In the 1990s, a beloved high school teacher in Seattle was rumored to be sexually abusing a student. Students at the school newspaper started investigating. The teacher later died by suicide. A new podcast from KUOW dives deep into the story — exploring what really happened back then. Isolde Raftery, managing editor at KUOW, was also a student in that high school in the 90s. She brings us the story.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. In the fall of 1999, a beloved science teacher and outdoor club leader at Seattle’s Garfield High School was put on leave. It happened after a senior named Isolde Raftery reported rumors that [the teacher] had sexually abused boys. A few months later, that teacher, Tom Hudson, died by suicide. The case rocked the high school community, but the truth about what Hudson had actually done never really came out – not until now.
Raftery is a managing editor at Seattle Public Radio station KUOW. She’s also the host of a new podcast series, “Adults in the Room.” It is her effort, more than 25 years later, to make sense of what happened. The seventh and final episode of the podcast came out this week.
Raftery joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Isolde Raftery: Thank you.
Miller: In order to understand the heart of this story, the ways and the reasons that Seattle Public Schools failed to stop an abusive teacher, we need to understand, I think, the role that he played at your high school. Can you describe post 84?
Raftery: Post 84 was, and still is, an outdoors program that takes, essentially, city kids out into the wilderness. They scuba dive, they go to Maui, they go to Mexico, they go to the Olympic National Park, they go camping just outside of Seattle. So they do so many different things. Tom Hudson didn’t actually start the club itself. He’s the reason the club became a real hub of the high school. And hundreds of students would join this club every year and go on trips.
He himself was larger than life. He had a thundering voice and made a lot of jokes. He was a prankster and he had this inner circle of kids around him, so he was a really charismatic leader. And he made a lot of things happen for kids. He was also viewed as someone who made the high school really pop, really shine, because of this program that he led at the school.
Miller: What led you to start investigating his conduct when you were a member of a high school newspaper?
Raftery: When I was a senior, I was an editor on the Garfield High School Messenger. And my best friend, Ella Hushagen, was also an editor. She heard a rumor about him abusing boys. We were working on an edition called “Student-Teacher Relationships.” And to make matters even messier, the reason we were doing this edition on student-teacher relationships, was that our principal had just been put on leave for a sexual relationship with a cheerleader.
So, we were understandably grappling with these issues. How close could we get to teachers? How close was too close? And we, as students at Garfield, were very close to our teachers. I call it kind of the cult of Garfield, the gospel of Garfield, where we would spend the night at our teachers’ houses, we would cat sit, we would go on vacation with them. Some students babysat for their teachers. So it was a very enmeshed community and we started questioning it.
We decided to do a whole edition of the student newspaper on it and that’s when the rumors surfaced. Ella took the rumor to our newspaper advisor who decided not to do anything. I took it and went to my mom, and later to the school district, and said, “we have to act on this.” So that’s how it came about, that’s how it got out. And then he was immediately put on leave.
Miller: I want to come back to your reporting and the school investigation of Tom Hudson. But just to spend a second on the principal who you just mentioned, one of the really striking details from some of the first episodes of the podcast was the student response. As you just said, the principal of the school, it seems, had been in many ways a beloved figure for a lot of students. He was put on leave after it came out that he had had a sexual relationship with one of your fellow students, with a young girl who was a senior.
Can you tell us about the student response to that, keeping in mind the FCC rules?
Raftery: Yeah. The students staged a walkout and they walked out of school. I wasn’t a part of the walkout. I documented it in my diary later because I found it very amusing actually. I wasn’t even outraged, but students walked out. They were furious that our teacher, our principal would have been put on leave. And I guess I won’t say what the chant was, but it was a very vulgar chant, very funny. And basically, the kids rallied around him instead of viewing it as potentially an abusive relationship.
Back then, it actually was not illegal to be sleeping with an [18-year-old] student in Washington state. She was a senior. It was legal back then to sleep with an 18-year-old student.
Miller: And the students, as you reported then in your diary but now in the podcast, had a rhyming slogan where they minimized the sexual act. But what was so shocking and I guess illuminating was this was a way for me to understand how students viewed a sexual relationship between, in this case, an administrator and a fellow student – that it was no big deal.
Raftery: It was no big deal. Yeah, that’s right.
