supreme Court justice who had voted to ban citizenship for Black people in the 1857 Dred Scott case, he resigned from the bench and became assistant secretary of war for the Confederacy. After Appomattox, he was imprisoned for about four months under suspicion that he had helped to plot President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Campbell arrived in Louisiana destitute, embittered, and determined to destroy Reconstruction through the courts. He was “one of the single most evil lawyers in the history of America,” says Rachel Shelden, a legal historian at Pennsylvania State University. “But he was very smart.”
He was “one of the single most evil lawyers in the history of America. But he was very smart.”
New Orleans’ unique promise lay in its population of moderate Northern business people and a prosperous free Black Creole community. A young Republican governor, former Union officer Henry Clay Warmoth, pushed development and revitalization—repairing levees, rebuilding railroads, and opening factories. A booming economy, he hoped, would smooth the way to racial harmony. “Everyone’s eyes are on New Orleans,” explains University of Maryland historian Michael Ross. “There’s a moment where it looked like it could have turned out differently.”
After the Civil War, Congress enfranchised the formerly enslaved, leading to the registration of more than 80 percent of Black men in nearly all the Southern states, and an explosion of their political power. In 1868, John Willis Menard, a poet and newspaper publisher from New Orleans, won a special election to the US House. But Menard’s white opponent challenged his right to serve. Menard’s pleas to be seated made him the first Black person to address Congress. “Mr. Speaker, I appear here more to acknowledge this high privilege than to make an argument,” he began. “But as I have been sent here by the votes of nearly 9,000 electors, I would feel myself recreant to the duty imposed upon me if I did not defend their rights on this floor.”
By 130 votes to 57, the House decided to keep the seat open rather than fill it with a Black man. As Rep. James Garfield of Ohio, the future president, reportedly said, it was “too early to admit a Negro to the US Congress.”
Top left: John Archibald Campbell, “one of the single most evil lawyers in the history of America”; bottom left: John Willis Menard, the first Black representative to address Congress; right: Klu Klux Klansmen rally at the US Capitol.Brady-Handy Collection/Library of Congress; Library of Congress; George Rinhart/Corbis/Getty
Campbell vociferously agreed. “We have Africans in place all about us…They are jurors, post office clerks, custom house officers, and day by day they barter away their obligations and duties,” he wrote to his daughter. “Even insurrection,” he added, “would be better than the insensibility that seems to prevail.” Campbell dedicated himself to destroying Louisiana’s nascent biracial government by halting Warmoth’s economic revitalization plan with, as one contemporary said, “a degree of intensity which it is difficult to express.” Aided by sympathetic judges, he blocked essential taxes, thwarted railroad repairs, and fought improvements to canals and levees. As Ross, the historian, has chronicled, Campbell became a hero to the city’s Lost Cause reactionaries: “Leave it to God and Mr. Campbell,” his admirers said. For three critical years, Campbell stymied Warmoth, causing discontented white moderates to drift toward the politics of white supremacy.
But Campbell’s legal campaign did more than doom Louisiana’s Reconstruction government; it set in motion events that would lead to what became known as the Slaughterhouse Cases, which dealt devastating blows not just to Reconstruction, but to civil rights ever since.
For a decision of such magnitude, the background was provincial: Deprived of funds by Campbell’s crusade, in 1869, Warmoth’s government chartered a private company to build and run a slaughterhouse downriver of the city’s water supply so as to combat disease outbreaks. All butchers had to relocate there or shut down. Campbell seemed to care little about the white butchers who sued; he fought the slaughterhouse plans all the way to the Supreme Court because he could not abide a political system in which Black people had the power to help see it built. His legal strategy would hinge on perverting the newly enacted 13th and 14th amendments.
Before the Reconstruction amendments banning slavery, creating equal citizenship, and prohibiting voting discrimination, the “rights of the individual [were] at the mercy of the states,” as Sen. Carl Schurz (R-Mo.) stated not long before the case reached the high court. The new amendments, he insisted, “made the liberty and rights of every citizen in every state a matter of national concern.”
But Campbell saw an opportunity to exploit the federal government’s new involvement in securing every American’s rights. Although the goal of the amendments was equal citizenship, Campbell argued they must necessarily protect white people against what he deemed the corrupt and ignorant machinations of biracial legislatures—a claim of reverse discrimination a century before the idea had a name. Ordering butchers to use the slaughterhouse, he contended, violated the 13th Amendment because it amounted to involuntary servitude. He also argued that new “privileges or immunities” under the 14th Amendment included a broad right to labor as one wished. Most importantly, these rights were now protected by the national government. Campbell, The Daily Picayune commented at the time, was using the “tyrannical” new amendments in the same way “one poison would be swallowed as an antidote to another.”
Campbell’s previous stint on the high court guaranteed his admission to Washington’s elite legal clique. But Justice Samuel Freeman Miller, a Lincoln appointee, hated him. “He has made himself an active leader of the worst branch of the New Orleans democracy,” Miller later wrote. “No man that has survived the rebellion is more saturated today with its spirit.”
