close
close

English teacher at elite US school resigns after being accused of sexually abusing a student

Teacher at elite school in the USA resigns after being accused of sexually abusing a student

She taught English literature in grades 9 to 12 at the school,

A high school teacher at an elite private school in the US has resigned after being accused of sexually abusing a former student. According to the New York Post, Mara Naaman, 50, resigned four days after the Dalton School received a letter about the alleged misconduct. The letter was written on behalf of a former student who claimed the English teacher mistreated her between 2020 and 2022.

The school also held an assembly to inform high school students about the investigation and sent an email to parents warning that there may be more victims.

“We are only releasing the teacher’s name so that anyone with relevant information can provide it. Our priority is to determine the credibility of these claims and whether there are other allegations of abuse from other members of the community,” said an email from school principal Jose De Jesus.

The school also said it had filed a police report and hired a firm specializing in harassment and sexual abuse to investigate.

Of particular note, Ms. Naaman, a mother and former Fulbright scholar who describes herself as a “writer, scholar, humanist,” was a tenured assistant professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Williams College in Massachusetts, where she spent seven years before joining the school in 2017. Her work has been published in various journals, including the Journal of Arabic Literature.

She taught English literature for grades 9 through 12 at the school, which costs $61,000 a year, and was also named “house counselor,” responsible for “creating a safe space for conversations about personal responsibility,” the school’s website says.

This is not the first time the school has attracted controversy. In 2018, former principal Gardner Dunnan was accused in a federal lawsuit of sexually abusing a 14-year-old student who lived with him and his wife in 1986.

The school, whose graduates include several celebrities, also gained notoriety during the trial of Jeffrey Epstein, when it emerged that the billionaire pedophile had worked there as a physics and mathematics teacher in 1973.