Question Authority - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rachel Cline, author of the novels What to Keep and My Liar, has written for the New York Times, New York, More, SELF, and Tin House magazines, and is a produced screen and television writer. For five years, she was a screenwriting instructor at the University of Southern California and has taught fiction writing at New York University, Eugene Lang College, and Sarah Lawrence College. She has been a resident at Yaddo, a fellow at Sewanee, and a Girls Write Now mentor. She lives in Brooklyn Heights, a few blocks from where she grew up.

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Excerpt, Zero Tolerance

“I thought we had ‘zero tolerance.’”

“Think about it. They’re not that easy to catch in the act—I mean, that’s happened, but like then someone calls the cops.”

I try to picture how a pedophile operates in a school. Of course, I already know: he writes understanding notes in the margins of the girl’s homework, tells her she’s pretty, that she can come to him anytime she ever “needs to talk.”

“The girl’s a teenager,” Jocelyn explains, “so half the time they think they’re in love. It’s like a spy movie, you know?”

In eighth grade, my best friend was fucking our teacher—as were several others at our fancy girls’ school, the Academy. In 1971, the word “pedophile” was not so commonplace and Bob Rasmussen was all of twenty-six, not what we then called a “dirty old man.” But I have come around to the realization, and it’s taken me a long time to get there, that he was a predator. “So, what do we offer in a case like this?”

The cases I’ve had to settle so far (which is what I do, settle lawsuits—think insurance adjuster) have been mundane: mostly staff claiming they were wrongfully terminated or made to work “out of category”—the worst case scenario is that we wind up paying them what they want, or give them their jobs back. It’s depressing but no one is materially harmed. (Well, except maybe the schoolchildren whose schools don’t have science books or working toilets because of all the money the department has to spend on lawsuits.) Anyway, when we settle we just give the other side some grand sum and, in return, they stipulate that they won’t sue us anymore, or defame us, or join a class action. I can’t imagine what the agreement could possibly say in a case like this one: we’ll pay you to go away and in return you’ll pretend you weren’t really a pedophile?