Lawsuit alleges historic sexual assault by Hamilton educator

This was in 1995, at Canadian Martyrs Roman Catholic Church in west Hamilton.

Dr. James (Jim) Anderson, 69, had been an anthropologist and the primary chair of McMaster College’s anatomy division, and a founding father of the medical faculty.

Identified for his mind, charisma, and offbeat sense of humour, within the early Seventies he created “Cool Faculty,” another for Hamilton teenagers who struggled in standard lecture rooms and in life.

Dunford, a Cool Faculty scholar in 1982-83 — “an intellectually gifted younger man,” Anderson wrote of his pupil — wasn’t certain why he attended the funeral for a person who continued to hang-out him.

For years, he had performed it again in his thoughts, typically whereas consuming and staring into area, burning days and nights.

What ought to he have accomplished? Had it been his personal fault? Was Anderson a sufferer, too?

Dunford had contemplated suicide. He had learn the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, and agreed with the German thinker that the considered taking one’s life supplied comfort, serving to “by many a darkish evening.”

After which sooner or later, he determined to take his demons, and the departed, to court docket.

“Trying again, I may really feel Dr. Anderson’s attraction to me from the beginning,” Dunford says. “He advised me he favored hairless. I had no chest hair. Even now I nonetheless can’t shave.”

Sitting for an interview in a espresso store, Dunford pulls down the collar of his shirt to disclose his pale decrease neck and higher chest.

His candour feels jarring, however at 60 years outdated, having advised his story to family members and attorneys, maybe he has no time for subtleties.

Dunford is pursuing a $2.85-million lawsuit in opposition to Hamilton Well being Sciences (HHS), holding the company liable for 2 alleged sexual assaults by Anderson.

Lengthy-standing, “historic” sexual assault claims usually are not uncommon, however Dunford’s allegations return to incidents 4 a long time in the past.

Pretrial motions within the case are scheduled in July, and the trial is predicted to start within the fall.

The entire particulars in Dunford’s assertion of declare are based mostly on allegations not but confirmed in court docket.

In its assertion of defence, HHS “denies that any of the alleged assaults occurred” and that if “any such conduct occurred,” HHS shouldn’t be liable. The assertion provides that “no grievance of inappropriate conduct was made to the hospital by Dunford or anybody else.”

A spokesperson for HHS declined to remark for this story as a result of the case is earlier than the courts.

When he was 19, Dunford says he would drop by the stately Hamilton dwelling of Dr. Anderson, who was referred to as “D.A.” by Cool Faculty college students.

They’d chat for hours, about philosophy and literature, drink Anderson’s fantastic Scotch and imported beer. Dunford marvelled at artifacts on show within the den collected from all over the world.

Anderson gave Dunford his Nineteen Sixties-era typewriter, as a present.

This was all earlier than a wintry evening in 1983, when Dunford says Anderson modified the course of his life.

Forty years later, Dunford nonetheless has the typewriter. He’s undecided why.

Dunford grew up within the Nineteen Sixties within the North Finish, close to Barton Road East and Wentworth Road North. He was the oldest of 5 boys. A sixth boy died very younger from most cancers.

He says his father was a gambler who cheated on his mom and was not concerned of their lives.

His mother and father separated. His mom, who had little training, raised the boys on mom’s allowance, and rented out rooms to boarders.

He has a reminiscence from eight years outdated, of two of the boarders groping him in the home. Round that very same time, he says he was molested in close by Woodlands Park.

Dunford loved studying, however couldn’t keep targeted in class and failed Grade 7 at Gibson elementary.

“I wasn’t silly; I learn lots however I used to be a juvenile delinquent, or that’s what they referred to as me,” he says.

In 1977, at 14, he left Hamilton to reside along with his aunt and uncle in Nova Scotia, however moved backwards and forwards a number of occasions.

That very same yr, Dr. James Anderson wrote a report for Ontario’s Ministry of Schooling about Cool Faculty, a program he had based in Hamilton six years earlier.

The idea was providing an choice for teenagers who didn’t reply properly to traditional classroom studying, by using a casual, self-directed studying construction, and serving to them operate “as their very own academics.”

Anderson had drawn upon strategies he helped develop within the Nineteen Sixties at McMaster’s medical faculty.

Together with program co-ordinator Ted Ridley, Anderson wrote within the report that Cool Faculty was for youth “immature in perspective,” a few of whom “habitually drug themselves or drink to the purpose of blotting out actuality,” and will have had a felony report, or “made half-hearted or honest makes an attempt to depart altogether from life.”