Miller: So to go back to then, you, as a member of the newspaper, were seen as somebody who was critical of Tom Hudson, this science teacher and leader of this outdoor program. How did members of the school community, both students and teachers, respond to you once it was announced that Tom Hudson was under investigation?
Raftery: I was very loud about my criticism, so I didn’t hide that I had played a large role in reporting him. I took credit for him being put on leave, because I thought he was a bad person. It was very black and white thinking. And I had been a kid who … I was homecoming princess. It feels weird to [say] I was popular. But I was well liked. And all of a sudden, I realized it was like a massive chilling effect. I felt like nobody really wanted to talk to me anymore.
One of my teachers lost my physics test, and I then had to retake the test, and then ended up with a low grade in the class. I mean, it’s stuff like that. And then I got fired by my journalism teacher, my best friend and I were. Well, he tried to fire us. He didn’t actually manage to fire us, but he said he was firing us for spreading rumors. That was really the big blow because we loved our newspaper and the staff. And it felt like a really big part of our identities.
Miller: As you report, it wasn’t even just the internal school community that responded to you this way. Tom Hudson died by suicide a few months after the district’s investigation was announced. What kind of a response was there after that from the broader Seattle community and the major city newspapers?
Raftery: The newspapers, at first, wrote articles that just praised the man and questioned the people who brought forward the allegations – myself and my best friend, who were teenagers. The Seattle Times main columnist wrote a column comparing him to Socrates and saying that, while we’ll never know why he ended up dying, we know that the allegations helped drive him to his death. I think it literally said the allegations played a role in killing him. So as an adult, I think reading that, I’d be like, “What? Come on.” But as a teenager, someone was saying out loud from the newspaper pulpit, that I was to blame and that I may have killed a man. That was really jarring and it was shocking to hear that as a child.
Also, he had a funeral service, a memorial service, where 1,000 people showed up. I actually went and most of the speakers talked about the allegations. There were lawsuits filed to have the case records released. The newspapers ultimately did go to court to get the investigatory records released. I’ve read those and it’s teachers calling the allegations false. So that was the vibe going on.
And after he died by suicide, a girl stopped me and said, “Congratulations, you killed Tom Hudson.” And that wasn’t just a one off. I mean that felt very much like the energy around me and around my best friend. And we were then put on suicide watch for a few days after he died because they didn’t want us at school. They were afraid of how our classmates would treat us. They were also, I think, nervous about what we might do to ourselves.
Miller: Why did you decide to investigate all of this again?
Raftery: That is such a good question. Ella called me during the pandemic and said, “let’s investigate this and let’s do a podcast.” I sort of thought she would forget about it, and I would just say, yeah, sure, and we interviewed a few people. And we interviewed a few people like our good friends, and we realized everybody had a different memory of what had happened because we’d never really compared notes. And that’s when I realized how little we knew.
I kind of kept going. Ella is an attorney and she has a big job, so ultimately she had to return to it. But I kept going and KUOW, where I work in Seattle, was like, sure. They gave me producers and an editor, and as we started learning more and more, I realized that Tom Hudson had preyed on multiple boys, and it was very bad what happened, and I hadn’t realized that. So I felt like the story needed to be about what really happened, because people had questions. Also it was just like, oh, we should expose this.
But then we started realizing, as we were going through records and getting more records, how many warnings had been issued to the school district. Teachers warned the school district about this guy and nobody did anything. And that’s when, as a journalist, you go, wait a minute, this could have stopped years before some of my classmates got harmed? And that’s when I felt like I have to do a big story on this, and that’s what kept me going.
Miller: You eventually did get a number of your classmates to talk to you on the record, men now in their 40s if my math is correct, who had never talked publicly about the abuse that they experienced. Why did they want to talk now?
Raftery: They want change. I think they believe that things probably haven’t changed enough. And certainly I think they really are thinking about other survivors and hoping that people hear them speak out and realize that speaking out is possible. You don’t have to do this alone, you don’t have to go on your healing journey alone. They all had slightly different reasons. One was very much interested in the systemic change, and that’s why he was very interested in talking. So they had different reasons, but it was for the social good.
