Episode 2: Price of Belief, Adults in the Room

A warning: this episode touches on sexual and physical abuse. Please take care while listening.

This is a serialized story. You may want to start at the beginning, with Episode 1: Mounting Danger. What follows is a transcript of Episode 2.

“The condom broke on a Saturday.”

That was the opening line of the first story I ever wrote for The Messenger… the student newspaper at Garfield High School, in Seattle.

I was 16 years old.

The article was about the morning-after pill….

Edgy…

And sure to get my journalism teacher’s attention…

Which I desperately wanted. We all did.

His name… was David Ehrich.

When I went to Garfield in the late ‘90s, journalism was like a varsity sport.

It was hard to get a position on the student newspaper...

And Mr. Ehrich rejected me at first.

I had to sit on the floor by my best friend’s desk in the newsroom every day to prove I was committed enough… until he finally relented.

For those who DID make it, the schedule was punishing.

We’d stay until 10 p.m. many nights, working on the next edition.

Miss a deadline?

Mr. Ehrich would ream you out in front of everybody.

Whisper when he was talking…

…beware the pen he’d throw at your head.

Mind you, Mr. Ehrich gave us a lot of freedom. We came up with the story ideas. We wrote the editorials.

But there was a throne, and Mr. Ehrich sat on it.

He was King … and kingmaker.

If Mr. Ehrich liked you, he’d give you a plum role.

And hopefully, a strong college recommendation letter.

Mr. Ehrich said he wrote the best ones.

…So for super-achievers like us, winning him over was a huge deal.

But it wasn’t just about a letter.

We craved being singled out as special.

A misstep could mean the worst fate imaginable: being ignored.

At Garfield, this drive for recognition went beyond the Messenger.

And nowhere was it more evident than in Post 84, the school’s outdoor education club…

… which took hundreds of kids into the wilderness every year.

They climbed mountains in the Pacific Northwest and scuba dived in Hawaii.

Post 84 was run by Tom Hudson, one of Garfield's most celebrated teachers.

He orchestrated a cult of personality that had kids clamoring to sign up for these excursions…

…which sometimes… lacked necessary safety controls.

I investigated and wrote about the climb he led on Mount Olympus in Washington State…

which left Hudson and several club members injured.

But my story barely made a dent in the reputation of a man who engendered so much devotion at Garfield.

Like Dave Ehrich, Mr. Hudson created a hierarchy – of which he was firmly in control.

He incentivized loyalty.

His acolytes got to call him by his first name.

They even wore fern crowns as they followed him through the woods.

I called them Hudsonites.

This may seem strange to you -- high school students seeking out close relationships with their teachers.

But this was the gospel according to Garfield…

and we all believed the unusual intimacy between us made the school great.

Until my senior year…when scandal rocked the school…

…And my best friend Ella Hushagen and I started interrogating that gospel.

We dedicated an entire issue of The Messenger to our newfound suspicions…

and asked if this culture of devotion made us vulnerable to our teachers’ darker impulses.

It was a bold question. … One that a lot of people didn’t want us to ask…

…because it poked holes in a sacred narrative…the foundational myth of our legendary high school.

We couldn’t have known it at the time…

but that edition of the Messenger would kick off a chain of events…

leading to a tragedy that Ella and I would be blamed for.

A tragedy that changed many of our lives forever.

A tragedy that we’re only coming to terms with now.

From KUOW in Seattle this is Adults in the Room. Episode 2: The price of belief. I’m Isolde Raftery.

Act 1:

[HOMECOMING SOUND]

On YouTube, I found this video of Garfield’s Homecoming rally in 1998.

The audio’s kinda hard to hear… It’s taken from an old VHS recording.

But I love it. I remember this rally so well. I was a junior.

[Music picks up: sound of horns]

The entire school was packed into the gym – more than a thousand of us, a sea of purple and white. We squished next to each other like teen sardines as the marching band laid into their horns. The brass was blasting.