Miller may have let this antipathy for Campbell cloud his judgment. In April 1873, the Supreme Court delivered its notorious Slaughterhouse Cases decision. In trying to allow Louisiana to manage its butchers as it liked, Miller’s strong case for local control effectively withdrew the federal government’s oversight of how ex-Confederates used state power to subjugate Black people. “You don’t have a federal backstop anymore,” says Bertrall Ross, a constitutional law expert at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.
The preeminent constitutional scholar Charles Black Jr. called Slaughterhouse “probably the worst holding, in its effect on human rights, ever uttered by the Supreme Court.”
Campbell recognized the victory he had secured in defeat: “It was probably best for the country that the case so turned out.” History disagrees: The preeminent constitutional scholar Charles Black Jr. called Slaughterhouse “probably the worst holding, in its effect on human rights, ever uttered by the Supreme Court.”
Campbell “is the first person to attempt to use the 13th and 14th amendments against the purposes for which they were designed,” historian Michael Ross explains. More than 150 years later, the Roberts court has embraced the same tactic. In Callais, the court perverted the 14th Amendment to eliminate Black political representation and liberate white people from multiracial government. “Somewhere,” Ross says, “Campbell is grinning his evil genius grin.”
The origins of the court’s next major attack on Reconstruction lie 200 miles northwest of New Orleans, in the town of Colfax. There, hours before the Slaughterhouse decision was announced, a racial battle over Louisiana’s 1872 elections ended in Reconstruction’s bloodiest single day. Black people had come to outnumber whites in the flood plains of the Red River, where cotton plantations ran on forced labor. Tied to the land by slavery, sharecropping, and enduring poverty, the region’s Black population has remained so remarkably stable that in 2024, when the Louisiana legislature drew Cleo Fields’ district, it followed the river’s path, where descendants of the plantations’ enslaved people still live.
After the Civil War, management of one of the valley’s largest plantations, where 14,000 acres had been worked by some 709 enslaved people, passed to a Republican, William Calhoun. White Democrats considered Calhoun, who led the freed men on his estate to the polls to back Republican Ulysses S. Grant for president in 1868, a traitor and turned to violence and fraud to suppress Black voters.
But Calhoun, just elected to the state House, bested his Democratic rivals by using his position to create a new majority-Black and Republican parish encompassing his land. As a final insult, Calhoun named it after Grant, and the parish seat after his vice president, Schuyler Colfax. The victory would prove short-lived.
Local ex-Confederates were outraged by the commingling of Black and white people in Grant Parish and determined to take control of its new government by any means necessary. After the 1872 elections, the outnumbered white Democrats fraudulently claimed victory. The Black Republicans hunkered down in Colfax’s courthouse, once the stable on Calhoun’s estate. About 140 white vigilantes, including former rebels and Ku Klux Klan members, gathered to attack. The shallow trenches the Black men of Grant Parish dug to defend the old stable would become their mass grave.
People gathering dead and wounded from the ‘Colfax Massacre’, Louisiana. Published in Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1873. MPI/Getty
On April 13, 1873—Easter Sunday—the white mob struck. Unable to oust the men inside the courthouse, they set it ablaze. When the Black men laid down their guns and emerged waving handkerchiefs in surrender, the mob encircled them in a firing frenzy so chaotic that it killed two of their own. According to The Day Freedom Died, by journalist Charles Lane, the mob chased and shot as many fleeing men as possible in a scene of “racially tinged sadism.” Alexander Tillman, who led the resistance inside the courthouse, made it 100 yards before his pursuers riddled him with gunshots. Then, dismounting their horses, they slashed his throat and battered his lifeless face.
That night, as rain fell on the dozens of bodies scattered around Colfax, a former Confederate soldier named William Cruikshank lined up the Black prisoners, two by two. Then he made a game of trying to kill each pair with a single bullet. Three years later, a catastrophic Supreme Court decision bearing Cruikshank’s name not only would ensure no one was punished, but would liberate white supremacists to take back control of the South through a reign of terror.
The doomed prosecution fell to J.R. Beckwith, Louisiana’s US attorney, whose job was complicated by the still-fresh ink of the Slaughterhouse opinion; by entrusting the protection of civil rights to the states, it was unclear whether federal authorities could punish even such a heinous attack. Still, Beckwith hoped to wield the Enforcement Act of 1870, which authorized him to prosecute attacks on Black people’s right to vote and plots against their civil rights. The Colfax massacre was certainly that.
Unable to round up most suspects, Beckwith ultimately brought only nine, including Cruikshank, to trial and secured three convictions. Even they wouldn’t last. After a challenge to the guilty verdicts was upheld in June 1874, setting the men free, United States v. Cruikshank headed to the high court.