It was really hard on them to do this and they’re putting themselves out there. And ultimately, I believe that they’ve had a really positive response from their family, friends, coworkers, just other people who want to get in touch with them. So it’s been very positive. But they weren’t sure if it would be. I think they were worried there might be a blowback.
Miller: What patterns eventually emerged in Tom Hudson’s behavior?
Raftery: Tom Hudson is a classic predator. He first tests the boys, usually in the form of a shower, in which they would be naked. He’s an outdoors guy, so they’re always out in the wilderness or maybe they’re at a gym. OK, now we’re dirty, we gotta take a shower. That was his MO. Then, depending on how the boys would react, if they were open to that, he would take it a step further. Maybe there’d be a solo camping trip.
And he would keep going from there, essentially they’d be touching. It would evolve over time. As one of the survivors said to me, it was never that you just leap to the final act. You actually start and it’s a thousand boundaries violated. Each one feels like you’re just pushing the boundaries further and further until you’re suddenly saying yes to the big one, as opposed to the first boundary, [which] was much smaller and benign seeming.
Miller: Some of the survivors of Tom Hudson’s abuse are still reckoning with how to separate, for themselves, the good aspects of their time in Post 84 from the harm. This is how Jason Fox put it.
Jason Fox [on tape]: There was a lot of good things, a lot of good qualities that Tom imbued in me and others about self-reliance, dependency and resilience, and how to survive in the world, especially when I go into the military. And just how to be compassionate and caring. So like now, all of a sudden because I now have associated this bad thing with that, does that negate all the good? How do I figure out how to not throw away the baby with the bathwater?
Miller: And this is Ocean Mason.
Ocean Mason [on tape]: I am who I am today, and I am in the world and the way I am, in part due to the things that he gave me. And that’s the part I can’t pull apart. They are inextricably linked. And it’s still hard for me to see, cleanly, what was mine and what was not mine. Was the good in service of the harm from him? And I don’t think I have an answer to that. I don’t know if there is an answer to that. But I do think that there are ways to get the good without the harm, that we can have amazing teachers who trust kids to be themselves, who give them adult responsibilities without harming them in the process. I think there are ways to do that without violating children.
Miller: Given some of the similarities, and we don’t have time to get into all of them, but between the boundaryless environments of Post 84 and the newspaper where you so passionately worked, I’m curious how you’ve come to think about this issue? Even for yourself, separating the good you got from your time at the newspaper, from the trauma – which I don’t think is too strong a word – that you experienced from the journalism teacher there?
Raftery: Making this podcast has changed me at a cellular level. I believed, really up until making this podcast, that to have a good product – and I’m in journalism – you had to completely enmesh with the people around you. So my relationships at work were very enmeshed. I believed you had to be so close, like share all your secrets, be best friends with everybody around you, to have a good product. And I believe that comes from what I learned at Garfield. To have a great experience in Post 84 or the student newspaper, you had to be completely in a symbiotic relationship with everybody around you.
So with this podcast, I would say I created healthier boundaries for myself. And it was interesting having a younger producer say, “no, that wasn’t OK,” when I would talk about something with my journalism advisor. Because I hadn’t quite realized certain things weren’t OK. So, I would love to say I showed up to this with a very clean idea of what is right and wrong with these power dynamics. Really, I think I mostly do, but there were ways in which I really didn’t. So it’s been healing for me in that way.
More than anything though, I was really nervous about re-traumatizing people. Because it was my decision to say we’re gonna be doing this now, we’re gonna be talking about this issue that really hurt you. And I wasn’t getting people’s permission. I was just doing it. And I have gotten such amazing feedback and response from all my fellow classmates who have agreed it’s time to start talking about it. And they’ve talked about it really openly. So that has been really, really special.
Miller: Just in about 30 seconds, what did you learn when you talked to the new superintendent of Seattle Schools?
Raftery: I learned that they are in a jam, that they don’t really have a plan for figuring out how to stop predator teachers, and that they need to come up with something because they don’t really know what they’re doing. That’s a really awful way to put it, but it’s complex.
Miller: I only gave you 30 seconds. But I recommend that people listen to the entire series, including the last episode where there is an extended portion of the interview with the new superintendent. Isolde, thanks so much.
Raftery: Thank you so much.
Miller: Isolde Raftery is the managing editor at KUOW, the host of the podcast “Adults in the Room.”
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