The report added that most of the college students “haven’t loved very best relationships with their mother and father” and that 28 per cent enrolled at one level had “a report of a number of convictions for juvenile or felony offences.”

Anderson had tutored “troubled youth” in his dwelling, earlier than Cool Faculty opened in a constructing at Chedoke Hospital on the Mountain. (Chedoke-McMaster Hospitals merged with Hamilton Civic Hospitals to type Hamilton Well being Sciences in 1996.)

Within the first 4 years of this system, 15 Cool Faculty graduates have been accepted by universities. By 1977, this system had 55 college students enrolled, with 4 full-time academics — referred to as tutors — along with volunteers.

He moved to Hamilton after becoming a member of McMaster’s medical college in 1967.

Anderson volunteered with the Boy Scouts of Canada, and established a clinic for youth in Burlington who had drug abuse points.

He obtained Hamilton Citizen of the Yr honours in 1975, partially for his work with Cool Faculty. An article in The Hamilton Spectator famous that Anderson, then 48, would generally submit bail for youth dealing with drug offence fees, rise up for them in court docket, and “make midnight home calls within the dingy alleys and backrooms frequented by younger drug customers and children in hassle.”

A headline in The Spectator referred to as him the “druggies’ doc.”

Anderson was quoted saying he was “not a high-profile public determine” and so the honour “makes me a really feel a bit of bit just like the unknown soldier.”

Dunford carried out higher in class residing with household out east.

His uncle, an artist, turned him on to Nietzsche, and the German novelist Hermann Hesse, whose tales featured coming-of-age themes and the “seek for authenticity, that means, and the religious life.”

Within the fall of 1980, at 17, Dunford had returned to Hamilton, and was attending Sir Winston Churchill highschool and residing at a youth dwelling referred to as Webber Home.

He was additionally consuming, and breaking home guidelines staying out all evening.

A buddy in Cool Faculty prompt Dunford prepare a gathering with Dr. Anderson.

Dunford says he met with Anderson in his workplace at Chedoke Hospital. Anderson was head of the college and a tutor.

“He wore glasses, and a jacket and tie,” says Dunford in an interview. “He smoked, had white hair, a comb-over … He appeared light and type, and actually listened to you.”

Dunford advised Anderson that he had learn Hesse extensively.

“He was impressed; Hermann Hesse was D.A.’s hero … Cool Faculty’s (philosophy) was based mostly on Hesse and his e-book ‘The Glass Bead Recreation.’”

(The novel is a futuristic story a couple of “gifted, parentless schoolboy” who is chosen for an elite training system after which rises to greatness.)

Dunford says that in the course of the assembly, Anderson grabbed and twisted his nipple as a greeting of kinds.

“He ‘purple nurpled’ me that first time. I hated it. He acted like he was taking part in round, laughing: ‘I gotcha.’ He did it to different boys, not simply me. I noticed it within the (faculty) hallway. I didn’t prefer it and I made that clear to him, and he stopped it.”

Mark Boardman, a Cool Faculty scholar and buddy of Dunford’s, advised The Spectator the nipple grabbing was a “well-known” behavior of Anderson’s, however he by no means skilled it himself.

Whereas not referencing groping, Ridley advised The Spectator in an e-mail that he recollects “occasional situations of jocular and consensual roughhousing” at Cool Faculty, “which, given the relaxed and casual tradition of this system in that period, didn’t seem inappropriate or to have a sexual connotation.”

Dunford moved again to Nova Scotia, the place he labored at McDonald’s, learn the works of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, and entered a brief story contest.

When he obtained optimistic suggestions from the competition decide, he gained confidence.

He phoned Anderson within the spring of 1982.

“Dr. Anderson stated, ‘what are you doing (out east)?’” says Dunford. “He advised me, ‘if you could find your method again to Hamilton, I’ll admit you to Cool Faculty.’”

He turned 19 that April, and entered Cool Faculty in September 1982. Anderson was his tutor.

Anderson launched him to a program graduate who was attending McMaster College, and writing his PhD on Soren Kierkegaard, the existentialist thinker.

Dunford was impressed. He determined he needed to be a philosophy professor.

Cool Faculty had moved to a constructing on King Road West, close to Queen Road South, leasing two flooring from the proprietor, the Sisters of St. Joseph.

Dunford lived in a small house on MacNab Road South. Quickly he was dropping by Anderson’s home about 10 blocks away, at Herkimer Road and Bay Road South, the place Anderson lived along with his spouse.