By the time the case was heard the following spring, other events had made the stakes crystal clear. Emboldened by the failed prosecution, white vigilantes murdered Black men throughout the Red River Valley, causing Republican officials to resign and flee. The state’s panicked governor warned the attorney general in Washington that unless federal troops intervened, the Civil War would have been futile. Black people, he wrote, “though free in name, will practically be remitted back to servitude.” In September, a white paramilitary, created with the help of lawyers for the Cruikshank defendants, ousted the Republican governor and legislature for three days until the US Army arrived.
In Colfax, Louisiana, a memorial commemorates the 1873 massacre in which white supremacists killed at least 57 Black people and wounded dozens more. Erected in 2023, it replaced an earlier marker falsely calling the massacre a “riot”.Annie Flanagan
The military’s intervention allowed the Civil War veteran and New Orleans bricklayer Charles Edmund Nash to become the second Black Louisianan elected to Congress. Nash, whom Cleo Fields would invoke 150 years later, was one of an unprecedented eight Black representatives seated in 1874. His election demonstrated that multiracial government would persist only if the court delivered a loss for the Colfax murderers and affirmed a federal role in combating vigilante violence.
It was not to be. Although a white mob had murdered Black men to hand political control to the party of white supremacy, the court’s March 1876 opinion asserted that there was “nothing to show…the conspiracy was formed on account of the race of the parties.” The court never recounted the horror of that Easter Sunday, but relied on the warped logic of the Slaughterhouse Cases to determine that states alone should safeguard citizen rights and punish lawbreakers; if they fail to do so, the federal government has no power to intervene. The court gutted the Enforcement Act and effectively ended Congress’ authority to punish vigilantism. A decade after the US adopted new amendments to protect Black people in the South, the Supreme Court severed the newly freed from their protection.
“A government which cannot protect its humblest citizens from outrage and injury is unworthy of the name and ought not to command the support of a free people.”
The contention that the 14th and 15th amendments shield Black people only against explicitly racist motives was immediately used to undercut voting rights. As the court announced Cruikshank, it handed down a separate case letting states disenfranchise Black people so long as they didn’t openly cite race, authorizing barriers like poll taxes and literacy tests. The lesson was clear: White supremacists were free to wrest control of the former Confederacy, either through violence or by regulating Black voters into irrelevancy.
By then, Democrats controlled the House, and they allowed Nash to deliver only one major speech. In the wake of the Cruikshank decision, he spoke late into the night on June 7, 1876, calling for strict enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments. “A government which cannot protect its humblest citizens from outrage and injury is unworthy of the name and ought not to command the support of a free people,” he warned a nearly empty chamber.
That November, as the white violence the court unleashed caused many Black voters not to cast votes or to have their votes thrown out, Nash lost reelection. His defeat was overshadowed by the disputed presidential election of 1876, when Republicans agreed to pull all remaining troops from the South as part of a deal to hand Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the White House. That so-called corrupt bargain, another concession by the federal government to segregationist whites, marked the end of Reconstruction. It would take Black voters in the South almost a century to regain the ability to freely exercise their political rights.
Erected in 1921, the original memorial in Louisiana honors three white “heroes” who fell “fighting for white supremacy” during the Colfax massacre fifty years before, in 1873.Annie Flanagan
Today’s Supreme Court is unwinding that progress again. Just as with Cruikshank, the Callais decision strips Congress of the ability to halt discriminatory voting rules, making states the sole guardians of political rights. Under both cases, the only way to protect minority voting rights is to prove intentional racial discrimination. But just like the Cruikshank court, the Roberts court never admits the racism staring it in the face. In lieu of “no smoking-gun evidence of a race-based motive (an almost fanciful prospect),” Justice Elena Kagan explained in her blistering Callais dissent, the VRA is “all but a dead letter.” Today, “intent is a get-out-of-jail-free card,” says Bertrall Ross—just as it was for the Colfax killers.
Cruikshank and Slaughterhouse were a one-two punch to Black rights. White supremacists used violence to retake control of all former Confederate states and were free to deny Black people their fundamental rights. The Supreme Court repeatedly struck down further congressional attempts to protect Black people, while upholding state laws that subjugated them. In 1896, in another case out of Louisiana, the court officially sanctioned racial apartheid.
Six years earlier, the state had passed the Separate Car Act, requiring segregation on railways. The Comité des Citoyens, a New Orleans civil rights group, recruited Homer Plessy, a Black man from a Creole family, to ride in a whites-only car, just as Rosa Parks would do more than a half-century later on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
When Plessy’s case reached the Supreme Court, the group’s lawyer contended the law violated both the 14th Amendment’s mandate of equality and, by imposing what had been called the “badges and incidents of slavery” on Black people, the 13th Amendment. But the argument made no impression, as the court found that the Reconstruction amendments were too limited to protect Black people from segregation. Just as Louisiana was well within its powers to consolidate butchering for public health, likewise, it could mandate segregation to promote “comfort,” “peace,” and “good order.”
The decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, embraced Cruikshank’s refusal to see obvious discriminatory intent and went so far as to gaslight Black people for claiming segregation put one race above the other. “If this be so,” the court stated, it is “solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” By rendering the 14th Amendment’s promise of equal protection powerless to stop segregation, the justices relegated Black people to the margins of American society, wealth, and power. Now, in its unbridled attack on voting rights, Roberts’ Supreme Court has embarked on this project again.
As Fields told NPR after the Callais decision, “I now feel what Homer was going through on that railcar in New Orleans.”
John Roberts has always hated the Voting Rights Act. As a young lawyer in President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, he fought to limit it to cases in which a judge found intentional discrimination, much as the Supreme Court had done to rights violations in the 19th century. As chief justice, his Republican-appointed majority has dusted off arguments its predecessors once used to defend slavery and destroy Reconstruction to roll back the gains made during the civil rights era.
President Reagan greets John Roberts during a photo opportunity with members of the White House Counsel’s Office in the Oval Office, January 1983.White House
Roberts took his first hack out of the VRA in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder, effectively blocking a portion of the law that had required states and localities with a history of excluding minorities from the polls to obtain federal approval before changing district lines or voting procedures. In doing so, he invoked the “equal sovereignty” of each state in its right to be treated the same as the others.
Roberts did not mention that “equal sovereignty” had been deployed in Dred Scott to declare that Black people were ineligible for citizenship. The 14th Amendment had overturned the ruling, but Roberts reanimated its logic to liberate white-dominated Southern legislatures from federal oversight, just as Chief Justice Roger Taney had done in the infamous 1857 case. New voter suppression laws spread across the South.
In 2019, Roberts gave states another powerful tool to disempower Black voters: partisan gerrymandering. Rucho v. Common Cause barred federal courts from throwing out maps drawn to advantage one party, even though they retaliate against voters based on their rights of speech and association.
And because race and party are tightly connected, particularly in the South, Rucho also provided a back door to lock minorities out of power. Legislators now have an easy alibi when drawing racist maps; they need only say party, not race, motivated the lines. The justices strengthened this alibi in 2024 by ordering lower courts to presume legislatures acted in good faith when accused of drawing racially discriminatory maps, allowing racist intent to hide behind this gentleman’s agreement.
Yet the VRA still required that racial minorities have an equal opportunity to elect representatives—a standard based on effect, not intent. That is until Callais, when the court put legislatures’ prerogative to draw partisan (and racially biased) maps above the VRA’s protections. Now, just by claiming partisan motivation, states can eliminate any district giving minorities a shot at political power. Like the Slaughterhouse and Cruikshank decisions before it, Callais renders the Reconstruction amendments unenforceable—except to serve white people. Once again, the court deployed a willful ignorance in order to camouflage obvious racism as normal politics.
Like the Slaughterhouse and Cruikshank decisions before it, Callais renders the Reconstruction amendments unenforceable—except to serve white people.
The Roberts court may have cynically blinded itself to racist intent, but its own motives appear obvious. The court has used voting rights cases to boost Republicans, today’s party of white grievance. But this partisan gamesmanship is insufficient to explain the eagerness with which the Roberts court seeks to unwind the Constitution’s protections against white supremacy.
The Reconstruction amendments are a bulwark against discriminatory laws. Yet the court’s mandate that state lawmakers be afforded a “presumption of legislative good faith” essentially protects racist state laws; it’s the legal equivalent of the trope that accusations of racism are worse than actual racism. The court’s willingness to use the 14th Amendment to emancipate white people from Black elected officials—but not to help Black people elect officials—signals its fundamentally racist priorities. After all, this is the same institution that halted school integration programs and banned affirmative action in higher education.
The roots of the court’s logic can be found in Plessy, which captured the 19th-century justices’ antipathy to Reconstruction by railing against “enforced commingling” and claiming that “if the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other’s merits, and a voluntary consent.” Exactly 130 years later, the Roberts court has revived the idea that the law should play no role in bringing about racial equality. White people are the gatekeepers of political and economic power; they can open or close that gate to others as they desire. Neither law nor constitutional amendments can take away that birthright.
From this shared centuries-old mindset, similar rulings flow. Legal arguments, once stamped out, rise again. The country can make big changes, as it did after the Civil War and again 100 years later due to the civil rights movement. But in standing against that progress, the Supreme Court will take it away. It has done it before, it’s doing it now, and it will surely do it again.
In Callais, justice Alito offered a final justification for killing the nation’s greatest civil rights law: Racism is over. “Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South,” he wrote. But the past and present of Louisiana tell a very different story.
In 1995, after the courts first struck down his congressional district, Fields launched a bid to succeed the state’s Democratic governor. No Black Louisianan had won statewide office since Reconstruction, and his campaign, he said, would be “a very good test” of any progress. He lost by 27 points to a white Republican. During the campaign, a Baton Rouge mall sold T-shirts reading, “Run, Cleo, Run,” with a cartoon of a Black man being chased by robed figures carrying nail-studded clubs. “I wish I could say that there’s no more racism in Louisiana,” Fields told the New Orleans Times-Picayune at the time, “but I can’t.”