The tall white dude on the gym floor – gyrating slowly? That’s my buddy Forest. He was a cheerleader. And the cheerleaders owned the gym.

Within seconds, everyone was standing. The good mood was catching … and we were grooving as one. Black, white, Asian, all together.

So what if the room smelled like a sweaty deep fryer?

Our homecoming kings could be proudly gay, our homecoming queens loud and funny. We hailed our nerds. We bowed down to the bump and grind.

Welcome to Garfield, let your freak flag fly!

Whenever I watch this video, I lose myself in the moment... the beauty of it all … kids of different races and backgrounds .. dancing… unselfconscious … happy.

Decades before, in the Garfield gym, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave an early version of his I Have A Dream speech.

According to lore, MLK said that Garfield…

with its racially diverse student body…

… was that dream.

But it was a trick of the light.

At the assembly, we were together… but in our classes, we were apart.

Garfield is in the Central District, Seattle’s historically Black neighborhood.

But I was bussed in from the city’s north end…

for Garfield's “Advanced Placement” program.

We were called the “AP Kids” for short… most of us white or Asian.

In contrast, almost all the Black students were in the quote unquote, “regular classes.”

Kids in the regular classes often didn’t get textbooks...

But us AP kids got one book for our lockers…

One for home…

And one for the classroom.

The regular class kids got photocopies of our books.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t see how unfair this was back then. As a student reporter, I saw inequities everywhere.

Like how Garfield’s sports teams got locker rooms…

And free uniforms… …but our cheerleaders didn’t.

So, I pitched an article about the cheer squad to the Messenger.

At first, our sports editor felt the story was too frivolous.

‘What a waste of column inches,’ he told me.

But I thought Garfield cheerleaders were more than athletes deserving equal treatment.

They were stars… mostly bigger bodied Black girls who moved together like water.

And when they danced… we would lose... our... minds.

I convinced him to let me tackle it.

CHRISTINA: If you get out there and you're not good, it's bad for you at Garfield. That's all I knew.

Christina Mitchell was a senior in 1998 and had just joined the squad.

Christina took her role very seriously. At Garfield, she had to.

We let her know if she wasn’t bringing it.

CHRISTINA: Like you would literally get stuff thrown on, you know, at you and, you know, made fun of the whole year. So I was just like, Oh man, if I come out, I got it. I got to get this together, guys. ISOLDE: Yes.

CHRISTINA: We can't be coming out here halfway.

I remember Christina as kind, and so pretty…

…big brown eyes and lashes out to space.

CHRISTINA: I was definitely an outgoing person, and I, I guess I called myself a free spirit.

Christina was one of the best dancers on the Garfield squad.

I wanted to interview her … but I couldn’t find her.

One day, someone mentioned she might be outside.

So I went looking for her in the parking lot…

Sure enough, there was Christina.

She was sitting in the driver’s seat of our principal’s gray SUV. He was in the passenger seat next to her.

Is Dr. Jones…. teaching her how to drive? I wondered.

It wouldn’t be surprising if he was…

After all, teachers did a lot for students at Garfield.

Plus, Dr. Jones was cool. He was a respected Black leader, which gave him credibility in the neighborhood around Garfield… and he seemed to genuinely care about us …

Christina: He was always there at the games with all the cheerleaders. He was doing a lot of stuff to help everyone … and he had this quirky sense of personality. He would literally lecture me ... hours of, hours of lectures … It was like that 24/7 with him, definitely like, like a super, super, super educator.

At Garfield, these tight relationships between students and teachers often continued outside school hours.

I had friends who slept over at our teachers’ homes. My best friend Ella and I cat-sat for one, houseboat-sat for another.

We did this for free…

…like we’d been specially selected for these tasks…

…as though the chores were gifts reserved for the best and brightest students.

Shoveling cat turds – what an honor.

I never did interview Christina. But I wrote about the Garfield cheerleaders... and moved on to the next story. The school year ended, and Christina graduated.

