Episode 3: Adults in the Room, 'Blame the Messenger'

A warning: This episode includes descriptions of abuse and discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741-741. Please take care while listening.

This is Episode 3 of Adults in the Room podcast. What follows is a transcript.

In the 22 years I’ve been a journalist, my thing has been investigation – with a focus on a particular beat.

I call it the Bureau of Men Behaving Badly.

My proudest moments have been revealing the misdeeds of powerful people… who, let’s be real, tend to be dudes.

A rock star accused of assaulting multiple women.

A Seattle night life mogul, suspected of rape and assault.

A Seattle mayor, who witnesses said pulled a gun on a pregnant woman.

I wonder sometimes why these characters appeal to me.

You could make the case that for the past two decades, I’ve been rewriting the story of my senior year at Garfield High School in Seattle …

…that I’m still the crusading teenager who wants to expose the bad guys, even when it’s risky…

…but now I’ve got better tools to work with.

I’ve developed my reporting methods — and to be honest, a lot of my identity — on the premise that what I do for a living is unquestionably good.

But when I say that, a voice in my head sometimes goes… but is it?

The misconduct I expose can ruin people’s lives… and shatter communities.

I know this because I’ve lived through it.

During senior year, when we were editors for The Messenger, our school newspaper… my best friend Ella Hushagen and I heard that a popular teacher, Tom Hudson… had possibly abused at least one student.

We reported that allegation to school authorities.

We hinted at it in an article.

Ultimately… Mr. Hudson was placed on leave.

And our journalism teacher…

Who we admired and respected… tried to kick us off the paper.

That was just the beginning.

Because Ella and I had unwittingly set off a series of events that would shock Garfield for years to come.

And in doing so, we put targets on our own backs.

Our teachers, friends, even local media…

all but accused us of destroying a great man.

And it seemed nobody would be satisfied until they destroyed us too.

ACT I

It was the week after Thanksgiving of our senior year.

Ella and I sat on the floor of The Messenger classroom.

Our journalism teacher Dave Ehrich stood in front of us.

He said two editors on the paper had acted unethically. They’d taken a rumor about Mr. Hudson … printed it as a fact…

And now, Mr. Hudson was suspended.

Mr. Ehrich was asking these editors to resign.

He didn’t call anyone out by name.

But everybody knew who he was talking about.

Ella… and me.

We’d just published a story questioning student-teacher relationships, and it included an anecdote told to us by Ella’s ex-boyfriend.

He said he’d been pressured by Mr. Hudson to shower with him naked after the two played racquetball at Mr. Hudson’s gym.

We kept it vague… writing that Ella’s ex felt sexual tension from an unnamed teacher…and kept his distance after.

Ella’s ex said the teacher didn’t like that… and started treating him differently.

We didn’t add any more detail than that, and we certainly didn’t use names.

But Mr. Ehrich still blamed us… in front of the entire Messenger staff… for his colleague’s suspension.

Which was confusing … because Mr. Ehrich had already heard even more troubling allegations from us about Mr. Hudson.

And he’d promised to take action.

Just a few weeks earlier, Messenger reporter Rosie Bancroft and Ella… told Mr. Ehrich that a friend of Rosie’s was also coerced to shower with Mr. Hudson on several occasions.

And that sometimes, Mr. Hudson was aroused in those showers.

Rosie’s friend said that Mr. Hudson even kicked him once… in anger.

And that the teacher gave students alcohol … and shared porn magazines with them on his boat.

Rosie and Ella assumed that as a mandated reporter… Mr. Ehrich would go to the authorities …

Instead, Mr. Ehrich said he’d have a “man to man” talk with Mr. Hudson and convince him to knock it off.

And he directed Ella and Rosie to not tell anyone else.

But Ella told me everything… and I went to my social worker mom, who phoned the authorities.

Within weeks, Mr. Hudson was placed on leave.

I’ve often wondered why Mr. Ehrich thought talking to Mr. Hudson directly would be effective.

I didn’t see how having a chummy conversation would stop Mr. Hudson from taking advantage of teenage boys.