“I say to members of the Supreme Court, come to Louisiana as a Black man and run for Congress and see where that gets you. We’ve never in the history of this state ever elected a Black person from a majority-white district. ”
Thirty years later, a Black candidate still has not been elected statewide in Louisiana. In the most recent legislative session, Republicans not only dismantled Fields’ seat, but abolished the clerk of criminal court post in majority-Black Orleans Parish so that a Black man, once wrongly convicted of murder, who won the position could not be seated; eliminated two Black-held judgeships in the parish; and advanced a bill to redisplay Confederate monuments removed in the last two decades.
“I say to members of the Supreme Court, come to Louisiana as a Black man and run for Congress and see where that gets you,” Fields says. “We’ve never in the history of this state ever elected a Black person from a majority-white district. Many have tried. Have we overcome? You hope you have, but the proof is in the pudding.”
United States Congressman Cleo Fields (center) prepares to film a video discussing the 14th amendment in his office in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on July 7, 2026. Fields is being forced from Congress after a Supreme Court ruling struck down his district as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Fields sees the ruling as a setback to voting rights. Edmund Fountain
The loss of representation is just the beginning, as the erosion of Black political power is likely to revive blatant discrimination and forms of segregation. Trump, who has claimed that “white people were very badly treated” by civil rights laws, has signed a series of orders eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and disproportionately fired Black workers across the government, including high-ranking officials like the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We just have some people in our country who feel that a person of a certain hue can’t do certain things,” Fields says. “I thought we were beyond that, but we’re not.”
Fields has been thinking about his Black predecessors whose brief Reconstruction-era careers were wiped out because of white supremacy. After he was sworn in to Congress a second time in 2025, he visited John Willis Menard’s DC grave and hung his portrait in his Capitol Hill office. “This story has been buried,” Fields says.
Now, like Menard, Fields is again being pushed out of the House by a reactionary white movement that is opposed to Black political power and has captured the highest levels of government. On July 21, he announced he was retiring from the House, this time for good.
“I’ve never served a single day in Congress,” he says, “without a federal lawsuit looming over my head.”
Southern Water taps fiber network to sniff out leaky pipes
Transcript: Trump Hits Record Poll Low amid Fresh Leaks of GOP Panic
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 23 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
We’ve been talking a lot about the polling on here because it’s crunch time now, and we’ve got some really striking new data to look at. Donald Trump’s approval just hit another record low in the polls. On the Iran war, he’s absolutely collapsed, and his tariffs are in deep trouble too. Meanwhile, Republican leaks are getting worse. Operatives are privately admitting that the bottom is falling out for the party. So here’s our question: Is it really this bad for Trump and Republicans, or is it a mirage that will soon get swamped by GOP spending?
To figure it out, we’re talking to veteran North Carolina Democratic operative Morgan Jackson, who’s on the Roy Cooper campaign, about what he’s seeing on the ground. Morgan, thanks for coming on.
Morgan Jackson: Absolutely, Greg. Great to be with you.
Sargent: So let’s start here. A new Reuters poll finds Trump’s approval nationally down at 32 percent. That’s a record low in Reuters polling for Trump’s two terms. I don’t know if it’s that low, Morgan, but the FiftyPlusOne polling averages have him at 35 percent. So it’s plausible that he’s heading down into the low thirties. Morgan, what’s your sense of where the president really is right now?
Jackson: So I think first and foremost, Greg, the president is in trouble, and he’s dragging down every Republican on the ballot. What we’re seeing, and I think what we see at every date—and the president was just here in North Carolina campaigning. And look at the kind of things that follow the president here.
One of the things he talked about was the war in Iran. He talked about gas prices, and how glad people were to be paying for higher gas prices. He talked about North Carolina, a state that he’d won three times, being the worst state in the nation. These are not things that help Michael Whatley, who is running for Senate in North Carolina.
And what we continue to see out from Trump’s numbers—you talked about his overall numbers, but his numbers with unaffiliated voters are even worse than his overall numbers.
I don’t know, Greg, that in the 30 years I’ve been in this business that I’ve seen a public official have worse numbers with unaffiliated voters. And as we know, North Carolina, as in a lot of these states, unaffiliated voters now make up the largest constituency, the largest number of registered voters.
Sargent: His collapse with independents is an extraordinary story, still unregistered by the mainstream media, in my view. Morgan, didn’t the president come down there and also kind of make fun of disaster relief and joke about it in some sense? I mean, that can’t play very well there.
Jackson: No, it can’t. And what I’ll tell you is he said, we’ve given you some money from FEMA, you want two or three billion dollars more—if Michael Whatley wins, I’ll give it to you. If he doesn’t, I won’t. And he paused, and then he joked, then he laughed, said, that was a joke. But I don’t think anybody thinks disaster recovery is funny.