I spent that summer babysitting my little brother, every day, for $3 an hour.

At night, I rode around with my friends… and my boyfriend, Toby Crittenden.

Toby was a Post 84 kid… and close to Mr. Hudson.

In August, he went on a scuba diving trip to Maui with Mr. Hudson and students from the club.

When they got back, Toby mentioned something that caught my ear.

He said that one day, he was helping Mr. Hudson haul gear across the island… and Mr. Hudson said he was tired.

He pulled over to the side of the road, got in the back of the truck, and urged Toby to lie down and nap alongside him.

Which he did…

I didn’t know what to make of that. But Toby didn’t seem too bothered.

I asked Toby recently if he remembered this. He didn’t. But his mom did. And it struck her as … not wrong per se, but definitely odd.

A week or two later, I heard a second story about Mr. Hudson.

A close friend of mine told me Mr. Hudson had invited him to play racquetball at a local gym.

Afterward, Mr. Hudson insisted they shower together… and in the gym’s locker room, while they were naked… Mr. Hudson whipped his butt with a towel.

My friend made it sound awkward and uncomfortable... but no weirder than seeing your dad change.

Come fall, and the start of school, Ella and I began our new jobs as editors at the Messenger.

We were ready to have the greatest senior year ever.

But then, in October, big news broke.

The school district put our principal… Dr. Jones… on leave.

Rumors swirled as we tried to figure out why.

Was he inflating test scores?

Embezzling school funds?

Here’s how Ella remembers the school administration letting us know:

ELLA: They put out this announcement that was very vague. It was like, oh, you know, inappropriate relationship with a student. An… inappropriate relationship… with a student??

We were hanging out at our teachers’ houses…traveling with them…sleeping over. So what did ‘inappropriate’ even mean?

And who was the student??

A week after the announcement, I found out.

I bumped into an acquaintance on the bus. She told me that Dr. Jones was involved with her big sister…

Christina! The cheerleader I tried to interview for the Messenger.

I was stunned.

Dr. Jones was 54 years old…

He had two adult kids of his own…

What the heck…

News of the relationship spun the school into chaos.

You might assume people thought our principal was a creep for sleeping with a student… but you’d be wrong.

The student body wanted Dr. Jones reinstated. In a diary entry from this time, I wrote about a school walkout in protest of his removal.

Students marched down Alder Street and chanted…

“So DJ got a BJ - who cares?”

I watched from The Messenger office. Local reporters stood across the street … waiting to interview the protestors.

But the rally accomplished nothing – Dr. Jones was forced to resign.

He left Seattle.

And Christina seemingly disappeared too.

I never found out what happened to her – until Ella and I started working on this podcast.

Garfield had been so focused on losing Dr. Jones…it was like nobody cared how the scandal affected Christina. She’d been forgotten.

But she likely had a lot to say about how Garfield’s culture of closeness could turn exploitative.

If she was willing to revisit that time in her life.

I found Christina on Facebook and sent her a message.

She replied immediately… And over a phone call, told me what happened.

Senior year, Christina scored low on the ACTs… and didn’t think she’d get into college. At the time, she was desperate to get away from her dad…

He was strict and expected her to be home caring for her younger siblings. At least cheerleading got her out of the house.

With few options left, Christina signed up for the military.

And Dr. Jones… who often hung around the cheerleaders… found out.

CHRISTINA: "And he was just like, What are you doing? And I was just like, Well, I don't think I'm college material. And once I started talking about all the things I didn't really think I was capable of doing, he was like, Oh, no, we're going to make this happen."

Christina said that for a long time, Dr. Jones was just a mentor.

He helped her write essays and apply to schools... and thanks to Dr. Jones, she got into Western Washington University, in Bellingham, north of Seattle.

Christina said things became physical with him just before she graduated.

CHRISTINA: “It wasn't really romantic and that's what made it kind of weird. I just loved him in a way like, wow, no one's ever done this for me.