But I got the feeling that Mr. Ehrich didn’t believe Mr. Hudson’s actions qualified as abuse.

He’d been quoted in the Seattle Times a few weeks earlier, in a story about our principal, Dr. Al Jones … who had been suspended the month before for a sexual relationship with a student.

In the article, Mr. Ehrich opined about student-teacher interactions… saying, quote, “There is a lot of doubt as to what the line may be… because when we hear inappropriate conduct that is not a legal or intimate relationship matter… that leaves a lot of territory.”

As Mr. Ehrich chastised Ella and me at the Messenger staff meeting, he expanded on that…telling the class that even he crossed the line with students sometimes… But he thought of us as adults, and expected us to handle it.

The school bell rang. I burst into tears and bolted from the room.

I was devastated about being fired.

Ella stayed behind to try to convince Mr. Ehrich to change his mind.

Ella: “I had this notion that like… this doesn’t make any sense. Like he must not understand. Like I know that he’s kind of a dick, but like… I’m just gonna talk to him.”

Alone in the classroom with Ella, Mr. Ehrich said our anonymized story in the Messenger was obviously about Mr. Hudson.

How many teachers meet with students outside of school? He asked.

Ella mentioned the swim coach.

But…. Mr. Ehrich was in no mood for a good-faith debate about journalistic ethics.

ELLA: He gave me a lecture basically where he was like, "Well, you know, Ella, I've done a lot of psychoanalysis and the world is just not black and white, it's gray. It goes both ways in these relationships, and what about the students who come over to me and rub their tits on me when they're asking about their grade?”

When Mr. Ehrich said that… Ella remembers a feeling of suddenly leaving her body.

But Mr. Ehrich didn’t stop talking.

Through the fog, Ella tried to focus.

Mr. Ehrich said that when he was a student, teachers made sexual advances toward him…

But he didn’t push back, because he didn’t want to jeopardize those relationships.

Teachers hitting on students… students hitting on teachers…

Mr. Ehrich implied ~ that was just high school ~

Nothing worth tarnishing a respected educator’s career for.

Here’s what Ella wrote in her diary at the time.

ELLA: “It was so fucked up. He made himself the victim and put Isolde and I in a position where we couldn’t defend ourselves but everyone was questioning us and what we did.”

But Ella also found herself wondering…. Maybe Mr. Ehrich had a point.

ELLA: “I felt sort of persuaded. I remember feeling a little bit like he's right. I don't know. There's a lot I don't know. I'm just a kid and actually there probably is a lot more complicity in terms of how these relationships work between students and teachers and I felt very, like, confused and did I do something wrong? What do I know?

“It's such deep, deep, deep gas lighting and it was so effective, you know, for, on me.

“I mean, we really did idolize him. He was so cool. I mean, he drove like a motorcycle and an earring and he wore leather and like, he seemed awesome. You know, even if we knew he was sometimes a little icky // it didn't take away from his coolness.

I’m almost embarrassed to say this now…

But Ella and I really did think Mr. Ehrich was deeply cool.

He was a man in his 40s…

And he was flirty with us in a way that felt exciting.

Even though we were his students…and minors… Mr. Ehrich made us feel like equals with his mature banter.

I remember one time… Mr. Ehrich and I were talking about a story in the Messenger classroom.

He paused … looked me up and down… and said: What size is your underwear?

I froze. Wait, what?

He was watching me for a reaction, so I laughed. I felt like I had to play along.

When he asked again later… and then another time… I turned it into a joke.

I rode the bus to Archie McPhee’s, a gag shop in Seattle, and bought a gigantic pair of tighty whities. I then made a big show in front of our whole class, pinning them to the wall. Mr. Ehrich laughed.

I thought he’d stop asking about my underwear after that.

But he still wanted to know … seriously, what size? Dude.

Mr. Ehrich wasn’t the only grown-up leering at us.

The first time I noticed a man ogling my friends was on Ella’s 12th birthday.

We were wandering through downtown Seattle. Our moms trailed behind.

I heard one say to another, “They’re at that age when men start checking them out.”

Once I saw the first man eyeing us, it was impossible not to spot the others.

