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‘Love, Rick’: Letters from teacher at elite Mass. private school track an attempted seduction

Jane Marion at her home, in Pikesville, Md.GABRIELLA DEMCZUK/New York Times

The first letter was hand-delivered, written on a store-bought card that was as goofy as it was flirtatious. The sender, who signed it as Rick, apologized that he was not around when its recipient, Jane, stopped by. He invited her to come back for poetry and wine.

The note seemed innocent enough, but Jane Marion was 16 when she received it. Rick, whose full name was Frederic Lyman, was 11 years her senior, and her teacher at Phillips Academy, a prestigious boarding school in Andover.

It was the start of a correspondence that began with cheerful notes on graded papers, then progressed to Lyman’s tempting her with flattery and romance. When she resisted, he offered praise, or scolded her or made a carefully calibrated threat. When she finally drew away, he was enraged.

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The letters came to light as a growing number of elite private schools release in-depth reports about the sexual abuse of students by faculty members, much of it kept quiet for decades as the schools sought to guard their reputations. In just the last six weeks, Choate Rosemary Hall, in Connecticut; St. Paul’s School, in New Hampshire; and Emma Willard, an all-girls school near Albany, New York, have made such investigations public.

The Boston Globe Spotlight Team reported in May 2016 that at least 67 private schools in New England have faced accusations since 1991 that staffers sexually abused or harassed more than 200 students. The Spotlight team also found at least 90 lawsuits or other legal claims had been filed on behalf of the alleged victims, and at least 37 school employees were fired or forced to resign because of the allegations.

The Spotlight team later reported that educators accused of misconduct often found new jobs at other schools.

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The schools almost never reported suspected abuse to the authorities.

Such was the case with Lyman, who is one of 12 men named in the Choate report. He taught at the school from 1980 to 1982, and investigators say that during that time Lyman groomed and then sexually abused two young women. He served students tea spiked with rum and took them out for dinner and drinks. He wrote romantic letters. He had sex with them in his car and his apartment. He gave at least one of them herpes. He went on to stalk one of the girls, and left her with a black eye. The entanglements lasted for years.

Lyman was forced to leave Choate, but was given a recommendation and got another teaching job at a private school in Colorado, where he lasted two years. He appears to have left teaching in 1984.

But before he arrived at Choate, he was a teacher at Andover. It was there, during the summer session in 1979, that he was Marion’s English teacher.

Marion shared the series of letters — five in all, written in 1979 and 1980 — with The New York Times. They provide a rare window into the mind of a man who would later be accused of being a predator. Their relationship never became physical, but the letters show Lyman coaxing her to cross that line.

“It has haunted me all these years,” Marion said of the experience. “I see pictures of this young person that I was, and I wish I could tell her, ‘Run the other way!’”

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Lyman was given the opportunity to review the letters, and in response, he provided a statement through his lawyer:

“In re-reading these letters nearly 40 years after writing them, I see the ramblings of a lovesick young man who was 27 years old at the time,” he wrote in an e-mail. “However, my lapse in judgment was inexcusable. I breached the trust and overstepped the boundaries between student and teacher. Due to my own immaturity, I considered my students to be peers and friends, which was a mistake that I will regret for the rest of my life. I am deeply sorry for any pain or discomfort my actions may have caused.”

Marion said that exchanges between them began when she bought him a get-well card after he had missed class because he was feeling ill. He then began writing personal notes on her academic papers. He would give her a grade, critique her work and then, in a different colored pen, write something more familiar, asking her to play tennis, or saying he would help her break curfew.

She remembered talking to him about James Taylor and Robert Frost, listening to music in his apartment. They went off campus to the library together one day, alone. He was handsome and he was her teacher, and she was flattered. This was Marion’s first experience with what seemed like romance, she said, and she thought she was in love with him. But she was also frightened, and she kept a wall up between them.

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“There was this fantasy person, who I didn’t really want to have as my boyfriend, but I had a romantic notion of him,” she said. “And then there was this real man making these moves,” she added. “I think when I got too close to the flame, I would draw back.”

It appears in the letters that he noticed. Cathy Stephenson was a good friend of Marion’s at Andover, and for many years after. She said they had long, detailed conversations about Marion and Lyman that summer, the same way they talked about the boy Stephenson had a crush on. “It fit into our feeling that she was so special, that he saw how special she was,” Stephenson said. “They weren’t vulgar,” she said of his advances, but instead they seemed romantic. “We were kids and we were just so naive.”

