Five women who said they were sexually assaulted by their high school teacher in the 1980s won a combined $13.6 million judgment Monday after a jury concluded that the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District failed to prevent the abuse.
The Torrance jury found that district administrators were negligent in allowing longtime Rolling Hills High School English teacher and baseball coach Garry Poe to groom and, ultimately, sexually abuse teenagers. The school district will likely have to pay at least $6.46 million of the verdict, which will be divided among the five women.
Poe’s former students sued the school district in 2022, alleging that he had cultivated relationships of trust and mentoring with them while they attended Rolling Hills High School, only to sexually assault them on a five-week European tour he chaperoned each year after graduation.
Now in their 50s and 60s, the five women took the witness stand during a four-week trial, framing the annual Europe excursion as an alcohol-soaked tradition with a dark side they experienced firsthand. They each sued the school district under the alias “Jane Doe,” and each was referred to in court by her first name only.
“He was drunk the whole trip,” testified one of the women, Kim, who narrated to the jury how Poe went from teacher to mentor to abuser. Poe taught her freshman and senior year English, and she became a favorite of his.
She recalled Poe as openly flirtatious and said he often asked her about her boyfriend and whether they were having sex. When she babysat for his kids during her junior year, he pushed himself against her in a hallway and tried to kiss her, she said.
On the Europe trip, she testified, Poe often visited her room or summoned her to his.
“Every night I was scared,” Kim testified, often crying on the witness stand as she described experiencing multiple sexual assaults. At the time, she was 18 years old and said she was overwhelmed. During the trip, she said, “I was in survival mode.”
Two other women testified that during their respective Europe trips in the 1980s, Poe initiated unwanted sexual intercourse with them while they were 17 years old. Another Rolling Hills High graduate said that during her Europe trip in 1989, she had oral sex with Poe when she was 17.
One woman, Michelle, recounted that on the Europe trip, Poe propositioned her and attempted to kiss her in his hotel room, but she left. A friend of hers alerted another chaperone and Rolling Hills High teacher, Jerry Kestenberg, who then summoned Michelle for a one-on-one meeting.
“He told me that I had likely misunderstood what happened, and that Coach Poe was trying to be ‘fatherly,’” she testified. She said Kestenberg reminded her that Poe had a wife and four children, asking, “Did I want to hurt them?”
Daniel Varon, a lawyer who represented the women alongside Jenn Liakos, repeatedly compared Poe to a “wolf” who roamed campus for years, pinpointing young girls for his annual Europe trip whom he could then assault. By the time of the trip — which began shortly after graduation — none of the attendees were officially students in the school district.
“Garry Poe was able to develop trust, break down boundaries and ultimately recruit and sexually abuse each one of them,” Varon told jurors during his closing argument. “They suffered lifelong harm ever since.”
The women testified to varying degrees of shame, guilt, anxiety, avoidance and trauma from their dealings with Poe. They did not sue Poe, but the school district’s lawyers counter-sued him and summoned him to the witness stand.
Under oath, Poe insisted he had done nothing inappropriate while the five women were enrolled in high school. He denied any misconduct with two of the women and emphasized that he fell in love with the three others shortly after they graduated, during the Europe trip.
“I never had a relationship with my students,” Poe said. “Some of my former students in Europe,” he said, “but never a student.”
Lawyers for the school district acknowledged that what Poe did was “despicable” but argued that most of the sexual abuse occurred after the students had graduated, on a trip that Poe led and organized on his own and that was unsanctioned by the school district.
“Where is that accountability for those decisions made by one person and one person alone, Garry Poe?” said Harry Harrison, representing the school district, during his closing argument.
Attorneys for the five women told jurors they should award nearly $100 million in total, split in different amounts among the women based on the severity of the abuse. Lawyers for the district argued for far lesser amounts, with Harrison asking the jury to award each woman $600,000 to $850,000 for past and future suffering, with 90% of that paid for by Poe himself.
The jury ultimately awarded $3.4 million each to three of the women and $1.7 million each to two others.
Harrison said the high damages that the women’s lawyers sought seemed disproportionately large compared to their injuries. He described the women as accomplished.
“Much to their credit, I didn’t see broken people,” Harrison said. “I saw five women who went on to become educated, went on to have careers and families.”
Times staff writer Sandra McDonald contributed to this report.
The post Former students abused by longtime Rolling Hills High teacher awarded more than $13 million appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