The moms thought it was gross… but seemed to view this as an inevitable rite of passage.

Just pretend you don’t notice them staring.

Pretend it’s fine when your teacher asks about your underwear.

After Mr. Ehrich called for our resignation from the Messenger, I felt like a lost child.

So I bee-lined to another adult at Garfield…Cheryl Chow, our interim principal.

Ms. Chow was a local legend. Her mom was Ruby Chow, a restaurant owner who regaled the journalists and politicians of old school Seattle.

Ms. Chow had been on the City Council, and was close family friends with Bruce Lee – yes, that Bruce Lee.

She’d been brought in to clean up Garfield after the sex scandal that ended the tenure of our previous principal.

Which meant, the day I talked to her, she’d been on the job for less than two months.

Ms. Chow listened as I sobbed and told her what Mr. Ehrich said.

She looked angry.

“He can’t fire you,” she said. “You’re students.”

In all the drama I forgot… The Messenger wasn’t a job. It was a class.

Ms. Chow told Mr. Ehrich he couldn’t make us resign. And she said something else: He had to apologize to Ella and me in front of our peers.

Mr. Ehrich must have sent his apology to Ms. Chow for approval,

because I found a copy of it during our research for this podcast, in a trove of Ms. Chow’s old records.

DAVE EHRICH: “You are, to me, fellow adults pursuing journalism. I’m guilty of confusing these priorities. My comments in this class, which resulted in my calling for editors to resign their positions resulted from this confusion. Most of the time I am happy to confuse you as adults because for one, you almost are, and for two, it makes for a wonderful working relationship.”

A few days later, Seattle’s alternative weekly paper, The Stranger, wrote a short news piece about Mr. Ehrich’s failed attempt to fire us, and how Ms. Chow came to our defense.

When I read it, I freaked out.

Ella and I had no idea how our story came to their attention.

But we knew Mr. Ehrich would punish us for it.

Which he did. Mr. Ehrich demoted us from our editor positions.

He put me on arts reviews… and he made Ella a photographer.

None of this helped Mr. Hudson.

The district soon launched an official inquiry to see if the allegations against him had any merit.

They brought on an investigator, who was headed for Garfield.

And over the next few months… this investigator and I would talk a lot.

Act II

Soon after Mr. Hudson was put on leave, I started getting pulled from my first period physics class.

The classroom phone would ring. This was a clunky, puke green landline … fused to the wall.

My teacher would answer – “Hello?” – and then turn to us, make eye contact with me, frown, and mutter into the receiver, “I’ll send her down.”

The school district’s investigator waited for me in the main office.

ELLA: “He was an ex-cop from Chicago.”

Ella and I helped each other remember this guy.

ELLA: “He's got this accent…”

ISOLDE: “Eddie, Eddie Somebody Junior. Do you remember?”

ELLA: “Was it Eddie Hill?”

Indeed. Eddie Hill… Senior. He was an older Black ex-cop who wore rumpled suits … and reminded me of detectives I’d seen on TV.

In winter 1999, Eddie Hill and I met every week…

I assumed he wanted to talk to me because my mom had reported the allegations about Mr. Hudson to the authorities.

Our chats lasted roughly 15 minutes…

I told him everything I’d heard about Mr. Hudson, but usually, Eddie did most of the talking.

He’d divulge what others were saying, to see what I thought.

As a journalist today, I try to be like Eddie and find the sources I can trust.

I call them my rabbis.

These are insiders who feed me intel, guide me around potential landmines, and vouch for me to others who have information.

I pointed Eddie to Rosie Bancroft, who knew a lot about Mr. Hudson.

Besides being a reporter at The Messenger, Rosie was also a member of Post 84, the after-school outdoors club that Mr. Hudson ran… a group that was extremely loyal to their leader.

Rosie said her Post 84 friends were fine with her talking to Eddie Hill… at first, anyway.

ROSIE: “ I think maybe they thought, great, like, whatever, say whatever you need to say, get it out of your system. And then we'll all go on about our lives.”

It was wishful thinking.

Winter break came and went.