I don’t think holding back federal dollars from a state that desperately needs it is funny. I don’t think cracking about hurricane recovery relief with your self-appointed hurricane czar in Michael Whatley—FEMA czar—who’s been absolutely AWOL in western North Carolina, is a joke.
Sargent: Well, yeah, and also this is something that really hit western North Carolina very hard, and that’s deep red territory. We should note that Trump’s drop in the Reuters poll is fueled by his slide among Republicans. In this poll, he’s only at 73 percent approval with them. That is catastrophic for them, if that’s anywhere close to right.
And I will say, Republicans are publicly acting as if this is the problem. They’re acting as if he’s badly got to get Republicans excited about him again. You spend a lot of time in red, rural North Carolina. What are you seeing candidly in these areas with regard to Trump support?
Jackson: So I think there are two challenges that Republicans have right now. I think the very first challenge is they have a base that is not enthusiastic about this election. They are not enthusiastic about Trump. Now think about the Trump coalition that powered him to victory in all seven battleground states in 2024.
A lot of the folks that drove the Trump coalition—and especially the folks that had switched from sort of traditional Democratic support, lower-income, non-college-educated working people—those are the folks who, when you think about high gas prices, high utility bills, high grocery bills, are feeling it every single day, even worse than the rest of the population. And so when gas jumps up to four and five dollars a gallon, the guy who drives a truck for a living is the one who feels that way more than somebody who’s working an office job or doing something else.
And so I think we’re talking about a lack of enthusiasm, because it is promises made and promises not delivered on, failed expectations. And I think those voters—Trump’s not on the ballot, which has generally been the one thing that turns them out. And you also have folks who feel like they were promised the economy was going to get better two years ago by Trump, and it has gotten worse for them and their families.
And so, as we talked about, the first issue is enthusiasm with the Republican base in a midterm election. That is a critical time that you’ve got to have that enthusiasm to be successful. And then the other side of it is unaffiliated voters and independent voters who have an incredibly low approval rating of the president. Those two things create a real problem and a one-two punch for Republicans this cycle.
Sargent: So you’re polling out in western North Carolina. That’s where Jamie Ager is the Democrat running. I think he might have a shot. That’s a tough race. I think it’s pretty close to double digits, a Trump district.
What are you guys picking up from some of these Republican voters and some of these GOP-leaning independents? Are they basically saying, I’m just not coming out? What are you getting back?
Jackson: So what we’re seeing is—one of the things, Greg, that we often poll on are to gauge enthusiasm. Not only do we screen you into a poll to ask you, are you a likely voter versus a registered voter, then towards the end of the survey, we ask you again about your interest in voting. And one of my favorite tools that we use a lot is asking people, on a scale of one through ten, you put a number beside it of how interested and motivated you are to vote.
And when I look at the folks that say 10 only—you’re talking about a nine-point enthusiasm gap, where Democrats are nine points ahead of Republicans in the 10 voters, the most enthusiastic voters. When you look at the eight-through-ten voters, you’re talking about a six- to seven-point gap.
That’s a huge enthusiasm gap between the parties. And if that holds, that can have catastrophic repercussions for Republicans this year.
Sargent: Well, just to reiterate, Republicans themselves are very much acting as if Trump is dropping fast, including among GOP voters. One Republican from a red district told Politico: “The bottom is beginning to fall out.” Republicans also privately reported to Politico that they’re having serious problems in Ohio, Iowa, and Kansas—all states Trump won by double digits.
And Politico reports that your guy, Roy Cooper, is ahead by double digits in private GOP polling. I just want to point out that if that’s true, if Roy Cooper is in the double digits there, then that’s when you see places like Ohio, Iowa, and Kansas suddenly become really gettable, right? Is it at double digits or not?
Jackson: No, I don’t think it is. Listen, North Carolina is a 50-50 state. This, regardless of the public polls—and Greg, you and I have sort of talked about the history of Roy Cooper several times—people will remember that in the 2020 election, when he was running for reelection as governor, the public polls had him up nineteen points, and he won by three and a half. In 2016, when he beat Pat McCrory, the public polls had him up twelve, fourteen points, and he won by ten thousand votes.
North Carolina’s going to be much tighter than that. I think the real question to me right now is, how do you deal with lack of Republican enthusiasm, lack of support from unaffiliated, but then you also have this massive cash infusion coming from Republican interest groups and special interest groups and independent expenditures out there.
Even right now, we’re at Roy Cooper—we’re looking at a $25 million deficit, being outspent right now by Republicans. That’s a big deal. That’s a lot of money, and that does move voters. And so we’re continuing to push hard.
We know this race is going to tighten with all this national spending they’re bringing. And we’re continuing to raise money and do everything that we need to do to remain competitive on the airwaves and in paid communication with voters.
Sargent: So you guys don’t believe the Republican polling that Roy Cooper’s up double digits, then.