“You don't make me feel bad for things I don't know. Yeah. You know, cause sometimes I would be mixed, I would get made fun of because I was a little slow, slower in school, and it would take me longer to catch on.

“It was just so amazing that he just treated me… He never belittled me. He never made me feel embarrassed by it. ”If a person wanted to manipulate someone or sleep with someone younger than them, they definitely wouldn't have to do all of those things that he did to make that happen.”

Christina left for college. And then … her dad found out about her relationship with Dr. Jones.

She said her dad got mad at her… and told the school district what he knew.

CHRISTINA: “ It was like my whole entire family turned on me.”

Distraught, Christina dropped out of college and crashed with a friend in the Seattle area.

But by then, her story had made the news.

And she couldn’t leave the house without someone shaming her.

CHRISTINA: “They would come up to me, they would be like, Oh, you're that girl. You know, you're that girl in the news with the principal.

“I remember staying with my friend, and I remember us going somewhere, and um, they recognized me, you know, and were pointing and talking about me.

“It was really bad for me, you know, and that's what people don't understand. It's like, if my dad wanted to punish me, uh, he definitely succeeded.”

The public ridicule pushed her closer to Dr. Jones.

They decided to move to Memphis, Tennessee, where nobody would know them.

Christina didn’t feel like she had another option.

But in Memphis, Dr. Jones blamed her for their situation…

Christina said he physically abused her.

CHRISTINA: “He was so angry about it, that I really didn’t really know where he was going to go… in terms of where he was mentally, like how angry can he be? Would he be angry enough to take me out?”

Dr. Jones died in 2013, so we can’t get his side of the story.

But Christina said she feared for her life… And left Dr. Jones.

Christina was homeless for a while … couch surfing where she could.

Eventually … she got back on her feet. Christina returned to college and became a special education teacher.

Today, she lives in New Orleans with her husband and kids. She thanks God every day for that stability.

But Christina’s relationship with our former principal still haunts her.

CHRISTINA: “It's easy to take advantage of an 18, 19 year old or young. You know, they have all these issues and problems, and I'm coming to the rescue with all these things. And naturally, naturally, they'll gravitate towards you in that way. No, but I just feel like, in my mind, that's taking advantage of someone else's disadvantage.”

Dr. Jones may have exploited Christina… but he didn't break any laws.

Back then, in Washington state, it was legal for a teacher to sleep with a student over 18 years old.

Which meant that their relationship was a question of morality, not one of law.

Ella and I were shaken by the news that Dr. Jones had sex with a student. So as we debated the theme for the next edition of the Messenger, this line between what was legal… and what was ethical… got us second-guessing our own relationships with teachers.

And we would pose a question that would rattle our school …

Just how close was too close? Act 2:

Each edition of The Messenger had a four-page spread called Focus.

One topic, lots of articles. Ella was the primary editor… but we often brainstormed together.

After Dr. Jones resigned, all we could think about was our teachers… and how we were seeing their behavior in a new light.

ELLA: "We did have these really cozy relationships with teachers that, that it was sort of like, is that qualifying? Or was there something more going on in this relationship?”

Ella and I started talking about moments with teachers that unsettled us.

Like the time Mr. Hudson made Toby nap with him on Maui…

… and whacked my friend’s butt in the shower.

Or when Mr. Ehrich threw a chair across the room in journalism class, because he was mad that two Messenger kids were whispering during an article brainstorm.

Maybe we did know what qualified as “inappropriate.”

And maybe… it was time to start writing about it.

Mr. Ehrich taught us to find relevant stories by taking a topic everyone is consumed with…. poking it, analyzing it … and then, zooming out.

Principal sleeps with cheerleader? How does that pertain to the rest of us at Garfield?

Ella and I had an idea.

ELLA: “We decided to do like a spread in the student newspaper to say ‘What is an inappropriate relationship between a teacher and a student, what does that look like?’ There were maybe three or four articles.”

Our main story explored the pros and cons of being close with teachers.

