In the winter of 1993, a tall, ragged-looking young man stood at the gates of Upper Canada College, the most exclusive private school in the country. Many thought he was a panhandler, and he was soon hustled off the property by security.
But Bud Wilson wasn't looking for spare change -- he was looking for someone to listen to what had happened to him 18 years before, when he was an 11-year-old boy, spending his first night at the school.
Mr. Wilson had first gone to school administrators in 1975. He told them that in September of that year, on the night he had slept in the elementary dormitory for the first time, he had been sexually assaulted by teacher Doug Brown. (It had been Mr. Brown's first night at the school as well.) Mr. Wilson was the first in a series of boys to claim abuse at the hands of Mr. Brown, but it was decades before their allegations came to the attention of the police. After listening to Mr. Wilson's claims in 1975, school officials launched an "internal investigation," but there was no effect -- Mr. Brown remained on staff for 18 more years.
In 2001, Mr. Brown was charged with a string of sexual assaults. On Monday, his trial is scheduled to begin in a Toronto courthouse after years of legal complications. The trial is expected to offer an unprecedented glimpse into a controversial era at Canada's most storied private school.
At least nine former students have now come forward to make allegations against Mr. Brown, who quietly left the school in 1993 after Mr. Wilson returned to reiterate his allegations. Although many dismissed him as unstable and unreliable -- "if he told you it was raining, you'd go outside and check the weather," one teacher sniffed -- Mr. Wilson's campaign apparently shook the bushes, and led to a series of similar complaints.
Like many of the other alleged victims, Mr. Wilson was a son of privilege whose life came unhinged after his experience at UCC. Mr. Wilson's father was a real-estate magnate with the money to send his son to the most expensive private school in the country. But that blue-chip beginning has meant nothing: By all accounts, including his own, Mr. Wilson's life since then has been a disaster, a decades-long slide into substance abuse, petty crime and personal despair.
"I've lost everything," he said recently from Vancouver, where he was living in a halfway house and preparing for yet another round at a detox centre. "It wasn't supposed to be like this."
The charges against Mr. Brown were the first in a series of legal setbacks for UCC, whose alumni include some of Canada's most respected and influential citizens. Since 2001, three other teachers have been charged with sex-related crimes, and a fourth was named in a lawsuit by former student Ron Fenn, who charges that he was raped in 1971. (That lawsuit was settled in November of 2003, when the school paid an undisclosed amount of money to Mr. Fenn.) The school also faces two additional lawsuits. In one of them, former student Yvan Prodeus has been joined by 16 other UCC alumni in a class-action suit that charges the school knew that Mr. Brown was a predatory pedophile, yet did nothing about it.
James FitzGerald, a UCC alumnus who wrote a book about the school called Old Boys, says the criminal charges against the former teachers, along with the lawsuits, have created "shell shock" among school insiders. "When you look at the number of cases, it's unbelievable," he says. "It's a lot for them to deal with."
Mr. Brown's case, in particular, has been costly for the school, due to the number of complainants and the accompanying lawsuit. Last year, the school raised tuition by 8 per cent to cover rising legal bills and fund claims by victims. The annual tuition at the school now ranges from $19,105 to $20,855, not including boarding costs.
Insiders say the Brown trial is the school's "worst nightmare," since it will provide an opportunity for the public and the press to hear firsthand about the alleged wrong-doings at the school, and about the administration's handling of the complaints.
Mr. FitzGerald says UCC insiders have spent the past three years praying that the charges against Mr. Brown would be found baseless and be dismissed, or that Mr. Brown would quietly negotiate a plea bargain.
Even after all that the school has endured since Mr. Brown was first charged, Mr. FitzGerald says, the prospect of testimony by the alleged victims will be a renewed test for UCC: "It's a watershed moment," he says. "This is the last thing they wanted. The negative publicity is going to be incredible."