1999 turned into 2000.

And the investigation continued.

When I look through school records from that time, it’s clear that Mr. Hudson’s many defenders were anxious about how long Eddie Hill’s investigation was taking.

I have copies of old faxes sent to Mark Green, the top attorney for the school district.

I can’t tell who wrote them, because the senders’ personal details are blacked out...

But they seem to have come from parents.

One reads: “You indicated things would be wrapped up by the time school resumes. I’d like to know if things are on schedule or if something unforeseen is delaying matters.”

There are also phone messages from unnamed parents for Ms. Chow, scribbled on notepads… saying Eddie Hill did not have permission to interview their kids any longer.

Post 84 students were also done cooperating with the investigation.

When Eddie called members back for interviews, they denied knowledge of any inappropriate behavior by Mr. Hudson.

And Rosie said her clubmates started pressuring her to stay away from Eddie.

That wasn’t all… Boys in Post 84 approached Rosie to say they had lied about Mr. Hudson.

They said Mr. Hudson hadn’t done anything wrong.

As Rosie recalls, this reticence to comply just prolonged the inquiry.

ROSIE: “The whole investigation was in this position where like, okay, there's plenty that we can't just let this go, but there's not enough that we can act on it because the people who were there are not willing to talk about it. And so it just kept going on and on and on.”

I became a target of this pro-Hudson push too… one evening, the student president of Post 84 called me at home, asking me to stay quiet.

At that point I’d been talking to Eddie for weeks.

And I had no interest in changing course.

I know now that part of the reason for Post 84’s sudden hostility toward the investigation was because Mr. Hudson was talking to Post 84 kids… and their parents.

He was calling them, distraught by his distance from the club he loved.

Sometimes, they visited Mr. Hudson on his boat. How could they not feel for the man they all admired so much?

The district heard that Mr. Hudson was still in touch with his students. They sent a letter telling him to stop.

But he didn’t.

This campaign of silence wasn’t keeping Eddie from doing his job.

In fact, the details he shared with me were more shocking than anything I’d heard before.

One day he asked me if I’d heard about incidents of oral sex involving Mr. Hudson.

Eddie questioned Rosie about this too… But she didn’t understand what he was saying at first.

ROSIE: “He had to explain to me what fellatio meant.”

I could also feel a tone shift from a lot of my classmates. They seemed colder, more standoffish.

Emails between Ella and me at the time show that we both thought Mr. Ehrich’s apology would get our fellow student journalists back on our side.

But we were wrong.

The Messenger’s news editor wrote an open letter to the Stranger, defending Mr. Ehrich, after the alt weekly published the story about our almost-firing. The news editor wrote: “It’s not the job of any paper to report on rumors.” It felt like a slap in the face.

This tension followed us everywhere at Garfield.

ELLA: “ I had this English teacher who I really, really liked. She was like, well, I really want to teach you guys how to waltz. You kids never learn formal dances …but I can’t touch anyone, even like on their elbow … I might be the next person in trouble. “I just felt like, wow. Fundamentally, nobody gets it.

“This is not about a fucking elbow touch.”

Our teachers had always liked Ella and me.

But as the investigation into Mr. Hudson dragged on, they became short with us.

One teacher invited Ella and me to her house for tea … and then scolded us, saying we’d done the wrong thing by reporting the claims against Mr. Hudson.

And my first period physics teacher – the one who kept getting calls from the main office to excuse me during class lost one of my exams.

At least, that’s what he told me.

He let me re-take it, and I got an A. But he reduced my overall grade to a C, because he averaged the retake with an F from the missing test.

That knocked down my GPA… And it meant I couldn’t be valedictorian.

It felt like the entire school had turned against Ella and me.

Every day, we were subjected to a near-constant barrage of angry looks, snide comments, and outright retribution for speaking up about Mr. Hudson.

And it would only get worse from there.

Act III

I’ve lived in Seattle most of my life… but I've often felt like a bit of an outsider.

I think that's because I'm an immigrant -- my family moved here when I was 4. My dad is Irish. My mom is from France. And we spoke French at home.