Dunford was not the one scholar who dropped by Anderson’s home within the Eighties. One other was Richard Heinzl, a McMaster medical scholar who based the Canadian department of the humanitarian group Medical doctors With out Borders.

“Right here was this man (Anderson) who was this towering professor, completely revered, and but you would develop a real friendship with him,” Heinzl advised The Spectator in 2008. “You could possibly knock on his door at midnight and he’d be up there working in his examine. He’d welcome you, and also you’d sit down and have a beverage with him and simply begin speaking in regards to the world.”

Within the fall of 1982, Dunford had pneumonia, and says Anderson visited him, examined his chest with a stethoscope, and gave him items: books that he had signed, and the typewriter.

When Dunford was higher, Anderson continued to go to the house, bringing sake (rice wine) with him. They drank and skim poetry.

“I used to be so comfortable this good man was taking an curiosity in me,” Dunford wrote in a letter to a lawyer, years later. “I went to his household’s Christmas dinner the place different good individuals attended.”

In February 1983, two months shy of his twentieth birthday, Dunford says he acquired drunk with Anderson on the home.

It was snowing exterior, and Anderson drove him dwelling.

“It was there, in my house, he kissed me,” Dunford wrote. “I froze. I didn’t know what to do. He advised me he was in love with me. That he had an sad, sexless marriage … A whole lot of ideas went by my head. This man, I believed, held the important thing to my future.”

The assertion of declare says Anderson carried out oral intercourse on Dunford, and that Dunford “was pressured to reciprocate.”

“I felt extremely responsible,” Dunford wrote. “I used to be actually confused and afraid. Not bodily afraid, simply usually afraid for the longer term.

About two weeks later, he says, upset at what had occurred, he visited Anderson, planning to inform him how he felt. As a substitute, they drank and Anderson carried out oral intercourse on him, however Dunford “managed to refuse to reciprocate,” says the assertion of declare.

“I advised Dr. Anderson that this couldn’t occur once more,” he wrote. “That it bothered me. That I wasn’t homosexual and didn’t like doing this … I used to be actually upset with myself. I couldn’t consider I allowed it to occur a second time.”

The declare says Dunford felt “confused, fearful, shameful, responsible, and complicit.”

He had felt like Anderson was a father determine to him. He believed Anderson was a genius.

“I beloved Dr. Anderson — platonically,” Dunford wrote.

Twice over the following 5 months, he says, he visited Anderson and talked about his ultimate faculty paper, whereas behaving coldly towards him.

“I started to hate him, and he knew it,” Dunford says.

Dunford barely attended class the final month of this system. After which, in a letter dated Aug. 31, 1983, on Chedoke-McMaster Hospitals letterhead, Anderson beneficial Dunford be admitted to school based mostly on his Cool Faculty efficiency.

(In its assertion of defence, HHS asserts that Cool Faculty officers had “no information” that Anderson was ever Dunford’s trainer or tutor, or that Dunford visited his dwelling, including that Dunford was a “non-materializing candidate who was discharged from this system in July 1982.”)

Underneath the heading “Letter of Equivalency,” Anderson famous that Dunford, “all the time a prolific author,” had learn 59 books, “together with the works of Hermann Hesse,” and written an essay on existentialist philosophy.

He concluded: “This intellectually gifted younger man has demonstrated his means to enter and reach a College program. He has the equal of Grade 13.”

Dunford says he was accepted to enter McMaster College that fall.

“That’s how good his phrase was.”

He squandered the chance.

Dunford would sit underneath an oak tree on campus, brooding, questioning if he was there as a result of he had supplied intercourse for Anderson.

He was residing along with his girlfriend, whom he had met at Cool Faculty, however didn’t inform her his story. He didn’t inform anybody.

He was consuming extra, and smoking pot every day.

He dropped out earlier than Christmas.

Not lengthy after that, he pursued a profession in journalism, and was employed to write down tales and editorials for group newspapers in Stoney Creek and Dundas.

In 1990, Dunford heard that Cool Faculty was about to shut.

It was round this time he advised his story for the primary time, to his buddy Boardman.

Later, he advised his teenage cousin, Mary Dunford, who had additionally attended Cool Faculty.

“Only a few issues can have an effect on the core of a person like one thing like that,” she advised The Spectator.

With Anderson lifeless, and not in a position to think about himself sooner or later confronting him, Dunford’s struggles worsened.

His newspaper colleagues considered him as a “troubled” individual, and he knew it.

He lacked confidence, couldn’t belief these in authority, and feared males usually.

“I had a very nihilistic perspective that I didn’t attempt to disguise … I used to be an actual mess between 1995 and 1999.”