Jackson: No, I don’t. I don’t.
Sargent: And you know, they’re also thinking of pulling back in Georgia as well. So Republicans are saying, we’re cutting back in North Carolina, we’re cutting back in Georgia.
Morgan, you’ve been someone who’s talked about the slow transition of North Carolina for a long time. It never seems to quite materialize, at least in the presidentials. Something similar is happening in Georgia. We’re seeing similar demographic shifts, another southern state.
Can you talk about this change? Is what we’re seeing now a reflection of that? You know, Roy Cooper’s sizable lead—maybe not double digits, but sizable. Is it a reflection of this slow transition, or is it something more fleeting that Democrats won’t really be able to bank for a presidential year?
Jackson: Listen, I think if we can win a Senate race in North Carolina, it’s a very big deal. It’ll be the first time—only the second time in 20 years—that we’ve been able to do that. And Greg, you and I have talked about this. When you look at the demographic changes of the next couple of years, especially when reapportionment and redistricting comes after the 2030 cycle, Democrats have to be focused on consistently winning places like North Carolina and Georgia if we want a chance to elect the president. That’s just a reality.
If we want to be able to have a sustainable majority in the U.S. Senate, you’re going to have to hold the seats in Georgia and in North Carolina, because what we’re seeing out there in the Electoral College is a lot of blue states in the Northeast are losing population. And a lot of red states like Texas and Florida and others are rapidly gaining population. And the math is not going to work for us anymore if we don’t start consistently winning southern states.
And Georgia and North Carolina are the two that are right there. And while Georgia was able to crack the code in 2020—we’ve fallen just short each time, but we believe putting a Senate seat in the bank this time puts us in much better stead for thinking about—we’ve got a U.S. Senate seat up in ‘28 and the presidential.
Sargent: So you think that what you’re seeing right now actually reflects these ongoing changes, that there’s something really systemic or structural moving in Democrats’ direction? It’s not just Trump’s collapsing numbers, it’s not just something fleeting?
Jackson: Well, it’s all of the things. Listen, when we see places like Raleigh and Charlotte and the greater triangle and the collar counties around Charlotte getting bluer and bluer and bluer from this influx of college-educated voters—the thing that’s held us just below the waterline, per se, the last several cycles, is that Trump has been able to ramp up this Republican turnout in red North Carolina, which is more rural and exurban, and they’ve outvoted their share of the electorate. And if we get to a place where blue North Carolina is actually voting its full share of an electorate, we’re going to start having better years and winning bigger races.
But, you know, at the same time, we’ve been able to win the governor’s race, the lieutenant governor’s race, the attorney general’s race, the secretary of state, Supreme Court races, things like that. We just have had a challenge cracking the code at the federal level.
Sargent: Well, Jamie Ager’s the Democratic House candidate out in North Carolina’s Eleventh District. That’s the western corner of the state. It’s right in Appalachia. It’s got Asheville there. Do you think Jamie Ager’s going to win that race or not?
Jackson: I like it. If I was a betting man, I’d bet on Jamie Ager. Listen, that’s a place that—not only, you talked about a minute ago, Trump’s sort of teasing support for hurricane relief for western North Carolina. Not only is that not funny to them, that is incredibly politically hurtful to their candidate.
We have to remember, the candidate who was on the ballot, the incumbent, withdrew from the race because he got investigated by Congress in a bipartisan way, was really smacked for his inappropriate relationships with his staff members, young female staff members, and advances towards them. And so they’ve been in a little bit of a free fall.
But I think Jamie Ager is a great candidate, running a great race. The last thing I’ll say about that is, you’ve got to remember, there were two places in the entire United States, two regions, that Trump did worse in between 2020 and 2024.
And one of those is western North Carolina, which I’ve always believed had a lot to do with the hurricane that had taken place a couple of months before then, and the disinformation by the Trump campaign at the time, when they were telling them FEMA was not helping you, when—people, FEMA was knocking on the doors. I think that hurt their credibility.
Sargent: Well, I will say that MAGA Inc., which is Trump’s super PAC, is actually putting money into North Carolina’s Eleventh District. This is a district Trump won by 9.5 points. And look, if you’re winning North Carolina Eleven—I still think it’s very tough, but let’s just for the moment say you’re winning there—that is really a sign that you’re going to have a very good night for Democrats on the House level. And it’s probably worth pointing out, maybe you could comment on this: there really is sort of a perfect storm of things coming together that makes something like North Carolina Eleven sort of drift into the realm of the possible.
I just want to stress for people, this is western North Carolina. This is a lot of rural North Carolina. It’s really Trumpy territory. Very hard for Democrats there. But Jamie Ager’s a family farmer. He’s a good candidate, and he fits the district perfectly. So all the pieces are there. I think it can’t be ruled out now. I mean, if Trump’s super PAC is spending there, they’re seeing something in the numbers too, right?
