US teacher resigns after being accused of sexually abusing a student

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

The school also held an assembly to inform students about the investigation and sent a letter to parents alerting them that there may be additional 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.

US English teacher resigns over sexual abuse allegations

The school also stated that it had filed a police report and hired an investigation firm specializing in harassment and sexual abuse cases. Naaman, a mother and former Fulbright scholar who describes herself as a “writer, scholar and humanist,” was a tenured assistant professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Williams College in Massachusetts, where she spent seven years before returning in 2017. Her work has been published in various journals, including the Journal of Arabic Literature.

She taught English literature to students in grades 9 through 12 at the school, whose annual tuition is $61,000. According to the school’s website, she was also appointed “house counselor,” responsible for ““Creating a safe environment for conversations about personal responsibility.”

This is not the first time the school has come under scrutiny. 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 institution, whose graduates include several celebrities, gained notoriety when it emerged during the prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein that the millionaire pedophile had worked there as a physics and mathematics teacher in 1973.