I've never been involved in such a firestorm,” says investor and newspaper executive J. The Marlborough community descended into name-calling, accusations of a cover-up, threats to withhold donations, and “gallons of tears. Meanwhile it absolved the board of all responsibility and downplayed the most explosive episode, which was far more damaging than anyone had imagined. The committee noted that the investigation revealed a “pattern of misconduct by Joe Koetters,” but it pinned the blame for how it was handled on one individual-Barbara Wagner, the beloved head of the school for 26 years. The front gate of the Marlborough School. The board of trustees put together a “special investigative committee,” consisting of five of its own members, that would look into and resolve the crisis. They're flirtatious and dramatic.’ ” But with sex abuse on campus dominating the national headlines, the school had a potential crisis on its hands. Among current Marlborough parents, who came of age mostly in the 70s and 80s, the reaction, says one, “was ‘Big whoop. But in person he evidently oozed charisma.īuzzfeed broke the story about these girls (who remain anonymous), and the Los Angeles Times followed. His yearbook photo shows a doughy blond resembling Conan O'Brien sidekick Andy Richter. The basic pattern, according to the girls: he validated as brilliant their insights into human nature while pitting them against one another for his affection, bitching about his wife (a Santa Monica gynecologist) and kids, and finding reasons to have private meetings, which often climaxed with him putting his hand on a girl's knee. Joseph Koetters, now 47, who had been head of the school's English department.Įight other girls contacted Mikaela via Facebook with their own stories about Koetters. To the girls reading the article, there was no doubt about it. The essay was not long, the details scant, but within a day or two it went viral among graduates of Marlborough School, an elite all-girls private school in Hancock Park, Los Angeles, that for 126 years has been educating the girls of California's most prominent families-with such last names as Spielberg, Goldwyn, Bloomingdale, Ahmanson, Booth (of the Los Angeles Times), and Munger (of Berkshire Hathaway). When she complained to school administrators, all they did was require the teacher to undergo counseling. The relationship had culminated, she wrote, in the teacher's professing how attracted he was to her and touching her knee. Last summer, Mikaela Gilbert-Lurie, a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, posted a personal essay on the Web site, about a flirtation with a certain, unnamed English teacher at a certain unnamed high school. It was the kind of article that might have gone unnoticed.

Marlboro high school