Another featured kids and teachers discussing the line between appropriate and inappropriate behavior.

And the third was an editorial – which I wrote with full dramatic flair.

It went like this.

“They have power over us. They develop our minds. We love them and we hate them; they inspire us, and they infuriate us. They are supposed to be our role models. Who are they? They’re our teachers, and that’s all they should be.”

Rosie Bancroft – the Post 84 student we heard from in Episode One – was also a reporter for The Messenger.

When Rosie learned about the upcoming issue… she had a pitch for Ella.

Rosie said a friend of hers from Post 84 had also been coerced by Mr. Hudson to shower with him…

He shared even more graphic details about their teacher’s behavior.

ROSIE: “Sometimes he was aroused in the shower.

“Sometimes he was like playing who dropped the soap in the shower. And then it went all the way to like providing pornography to students, watching it together with them, being out on the boat, drunk, driving the boat around in, very rough weather, having kids, like, stripped down naked and, dance on the deck of the boat?”

Rosie’s friend also told her that during a camping trip, Mr. Hudson had kicked him.

Rosie sat on all of this for months.

She didn't want to tell her parents…. That would violate her friend’s trust.

On the other hand… if she did nothing, then Mr. Hudson might continue hurting her friend… and other kids too.

ROSIE: “I have no idea what to do about it or who to tell or what would happen if we told… anyway. That’s why When that came up about the article, I think I was like, This. This is the chance.”

Rosie wanted to write about her friend’s allegations.

But Ella wasn’t so sure. She just wanted us to come up with a few stories about blurry boundaries for our next issue...

An investigation into potential abuse? That was well beyond our scope.

ELLA: “I said, I think we should talk to our teacher. Let's tell Dave Ehrich about this.”

Ella asked Mr. Ehrich to meet with her and Rosie, at the football field. The girls didn’t want anyone to overhear their conversation.

Once outside, they revealed what they heard about Mr. Hudson.

ELLA: “He basically said like, keep this under your hat... don't tell anyone else right now while I figure out how to handle it.”

But when the weekend hit, Ella did what any 90s teen would do.

She took the family cordless phone and called me, her best friend.

ELLA: “I thought it was,distressing to learn this about another student and about a teacher who was really well loved, and had tons of access to students.

“I also just felt like, you know, Isolde, you're my sounding board. You're my best friend. Like, what do I do?”

Ella thought I would agree with her, and let Mr. Ehrich have the weekend to think about Rosie’s friend’s allegations.

But that felt wrong to me.

ELLA: She just sort of had this very rational response which was like, this is abuse, and I'm telling my mom, who's also a mandated reporter, she's a social worker, and, you know, forget it.”

“I think I felt mad at her that she just, you know, did that.”

As a social worker, my mom was required by law to report allegations of child abuse.

I didn’t consider that if I told her about Mr. Hudson… I would betray Ella’s confidence…

… and expose Rosie and her friend to inquiries neither of them signed up for.

But it bothered me that everyone was talking about these allegations like they were a secret…

I was pretty sure they were crimes…

So… I sat my parents down… and I told them what I knew.

My mom has always been clutch in a crisis. This moment was custom made for her.

She said we needed to report the allegations and debated whether to call the police or Child Protective Services

My dad reacted differently. He said if I disclosed what I’d heard about Mr. Hudson, I risked destroying a program … and a man many people loved.

He said I could be called a liar. Shunned. Retaliated against.

Then my dad cleared his throat and told me something I’ll never forget.

If you report this, everything will change, he said.

Your life will be separated by the time before you reported it, and the time that came after.

Be very, very certain this is something you want to do.

I thought Mr. Hudson was on an overnight trip in the woods with Post 84 kids that weekend.

We have to tell someone, I said.

My mom got up from the table and went to the phone. She called the authorities … neither of us remembers now if it was the cops, Child Protective Services, or the school district.

The police might go out there tonight, she told me.

I pictured them weaving through backcountry roads, sirens blaring, to find Mr. Hudson… would they handcuff him?