In the fall of 1979, after Marion had returned home to Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, for her junior year, Lyman wrote her a letter that arrived in an Andover envelope: “Let me declare it — now — I would love to kidnap you for a weekend or for a portion of vacation,” he wrote in looped cursive. “We could go out on the town... go climbing... skiing (if you wait that long to visit!)... or wine and dine to our hearts delight. I’ll treat you like a queen.”

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Then, his tone shifted.

“If you don’t come... I’ll be so frustrated that I may never forgive you,” he wrote. “I’ll write terrible recommendations for you... send you hate mail... call you at obscure hours (i.e. 3 AM)... and swear a bloody streak. Get the hint!! I’m so subtle.”

Then it shifts again, to something more genial. “So,” Lyman asks, “how’s my star English student? All As in school? Dates every night? A steady romance?”

Next, a card arrived in which Lyman complains that she seems emotionally distant.

“Letters of obligation sometimes dampen the cherished spirit of what was previously shared,” Lyman wrote. “I don’t mean to imply that your letter has done this... but it read with far more facts than feeling... it didn’t sound like the Jane I knew. Oh well so much for feeling the pangs of distance and time.”

The next year, during the summer of 1980, Marion attended summer session at Harvard while Lyman was again teaching at Andover. Another woman approached The New York Times last month to say that during that summer, when she was a student, Lyman had tried to groom her, as well. They held hands and walked with their arms around one another. He would sing to her a James Taylor song. On a group camping trip, she woke in the middle of the night to find Lyman kissing and stroking her arms.

That same summer, he was writing letters to Marion and speaking to her by phone, trying to persuade her to meet him in Boston.

“Dearest Jane,” began a letter he sent in early July. “I miss you so much.”

Lyman continued: “So you’re a Harvard girl? Would you accept a night or two out on the town? Or an adventure out to Ashby? I’d love to see you. Please call collect any night.” He signed off: “I’m so glad you’re in Boston. Love, Rick.”

Tracy M. Sweet, a spokeswoman for Andover, said the school had referred reports about Lyman to an outside firm to investigate. The school announced last year that five former faculty members, three of whom it named, had abused students in the 1970s and 1980s. Lyman was not among them.

Lyman and Marion never did meet in Boston. They spoke by phone and she agreed to see him, but even as she was saying the words, she recalled thinking, “How am I going to get out of this?” She called back and said that her parents were surprising her in town. He reacted angrily.

He started calling her repeatedly, Marion said, following through on the earlier threat to call at odd hours by phoning at midnight or 1 a.m. It felt as though he was stalking her, she said. She put a note on the phone in her dorm at Harvard that said, “If Rick calls, Jane died.” Lyman wrote her a final letter, postmarked July 17, 1980, this one punched out on a typewriter using yellow composition paper, and they never spoke again.

“Dear Jane,” he wrote. “I can’t believe your attitude. What did I do to deserve silence and the cold shoulder?”

He went on: “Right now I feel quite slighted. I’m baffled. All I really want is the understanding of the truth... I don’t intend to beg for a date or anything of the sort. But I don’t want to leave you in the back of my mind with a sense of bitterness. I think you deserve more than that.”

Toward the end of the letter, Lyman wrote that he had never intended his advances to be taken as romantic, a sentiment that left Marion confused for years.

“If you think I wanted any sort of love relationship you’re way off target,” he wrote. “I’m free and fancy and I have no desire for anything but friends. I love wild times of fancy dinners and plays, but commitments and sexuality are not where I’m bound. For now I’m light hearted to the core, except when it comes to friendships,... and then I am as succeptable as they come. Right now I feel truly pierced.”

He signed the letter, “My love, Rick.”

From there, Marion said, she slipped into a rocky period. She became depressed, and right around that time, she developed an eating disorder.

Eventually, she put it behind her. She got married and had children. Today she is an editor at Baltimore magazine. She never considered herself to be a victim of anything, she said, but she felt unsettled by the experience. Then last month, she learned what Lyman is accused of having done at Choate, and her own experience clicked into place.

“Every few years, for the past 38 years, I have reread the letters to see if I was missing something,” Marion said in an e-mail, “to see if I could understand what was on the other end of those unfinished lines, to see if I had been wrong or been wronged. I can now say with certainty that I was wronged. Knowing that has given me complete closure.”