Frederic Lyman’s prep school teaching career spanned just six years, and four schools.

On Wednesday, allegations of inappropriate behavior against him surfaced at Kent Denver, a private day school in Colorado, which means that Lyman now stands accused of misconduct with students at three of those schools, across three states.

Lyman was one of 12 men named in an in-depth report on sexual abuse released by Choate Rosemary Hall, the prestigious Connecticut boarding school, in April. Investigators for the school, where he taught in the early 1980s, said that Lyman had sexual relationships with two students. He stalked one of them, according to the report, and gave her a black eye.


Lyman was forced out of his job at Choate when administrators learned he had given one of the students herpes. But he left the school with a letter of recommendation, the report said, which allowed him to move on to Kent Denver in 1982, where administrators had no way of knowing what he had done.

In a letter sent to the school community Wednesday, Kent Denver said that three former students had contacted administrators in recent weeks with complaints about Lyman.

A fourth person, a woman named Kirsten Johnson, approached The New York Times with her own story. Johnson asked to be identified by the name she had at the school, before she was married. She said that after her father discovered a letter Lyman wrote to her, suggesting they go skiing or meet for dinner and wine, he was forced to leave the school. She was 14 at the time.

Rand Harrington, the current head of school at Kent Denver, said in a statement that after the incident, Lyman’s contract was not renewed. “We did not provide him with a letter of recommendation for other teaching positions, and our head of school discouraged Mr. Lyman from pursuing future employment in schools,” he said.


Kent Denver has hired a lawyer from an outside firm to investigate Lyman’s two-year tenure at the school. Harrington said he expected that work to be complete in the next three weeks. Kent Denver declined to provide details about complaints they received from the three former students who contacted them in recent weeks, citing the ongoing investigation.

As a growing number of private schools release reports on the sexual abuse of students, the actions of administrators in covering up misconduct and quietly allowing abusers to move to other schools has come under increased scrutiny. The practice was so common there is a name for it: passing the trash.

Lyman’s pattern of behavior provides a remarkable case study in the dangers of that practice, though it’s unclear whether his misconduct was known to all of the schools at the time.

Johnson was an eighth-grader in Lyman’s English class during the 1982-83 school year. Lyman was 30.

She said he began by signing her papers with “little personal notes, using his first name, that kind of thing.” Their interactions gradually became more intimate and flirtatious.

Lyman’s approach with Johnson followed a pattern dating back at least to the summer of 1979, when he began writing notes on the papers of Jane Marion, one of his 16-year-old summer students at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Those private comments on her papers led to more intimate letters, in which he said he would “love to kidnap” her for a weekend, to “wine and dine” her, and to treat her “like a queen.” On the papers of both girls, he would sometimes sign his name as Fred.


At the end of Johnson’s eighth-grade year, Lyman wrote a note in her yearbook: “A pretty exposed place to write… all that I’d like… but I think you know how very special you are to me.”

Johnson said that she presented Lyman with no obvious vulnerabilities. She came from a stable home. She had attentive parents. But she became his target nonetheless.

“He picked up on my need to feel exceptional,” she said. “And that was all he needed to do, to tell me I was exceptional.”

In her ninth-grade year, she was no longer in his class and saw him less, she said. Then, at Christmastime, he sent her the card with its invitation to get together off campus. “He told me to ‘take a chance,’” Johnson recalled of the card. “He said he knew it sounded risky, but take a chance.

“I freaked out,” Johnson said. “What I recall is that I didn’t know how to handle it.”

Johnson said she left the card lying out in her home, and that her father found it. He took it to school administrators, who confronted Lyman. He was allowed to finish the 1983-84 school year, and then seems to have left teaching.

Johnson said that while he remained on campus, Lyman would glare at her when he saw her in the dining hall.

Through his lawyer, Lyman declined to comment beyond a statement sent to The New York Times for a previous article, about his advances toward Marion. In that statement, he said, “Due to my own immaturity, I considered my students to be peers and friends which was a mistake that I will regret for the rest of my life. I am deeply sorry for any pain or discomfort my actions may have caused.”

Johnson said she found that reply unconvincing. She said she was angry that he was trying to “normalize” what he had done. “I always held on to the fantasy that he’d gotten help and would understand how truly sick the behavior was,” she said. “In no way could he claim that he considered me a peer.”

Choate does not defend how past administrators handled Lyman’s situation.

“By commissioning a completely independent report and issuing it in full, we sought to bring these issues into the open,” Lorraine Connelly, a Choate spokeswoman, said in a statement.

The fourth school where Lyman worked, Beaver Country Day School, in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, said it was “in the process of looking into information about his time here.” In one of his letters to Marion, he complained that Beaver students were not as motivated, adding that “being a day school I’m not able to get to know them as well.”

Johnson said that she did not initiate contact with Kent Denver, but that the lawyer who is investigating reached out to her last week.

Looking back on her experience, “mostly I just feel so thankful that my dad opened the letter,” she said. “At the time — and I think this shows how vulnerable kids are to this — I was so horrified that I betrayed him,” she continued of Lyman. “I was 14 and I thought I had betrayed him.”