“It was like this little step-by-step process,” Cumming remembers. “Surely there must be an innocent explanation: Maybe this is how European artists express affection innocently?”

Senior year, Cumming’s grades dropped off. He couldn’t bear to set foot on the campus that he loved, that he was proud of, for weeks at a time. “I was tormented by the self-loathing and feelings of guilt and self-hatred and confusion,” he says. At age 17, he was prepared to jump from a fifth-floor window when he says he heard a divine voice, talking him down. The abuse did not end for Cumming, but the moment was a turning point, and he began pulling away from Somary. Cumming chose to attend Princeton where his father had gone, rather than Yale, where Somary had pulled strings for him to attend.

After Cumming was ordained as a minister in the early '90s, he was trained to identify and report child abuse and learned for the first time that most pedophiles have more than a single victim. “I decided, OK, if I ever find one other person who says Johannes touched him in the wrong way, I will report him to the authorities.” Still, he had no way to ask anyone without indicting Somary, and outing himself. By the late ‘90s Cumming started searching the same terms on a near daily basis: "Johannes Somary child abuse," "Johannes Somary pedophilia." In February 2011, Somary died. Weeks later, Cumming discovered a blog: “Johannes Somary, Pedophile.” In its first post, a person going by the initials EB wrote:

“Though Mr. Somary brought the gift of music to many and had a long and celebrated career, he was also a molester of children. … Those events had a devastating impact on my life. You may ask, why bring this up now, now that he is gone? The reason is that I know there are others out there like me and I believe that by connecting we may be able to help each other to heal.”

Cumming reached out to EB — Ed Bowen, a Horace Mann grad abused by Somary a few years before Cumming was. They spoke on the phone, painfully recounting their stories. “Neither of us had told the story to anyone,” says Cumming, save for Bowen to his therapist, and Cumming to his wife. For the first time, he understood that what he’d experienced was truly, unambiguously, sexual abuse, and that he wasn’t alone. He also knew that the abuse was unlikely limited to them. He told Bowen, “If there are two of us there are probably 10 of us.”



Bowen suggested they reach out to other survivors. “I think things need to be talked about,” says Bowen. “I think they fester and make you really ill when they just lay deep in your subconscious.” Years of therapy and Alcoholics Anonymous had informed his thinking. He thought other survivors deserved the same forum to speak about what had happened, the chance to feel the same sense of healing. The two put together a list of students they suspected were abused, and started making calls. Of those who returned his calls, Cumming says, “Every single one said, 'Yes, Johannes initiated sexual relations with me.' Every single one.”

Then a June 2012 New York Times Magazine exposé put the rampant sex abuse at the then-125-year-old institution in the national spotlight, and, finally, some kind of reconciliation seemed possible. The article racked up more than a thousand comments, prompting the Times to shut them off. The Bronx DA set up a hotline to gather accounts of abuse, and a Facebook group for alumni called “Processing Horace Mann” grew to 2,200 members in 10 days. The group became a safe haven for survivors to come out with their stories, and for other alumni to express disappointment, astonishment, and disbelief. This also provided a platform for Cumming and a few others to seek out people who had not yet told anyone of their abuse.

By the time the survivors group first met in the conference room of Bowen's Harlem apartment building the week after the story broke, they were shell-shocked. “We thought if we could come together to encourage each other, that would be healing,” says Cumming. With his rimmed glasses, stubbled beard, and deliberate cadence, he can seem like the platonic ideal of a pastor, a quality that would be put to use: Having spent years promoting rapprochement between Muslims and Christians, Cumming was no stranger to intractable conflict. After helping to bring the survivors together, Cumming informally chaired the meeting of around 10 survivors and a few of their significant others. Some were strangers, some were acquaintances, and as they sat around a foldout plastic table in that sterile, carpeted conference room, it was unclear if they would be anything more.

To begin, Cumming opened the floor to anyone who wanted to talk. “I thought two or three people were going to want to share,” he says. “I was stunned that every single person wanted to share their stories with each other.”

They’d all felt the same shame and humiliation. The same guilt. Many had suffered through depression, sleeping trouble, substance abuse, and suicide attempts. They had divorces and relationship issues, trusting not enough, too much, or vacillating between the two. They blamed themselves, even though they knew logically it wasn’t their fault, and they’d felt alone — a feeling that evaporated more with each story told, a feeling they no longer had to claim or feel defined by.

It was a “remarkable experience,” says S., a group member who attended Horace Mann in the ‘70s and ‘80s. “Having a flesh-and-blood person in front of you who has suffered the same thing made one realize that he wasn’t alone in a way that had never previously been real and visceral.”

“So much had been so suppressed and secretive for so many years, to actually sit in a room and look across the table at other survivors was amazing,” says Bowen.

At the end of the meeting, one attendee quoted lyrics from Horace Mann’s alma mater which now had new resonance: “We were strangers met in friendship, now we’re kin to one and all.”

The group became a support system as more survivors emerged over the summer. It also became the foundation for a response to the school. Realizing they weren’t to blame for their abuse allowed the survivors to feel bolder, to realize, as S. says, “We had the right — the moral right — to demand something of the school.”

But what? The New York judicial system’s response as a whole to cases of this nature has historically not been in the victims' favor. “They completely throw out a lot of very strong legal principles in order to protect the status quo, and in order to protect these institutions who have engaged in really heinous conduct,” says Kevin Mulhearn, the rare lawyer to argue his way through the state's deeply restrictive statute of limitations in sexual abuse cases (and to write the book on the issue). The survivors agreed they would write a formal letter. In the week following the meeting, Cumming composed a first draft, hammering out revisions with a handful of members before clearing it with the rest via email. There were differences — "a very cordial disagreement" as S. recalls — regarding whether or not lawyers should be retained and whether seeking financial compensation or a formal apology should be the primary objective.

“We were pretty united on letters to the school,” remembers Bowen, “but the whole question of how public are we going to be? Are we going try to take legal action? Are we gonna hire a lawyer? There was a lot of disagreement, confusion, even within ourselves.” Bowen, a calm, gentle-voiced 58-year-old with a broad smile and a shock of white hair, feels great affection for the school despite his abuse. “There was a magic about the place,” he remembers. His ties there run deep: His mother was a teacher and administrator, and four of his siblings attended. But that summer as the arguments over how to respond continued and the anger at the institution he loved continued to boil, he felt worn down. “I got absolutely overwhelmed.”

But moreover, for the first time since suffering this trauma, they were indeed a they — emboldened, perhaps even hopeful, despite the long odds of real restitution.

That letter, which would be the first of four, was addressed to Headmaster Tom Kelly, the board of trustees, and the Horace Mann community. The response that mattered most was that of Steve Friedman, an enormously wealthy hedge fund manager and chair of the board of trustees. “I didn’t realize how implacably hostile Steve Friedman would be to us,” says Cumming. “We initially gave it only privately to the trustees, because we hoped it would open a positive, constructive dialogue." The letter listed a number of potential remedies, including an apology, an independent investigation, and funds set aside for therapy and support.

Tom Kelly personally delivered the letter to the board of trustees at a meeting on June 21, 2012.