Jackson: They are. You’re right, Greg. It’s an R-plus-nine district. And what happened is they had a very weak incumbent. And Jamie Ager is a phenomenal candidate, as you said, straight out of central casting, frankly, for that district. His family’s been on that farm for hundreds of years.
And he’s exactly who you see in these ads: he is a straightforward kind of guy, and he’s a mountain guy, and you can tell it by talking to him. And one of the things he’s been doing over the last week I noticed was hosting barn dances all across the district. I mean, think about the cultural connection there. That’s incredibly good.
And so Republicans have a candidate who’s only been on the ballot a month, that voters don’t know. You’ve got Jamie Ager, who voters do know. And for Democrats, that’s one of the places Democrats have been able to outspend Republicans, up until Trump has come in with this new money out there. So it’s going to be interesting to see how it unfolds.
But Democrats clearly have the advantage right now. It’s, can we hold the advantage and push that advantage? And part of that is—we need help. We need help, people, from around the country investing in these races. Because Trump just dumped in over six million dollars over the last two weeks against Cooper. He dumped in over a million, million and a half, against Jamie Ager, separately than that, just in the last week.
Sargent: That’s based on ad data, your own ad-tracking data?
Jackson: Yes, that’s correct.
Sargent: So you’re saying that Trump’s super PAC just put a million dollars into North Carolina Eleven?
Jackson: I think it was a million and a half. It was close to that, yes.
Sargent: Well, that’s really striking, because again, that’s a district Trump won by 9.5, western North Carolina, Appalachia. So that’s telling.
So there’s not a lot of mystery as to why Trump is collapsing so badly: prices, tariffs, and war. Some new data on that as well. Reuters has Trump’s approval on cost of living at an extraordinary 17 percent. That’s not a typo. A new CNN poll has 70 percent saying his Iran war has hurt the U.S., and 76 percent saying the war isn’t worth the costs.
And on tariffs, a new Suffolk poll in Michigan—which, let’s face it, very, very close, Abdul El-Sayed is up seven points, I really doubt it’s that high—but note that two-thirds, 67 percent, are concerned about the impact of Trump’s tariffs on Canadian cars, trucks, and auto parts. That’s the story right there, isn’t it? Prices, tariffs, war. Your thoughts?
Jackson: It is. And I think what you see Republicans around the country trying to do is to change the narrative on voters. In North Carolina, they’ve tried to make this race about crime. You see other states, they’ve tried to make it about immigration, they try to make it about a lot of things.
The reality of it is, voters are so laser-like focused on the cost of things—the price of groceries, the increased price of gas, your utility bill, your mortgage, your rent, your childcare. These are things that continue to grow in cost every single month. And families sit around the kitchen table on Friday night and Saturday night trying to figure out how they’re going to pay for their daily expenses, not some exorbitant vacation. And when Americans are feeling that way, somebody’s got to pay the price for that. And the people who they blame right now are the president.
Listen, we lived on the other side of this two years ago, is that people were feeling really frustrated, really agitated, really unsafe in the economy due to increased inflation. And so they voted Donald Trump in to change the policies they thought of, of Joe Biden. And now they’ve figured out that not only are things just as bad, they’re a lot worse under Trump, after they thought he was going to fix it. And so there’s a lot of blame and a lot of regret going around.
Sargent: Very briefly, what’s the map look like for Democrats more broadly, in your view? Is there a path to a Senate majority? What do you predict?
Jackson: Absolutely, I do. Listen, I think when you see places like Texas, Kansas, Iowa coming online, Alaska, Ohio—none of these were close states in 2024 in the presidential. And these states, Democrats have small leads or are dead even. And a lot of prognosticators have ranked them toss-up seats. That’s a very big deal.
That shows the mood of this country and where voters are—not just where Democratic voters are more excited, but the lack of enthusiasm from Republican voters, and, frankly, unaffiliated are just revolting against Trump at this point. And so I think all those things—and listen, we’re light years away from election day. We’re fifty, forty-some days away. And the reality is that things can change.
Sargent: OK, so Democrats have to net four Senate seats in order to win the Senate. They have to flip four Republican-held seats. If you had to pick which are the four most likely, in your view?
Jackson: So the four most likely—first of all, I’d start with North Carolina. It’s the place that if we’re going to win anywhere, we’ve got to win here. This is seat number one. I like our thoughts in Maine. I like Alaska. I think Sherrod Brown is running an incredible race in Ohio.
But I also think—listen, I think Iowa, Josh Turek is running a great race and things are happening in Iowa. So we talked about Texas. These are places that are really challenging. And I think the good news for us, the best news for us, is there’s not just one path to get there.
We’ve lived in an electoral environment where there’s only—we have to, if we don’t win this state, we’re done; if we win this state, we can’t get there. The reality of it is, we have multiple paths to get to the majority. We just need to close some of these races out.
Sargent: Sure looks that way. Morgan Jackson, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming on.
Jackson: Thanks, guys. Y’all take care.