My mom’s sisters use a term to describe the sad, bitter anger I felt in the winter of my senior year: amere. It also sounds like French for “out at sea.”

That was me: salty and alone. Garfield was the first place where I’d found my people. But after blowing the whistle on Mr. Hudson, I felt like an interloper again.

I joked in emails to Ella that I couldn’t eat anything but M & M’s.

But it wasn’t far from the truth.

I was often nauseous.

Between November and February, I dropped from 90 pounds to 75.

It was obvious that most of my friends were keeping their distance from me.

I wrote to Ella about how I no longer knew how to talk to people… and that I had nothing to say anymore.

But then…

Ella started pulling away too.

She now regretted telling me about Rosie’s friend.

ELLA: “I felt like you, you were the one, you're the one who took this and went and told your mom. And now, you know, I'm in the hot seat. I never want to be in the hot seat. I hate that.

“It was just so upsetting, like to feel like our senior year, which was supposed to be so fun was sort of marred by this really horrible experience right in the middle of it.”

We had been in this together at first … but our closeness became suffocating. ELLA: It's sort of like, it's like a scab you can't stop picking. I just remember being like, I'm tired of being angry. I'm tired of being sad. And so we did, we did take some space from each other.

We still called each other nicknames like Smella and Moldie in our emails.

But they became less frequent.

When we did write, it was to ask each other why we weren’t spending time together anymore.

Ella hung out with other kids… but she felt like no one wanted to be near her.

Sleep was hard. She had nightmares and gnashed her teeth.

At school, someone called her a narc.

It was a joke… but it stung.

My mom saw how I was struggling.

She sent me to a psychiatrist, whose office was past the University Bridge.

As I walked across it to my first appointment, I stopped at the midway point.

I held my breath.

What if I jumped?

I couldn’t see a way through these bad feelings.

But I was so exhausted, even dying felt like too much work. So I kept going.

My boyfriend Toby seemed to be the only person who wanted to spend time with me. He was in Post 84 when they went on a scuba diving trip with Mr. Hudson to Maui…and Mr. Hudson made Toby nap with him in the back of the group’s truck.

Toby couldn’t reconcile the teacher he knew with the one I was describing.

And that frustration entered our relationship.

Toby: “ We fought at her folks’ place, we fought at my folks’ place, we fought at the beach.

“From her perspective, I think it was sort of like, ‘How can you not see what's happening here?’ And from my perspective, it was, ‘How can you accuse this good person without, actual evidence, and how can you believe this about this person?’”

I spent a lot of time at Toby’s house and tried to talk to his parents about Mr. Hudson.

They are some of the sweetest people you could ever meet… but they seemed unsure of how to engage me …

I was wild-eyed … and fanatical about Mr. Hudson’s guilt... And they probably didn’t want to disagree and set me off.

I’m a mom now, and my heart hurts thinking of what this must have been like for them. The limbo of not knowing if Mr. Hudson was a predator … and the fear, they might not have protected their children from him.

Toby’s older sister had also been in Post 84.

Toby: “We're talking eight years of trusting your kids off in mountains and oceans and that's a hard thing to as a parent to say, "Wow, this is possible. What situation was I letting my kids get into this whole time?"

As a journalist, when I ask my sources to go on the record about sensitive situations… I don’t tell them I’ve been in their shoes.

But I say it will be hard to speak the truth, that people will doubt you, and then it will get worse.

You can expect blowback from those who don’t want whistleblowers to speak up… You may be too anxious to sleep or eat. You may wish we’d never met.

But then, I say it will get better. And that’s when you'll find out something important: that you’re very brave.

It’s a pep talk I wish I could have given my younger self.

By the end of January 2000, Eddie Hill had been investigating Mr. Hudson for two months.

I started to worry that the school district was prolonging the investigation on purpose.

My graduation was a semester away. Would Eddie Hill disappear once Ella, Rosie and I weren’t around to make trouble anymore?

Would the district let Mr. Hudson return to school? Would he abuse more boys?

Then, on Feb. 2nd… at the start of lunch … Ms. Chow’s voice boomed from the intercom.

