It’s been more than nine months since Hilary Simon and Melissa Fares shared their stories with Vanity Fair about the sexual abuse they say they endured at the hands of Matt Rutledge—star history teacher for 30 years at Miss Hall’s School, the all-girls boarding school in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. (Rutledge did not respond to questions provided by Vanity Fair.) Now Aleta Law, hired by the school last year, has released its 60-page independent report, which details Rutledge’s sexual misconduct and boundary violations across three decades, and concludes, in part, “that the School’s leadership failed to adequately investigate and respond to the reported information.” The analysis has reopened old wounds in Rutledge’s accusers, and unleashed fresh anger in other quarters about a perceived lack of consequences for the school’s current leadership. A letter from head of school Julia Heaton to the Miss Hall’s community reads in part, “The investigation revealed horrible truths about a community we hold dear and has brought about personal and institutional reckoning.”
The report opens Rutledge’s personnel file. For Simon and Fares, who attended in the early 2000s when Jeannie Norris was head of school, the Aleta report lays bare the school’s contemporaneous knowledge of Rutledge’s sexual misconduct. As Vanity Fair reported, by 2008, Norris and assistant head of school Jenny Chandler had been informed at least twice about Rutledge’s alleged wrongdoing—first in 2005, when they learned of another student’s allegation that he had kissed Simon, and again in February 2008, when the parents of a recent graduate (referred to in the report as “Student 8”) wrote a letter to Norris stating that Rutledge had visited their daughter at college and engaged in “unmistakably inappropriate” behavior with her. The Aleta report further fills in the details: Norris and Chandler reprimanded Rutledge’s behavior, which they called a “pattern” and told him to cease contact with Student 8, and Norris wrote him a letter outlining how damaging his actions with Student 8 could be—for the school’s reputation:
This incident has the potential for seriously damaging the School and your reputation…. There is also the risk that news of what happened will filter back to the current student body and to your peer group. That can, and most likely will, cause students and parents to doubt the most precious commodity we have—the trust between students and teachers…. This isn’t the 70s or the 80s. Society has no stomach for any kind of inappropriate behavior between adults and girls or teachers and students.
In the timeline that VF reported, shortly after receiving the letter from the graduate’s parents, Norris had a meeting with the parents of Fares, who was then a sophomore and wavering on whether to return to Miss Hall’s the following year. Norris’s advice, as Fares’s mother recalled, was that she and her husband should not press and let Rutledge take the lead—encouragement that prompted his chilling summer visit to the family house in Wilton, Connecticut. Months after that, as Fares told VF in the original report, and as Simon emphasized succinctly in a recent interview, “He raped Melissa in his classroom closet.”
“Seeing that, how the hell could you keep this man employed after acknowledging that he had a ‘pattern’?” Fares, who had considered Norris a mentor, says now. “I feel enraged. I know my mom, also reading that letter, did too. It’s just a different level of betrayal.” (Neither Norris nor Chandler responded to VF’s request for comment.)
As the report indicates, in 2016, a few years after Norris left her position, she told the new head of school, Julia Heaton—who remains in the job today—about Rutledge’s past behavior toward Student 8, but insisted it had all been resolved, which was apparently good enough for Heaton. Heaton would learn more still. As Vanity Fair reported, in 2022 and 2023 she was then told by two separate alumnae that there were rumors that Rutledge had had sexual relationships with past students. Still, Rutledge remained a teacher there. Still, Heaton took no meaningful action, until March 2024 when she placed Rutledge on administrative leave after receiving a letter from Fares’s attorney.
In the wake of the report, Heaton addressed her culpability in her letter to the community. “As your Head of School, I apologize for not taking adequate steps to investigate and follow up on third-party reports brought to me. I am deeply sorry for not doing more, and I must and will do better.”
A number of alumnae are appalled that she remains in her role. Sushil Sinha, one of the Miss Hall’s graduates who’d informed Heaton about Rutledge’s past relationships, is fervently leading a charge to have Heaton and head of the board Nancy Gustafson Ault removed. Commissioning the report, Sinha says, “was a stall tactic. It was a stall tactic to make alums sit back…to kind of give us a controlled outlet for us to report things and then say, ‘Okay, all said and done. But also let it take a lot of time so people forget about it a little bit, let the smoke clear a little bit. Then let women do what women do: They get nostalgic and they put fucking rose-colored glasses on and don’t stay on track.’”
As Sinha notes, after the report came out, the school announced it would be pausing access to the Facebook alumnae engagement page, severing means of public discussion among graduates about what they had just read for several weeks.
Simon, who graduated in 2005, agrees that the school is failing in its relations with former students. “I don’t feel that the school is equipped or able to handle the alumnae response to this. And instead they’re just perpetuating, at least for the alumnae, a culture of silence, which is how we got here in the first place.” But she has reservations about Sinha’s immediate goal. “I’m not really a fan of cancel culture, and I just feel like I don’t think that that will necessarily bring about the change that they are wanting.”
While Fares’s civil suit against Miss Hall’s and Norris for negligence and Rutledge for battery and assault is now in the discovery phase, Simon settled her case against the school, Norris, and Chandler in August—and she stands up for the current head. “I have felt that Julia Heaton in particular, and also the head of the board, Nancy [Gustafson Ault], have had compassion for the survivors and have taken accountability for what happened.” She adds, “I don’t want to wrap it up in a bow, but I really do want to have hope in this moment for Miss Hall’s, and that they can make sure that what happened to us never happens again.”
For Simon and Fares, that means doing what they can to change the Massachusetts law by which 16 is the age of consent, regardless of whether one party is an adult in a position of authority—Rutledge did not have sex with his alleged victims until they were technically of age. Simon and Fares recently testified before the Massachusetts Joint Committee on the Judiciary on behalf of a proposed bill that would criminalize such conduct. By December, the state Senate Committee on Ways and Means will have voted on whether to push the bill forward.
Still, any changes to the law would have no retroactive impact; Rutledge is, and will likely remain, a free man in the state of Massachusetts. And according to Simon, he’s still an intimidating presence. In May, Simon returned to the Pittsfield area for her 20th reunion—a testament, she says, to how far she has come in the past year. Before attending an off-campus gathering, she stopped by a liquor store to buy a bottle of wine. As she approached the store, she spotted Rutledge out of the corner of her eye, sitting in the passenger’s side of a parked car.
“He stared at me and I stared at him. I just turned and went into the store, and then he followed me into the store and stood in the doorway,” Simon says. “I didn’t want to engage with him, obviously, and he just started his loud, booming voice talking to the cashier.” The topic was innocuous—the window display—but he was blocking the door and his intonation was uncanny. If his intention was to rattle her it worked. Shaking, she held back and waited until he left. The first person she called: Fares.
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