Put him in the back of a squad car?

Would the Post 84 kids have to watch?

My mom hung up… the house was quiet.

And then … we waited. ACT 3:

Monday morning, I rode the school bus in.

My parents wouldn’t let me get a driver’s license… so I was one of two seniors …surrounded by a swarm of loud freshmen.

I felt shaky as I walked up the steps into Garfield.

I expected to enter a school that was frantic with the news that Mr. Hudson had been arrested.

When I got into the building, my eyes darted up and down the long, crowded hallway, looking for a sign that something was off.

Maybe a friend grabbing my arm, saying, did you hear what happened?

Then I saw some kids from Post 84 who looked … totally fine.

That’s because nothing had happened to Mr. Hudson.

He was in his classroom at that very moment, preparing for first-period biology.

I was stunned … my parents told me to expect backlash… I wasn’t prepared for silence.

I found Ella… who was still hoping Mr. Ehrich would step up.

Not much later, he pulled her aside and told her his plan for Mr. Hudson.

ELLA: “We're gonna talk man to man. Man to man, I definitely remember. “You know I'm gonna tell him that he needs to stop. That's how I'm gonna handle it, and, and, and, you don't need to tell anyone else, basically.”

But it was too late... Ella had already told me... and now, the authorities knew too.

Here’s where I need to pause and tell you something.

Over the weekend, I didn’t just share what I knew about Mr. Hudson with my parents. I also told my Aunt Mary…

… a prominent investigative journalist in Ireland.

In the U.S., people don’t generally know about Mary Raftery.

But in the late 90s in Ireland, she was a household name.

Mary had recently exposed how poor Irish children were locked up in institutions … and often abused by priests and nuns…

Her reporting caught the attention of U.S. news outlets, and it prompted investigations into abusive priests here.

When I told Mary about Mr. Hudson and Garfield … she said it reminded her of the priests she investigated – respected men who were trusted by society to be around children.

Charismatic men who groomed entire communities to look the other way.

As Mary had learned … and taught me … A predator wasn’t always who you would expect.

A predator didn’t necessarily present as a villain. He could wear a priest collar … or hiking boots … and flash a winsome smile as he took your kid for a ride on his boat.

Mary assured me I’d done the right thing by not sitting on the allegations …

And she gave me hope that given time, Mr. Hudson would be held accountable.

But as the week went on, Mr. Hudson remained at Garfield.

Ella and I obsessed over the situation…

Every day we went round and round, wondering how on earth Mr. Hudson seemed to be getting away with child abuse…

At lunch, I’d find a car to pile into and rant that no one cared about us kids.

My friends would get quiet – they didn’t know what to say to me.

Ella was incessant about Mr. Hudson too.

Toward the end of the week, she told her ex-boyfriend about the allegations from Rosie’s friend.

His reply shocked her. It turned out, Mr. Hudson had also pressured Ella’s ex to strip down and shower with him after they played racquetball together.

Ella’s ex talked to me for this podcast… but he didn’t want us to use his name.

ELLA’S EX: “He's like, naked, and I was naked. And I remember, like, the distinct thing that I remember was him... He had this kind of like... these big features and big cheekbones, and big kind of distinct face, and he had big kind of bushy eyebrows. I remember, like the water like running over his face, and then him kind of like opening and I like in the water, like big 'brawr', his eye like looking across the room at me. And I remember like, he's like distinctly looking at me. And that definitely felt kind of... weird.

“I stopped hanging out with Hudson and stopped doing stuff with that program at that point for that reason. And I don't really remember it being that distinct, like, I'm really freaked out by this, I don't feel like a victim of him in any way. I just feel like he's also somebody who, I guess the terminology would be like, it's grooming behavior or something like that.”

Ella asked her ex if she could write about what he told her for the student-teacher edition … He agreed.

Ella knew it would be risky to name Mr. Hudson in an article…

…And since Mr. Ehrich could still be planning on that “man to man” talk with Mr. Hudson…. any story that directly indicted him could be seen as going around Mr. Ehrich’s back.

