BRATTLEBORO-What does accountability look like? How does a school district repair a legacy of harm?
Reading Linda Hecker's self-pitying opinion piece, it's clear that not much has changed in our community since the revelations of "No more secrecy" [Viewpoint, Aug. 25, 2021], a memoir written by Brattleboro Union High School alum Mindy Haskins Rogers over three years ago.
The WSESD school board's refusal to release the results of their years-long sexual abuse investigation has emboldened Mrs. Hecker to write and publish what I consider a classic example of DARVO.
The acronym DARVO refers to a reaction that perpetrators may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior: deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender.
In portraying herself as a victim of harassment, Mrs. Hecker denies the experiences of survivors who were allegedly groomed and/or abused at the hands of her husband. She denies her own role in enabling that grooming and instead flips the script, claiming that she is an "outcast" whose life has been ruined.
Mrs. Hecker asserts that she has "always acted professionally with [her] students and with minors everywhere," despite the grooming behavior Ms. Rogers described in chilling detail in "No More Secrecy."
Nowhere in her piece does Mrs. Hecker acknowledge that she is married to a man who has described himself as a "child molester." She does not mention that her husband, Robert "Zeke" Hecker, a longtime BUHS English teacher, was banned from the high school campus in 2009 following multiple police investigations into his sexual exploitation of students.
Mrs. Hecker's rhetorical strategy of repeating the phrase "false allegations" is an effective one. Vermont's statute of limitations ensures that no criminal charges can ever be brought against Zeke Hecker. There will be no public trial in which the details of the alleged abuse - and the roles of those who enabled it - will ever be aired.
She mentions that she has had to seek legal counsel, so we can assume that her attorney informed her and her husband that Vermont's laws protecting public discourse are strong - and that the truth is the ultimate defense in a defamation lawsuit.
The #MeToo movement, founded by activist Tarana Burke, went viral in 2017 and empowered survivors of sexual violence all over the world to tell their stories. Mrs. Hecker seems to have missed the memo that the catchphrase is not "believe the woman," but "believe survivors."
Diana Whitney
Brattleboro
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