Toby remembers hearing it.

TOBY: “There was an announcement over the loudspeakers to calling in a set of folks into Cheryl Chow's office.”

“I remember people being angry later that she sounded too chipper on the intercom announcement, like, ‘Hey, Bulldogs, can such and such come on down to..." And I just happened to be in the main office. And basically, she was like, ‘Well, you can come in too.’”

Ms. Chow had requested an urgent meeting with Post 84’s student leaders.

Strangely, police officers were there too.

Toby doesn’t remember much from this meeting… or who delivered the news. But he recalls how quiet everyone got.

Lunch ended… and fifth period started. Ella and I went to AP American Government.

Ella’s mom was a nurse practitioner at the Garfield health clinic. She pulled Ella and me from class…and told us the same news Toby had heard.

I collapsed on the hallway floor and sobbed.

Ella’s mom kept saying it wasn’t my fault.

And Ella said she never wanted to come back to Garfield.

I went looking for Toby … I found him in the school’s computer lab.

TOBY CRITTENDEN: “I remember being in that, that room across from The Messenger in the computer room, with Isolde, just bawling my eyes out. I just remember that was the only time I've ever cried at school.”

As I held Toby, Ms. Chow got on the intercom again.

"Students, this is Principal Chow. It is with sadness and concern that we must announce the death of Mr. Tom Hudson.”

What she didn’t say: First responders had found Mr. Hudson’s body in a motel room north of Seattle.

He’d died by suicide.

When I first saw Toby in the computer lab, I was afraid he was angry with me.

I could draw a direct line from when I reported the allegations about Mr. Hudson… to his death.

But to my relief, Toby fell into my arms…

Here’s how I described this moment in my diary at the time.

“I feel Toby’s tears soak through my coat… and I like it. I am glad to have temporarily taken on the role of caretaker… because figuring out what’s going on through my own head would be too difficult.”

Toby and I parted ways for the day.

As I left the building, I ran into a group of classmates who peppered me with questions.

What happened?

How did he die?

A girl in the group pointed at me and said, “Congratulations, you killed Tom Hudson.”

Everyone stared at me.

I had no response.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, one of Seattle’s two daily newspapers, published a story about Mr. Hudson’s death the next day.

Reporter Rebekah Denn wrote that the school district would probably not finish the investigation now that Mr. Hudson was dead.

Then she quoted an unnamed teacher from Garfield who said, “The question that's going to be looming is, is someone being falsely accused of something that can drive them to their death and ruin their career, and can this happen to someone else?”

For the next week, the counselor at Garfield told Ella and me to stay home for our own safety.

She also put us on suicide watch, which meant she called us every 30 minutes to make sure we were okay.

We were not okay.

No one was.

But I wouldn’t find out just how bad it had been for some of my classmates until many years later.

And it would be a long, long time before Ella and I discovered if we really were the ones responsible for Tom Hudson’s death.

In episode 4 of Adults in the Room… Twenty-five years after our senior year at Garfield, Ella and I scrutinize the life… and death… of Tom Hudson.

Through the eyes of a member of his inner circle. He shares new revelations about Mr. Hudson’s final days… and completely upends our idea of how far this abuse went.

CREDITS

Adults in the Room is part of FOCUS, a dedicated documentary channel from KUOW Public Radio in Seattle, a proud member of the NPR Network.

Original reporting for this project was done by me, Isolde Raftery, Ella Hushagen, Jeannie Yandel, and Will James.

Our producers are Will James and Alec Cowan.

Our editor is Jeannie Yandel.

Music by BC Campbell. Additional music by Alec Cowan.

Logo design by Alicia Villa. Amelia Peacock manages our marketing and promotions.

KUOW’s Director of New Content is Brendan Sweeney. Our Director of Marketing is Michaela Gianotti Boyle. KUOW’s Chief Content Officer is Marshall Eisen.

Voice acting by Shane Mehling, Jeannie Yandel, Phyllis Fletcher, Marshall Eisen, Jason Pagano, and Alec Cowan.

Special thanks to Rosie Bancroft and Maria Coryell-Martin.