So Ella and Rosie wrote with extreme caution, giving her ex a pseudonym, and removing the identifying details about racquetball and the shower.

In the end, they stated that a boy felt sexual tension from an unnamed teacher… and that this teacher seemed angry with him for taking his distance after.

Not exactly the expose Rosie wanted… but it still struck a chord.

When the issue was finally published on November 23rd, two days before Thanksgiving, it was the talk of Garfield.

Our classmates hounded us to spill the identities of the boy and the teacher…

…but we kept our source a secret…

…And school adjourned for the long holiday weekend.

The Tuesday after Thanksgiving was November 30th, 1999.

Seattleites may remember this as the infamous day when protesters marched against the World Trade Organization…

…which was meeting downtown.

Ella, Toby and I skipped school to check out the demonstrations…. I planned to report on them for The Messenger.

It was like a carnival at first, with protestors dressed as sea turtles decrying unsafe fishing practices. But then things spiraled… We watched as people dressed in black marched through the city’s streets, smashing windows and setting cars on fire.

With little warning, the police responded forcefully all around us. We inhaled pepper spray; I got hit with a rubber police bullet.

I have to admit, I was thrilled to be there...

I knew that history was unfurling before us.

But when Ella and I came back to school on Wednesday… it was immediately clear that something had changed.

Our classmates' faces were heavy… and our teachers were terse.

Word travelled through the hallways and finally reached us.

Mr. Hudson had been placed on leave.

I felt a weight lift off me…

Finally … something was being done about Mr. Hudson. He was out of the classroom, and away from Post 84.

But my relief was soon eclipsed by anxiety.

By that point my mom had talked to people at the district office about Rosie’s friend’s allegation.

Did her calls, or our anonymous story, prompt the school to take action?

Would our friends now blame us for Mr. Hudson’s suspension?

At first, our classmates directed their anger at the school…. just like when Dr. Jones was suspended.

ELLA: “The general vibe in the school was like a groan, like a collective groan. Another one? Oh no, like what's happening? And not really like what's happening that all these adults are so, um, inappropriate. More like what's happening that the school district is like targeting all of our best people, you know?”

Ella and I were on edge as we waited to find out what the school district would do next.

Then, on Thursday…

Mr. Ehrich called a mandatory Messenger staff meeting at the end of the school day.

Ella and I had a bad feeling about it.

ELLA: “He had a really, like a short fuse. You never wanted to get on his bad side.”

Ella had a hunch that Mr. Ehrich was upset about our article.

Unfortunately… she was right.

ELLA: “He did not identify, um, any of us, by name, but he said, some of the journalists on this, paper have, acted unethically, and they need to step down and, and tied us directly to Tom Hudson being placed on Administratively, you know, they ran a story that was, um, you know, inappropriate and full of rumors. And now a teacher is like facing professional consequences for it.”

We had never seen Mr. Ehrich so angry.

And he was not going to stop until he took his pound of flesh from Ella and me.

ELLA: “And he said, and I want them to step down. They need to step down from their positions on the paper.

“I'm asking for them to resign.”

I still remember how crushed I was hearing this.

The Messenger was everything to me...

I put every ounce of energy I had into that paper…

…and I couldn’t imagine my life without it.

Only now, Mr. Ehrich was forcing me – and Ella – out…

…And he was intent on humiliating both of us… in front of our peers.

My mind swirled.

Had we really betrayed our school and one of its most popular teachers?

Were we unethical… an embarrassment to journalism…

Or… were Dave Ehrich and Garfield High School… defending a predator?

Fired or not, there was no way either of us would go silently.

And there was no way we were going to let Tom Hudson off the hook.

Episode 3 drops on March 10, 2026, just after midnight.

If you’d like to reach Isolde Raftery, email her at iraftery@kuow.org. She is slow to respond at the moment because of the volume of emails, but will do her best.