He left his girlfriend. He took a go away from work and barely ate. He says Boardman confirmed up at his door sooner or later in 1997, and located him “emaciated” from weight reduction.

“Mark took me over his shoulder to the hospital.”

He was admitted to St. Joseph’s Healthcare, and to Homewood Well being Centre in Guelph for six weeks of post-traumatic stress dysfunction (PTSD) remedy. He says he was recognized with despair and normal nervousness dysfunction. He attended Alcoholics Nameless.

He says a few of his caregivers minimized his experiences with Anderson.

“It was like, ‘(Dunford) was 19 on the time, he was an grownup.’ That’s what it felt like.’”

He started courting a lady he had met at Homewood. The connection didn’t final — “I’ve ruined each relationship” — however that they had a son.

He says fatherhood made him much less self-absorbed, ended the suicidal ideas, and motivated him to go public along with his allegations.

He says he took authorized motion to make sure his story is on the report and to carry Anderson accountable in any case these years.

The declare says the long-term psychological well being affect from the alleged assaults brought about Dunford to “develop sure psychological mechanisms in an effort to survive … (together with) denial, repression, disassociation, and guilt,” and that it contributed towards a “lack of revenue … lack of incomes capability … and delight of life.”

He filed his declare in 2013, however the motion was dismissed in 2018, resulting from delays submitting motions by his first lawyer.

His present lawyer, Michael Wilchesky, has represented purchasers in sexual abuse and assault “vicarious legal responsibility” circumstances for 12 years. He prompt it’s common for a court docket to discover a faculty board, for instance, responsible for the actions of a trainer who’s deceased.

He added that damages awarded by courts in such circumstances have grown in recent times.

Wilchesky advised The Spectator the court docket should resolve if “it’s simply and equitable” for (HHS) to be held responsible for the hurt Dunford says he suffered.

The weird nature of Dunford’s case, he prompt, is that Cool Faculty was not operated by a college board, nor was it a company entity.

“So we’re left with the hospital,” says Wilchesky. “The hospital is saying, ‘we had nothing to do with (Cool Faculty),’ however we are saying they’re accountable as a result of all indicators pointed to the hospital working the Cool Faculty; it operated on hospital grounds by their adolescent improvement unit — that Dr. Anderson headed — and funds to Cool Faculty workers have been made by the hospital. Cool Faculty paperwork have been on hospital letterhead, college students utilized to attend and have been admitted by the hospital’s ordinary consumption course of … And these have been additional susceptible children, with household issues, who couldn’t full highschool.”

Wilchesky plans to name witnesses at trial, together with former classmates of Dunford’s.

When requested by The Spectator if he’s conscious of extra claims filed in opposition to Anderson previously, Wilchesky stated he was unable to remark.

Ridley, the Cool Faculty program co-ordinator, advised The Spectator that he’s “stunned and troubled” to listen to of Dunford’s allegations, and added that he would have “adopted up and reported the state of affairs appropriately” if he had been made conscious of them. “In my expertise, college students have been comfy approaching me, or different workers, with considerations of any type, together with mistreatment, assured they might be handled significantly, and their points addressed.”

Tony Hansen labored as a summer time scholar in Cool Faculty in 1979, and as a scholar trainer in this system within the early Eighties, attending workers conferences the place Anderson was current.

He advised The Spectator that in his expertise, Cool Faculty was “a joyful place,” and the allegations in opposition to Anderson “don’t match” with the individual he had skilled.

“(Anderson) was useful, clever and type,” he says. “He had a depraved sense of humour, and an infectious chuckle. He may act like a child at occasions; it wasn’t uncommon to see him talk about Dante’s ‘Inferno’ and Hermann Hesse one second, and race down the hallway with a squirt gun the following. However he was clear on his expectations and when it was time to work … He was undoubtedly a father determine to a few of the college students.”

One week after Anderson’s dying, Cool Faculty tutor Anne Snider wrote in The Spectator:

“Jim Anderson acknowledged the unimaginable alternative supplied by the uncertainty of adolescence … He supplied children respect, self-direction and a world of thrilling concepts. They beloved him for it and excelled due to it. Many went to school or different inventive endeavours. Few have been untouched by the magical door he opened for them.”

The final time Dunford spoke with Anderson was in 1990, 5 years earlier than his dying.

He says he regarded him up within the telephone e-book, after listening to Anderson not lived in his household dwelling.

He needed to let him know the way determined his life had been since Cool Faculty.

“I needed to convey up quite a lot of issues.”

Anderson answered the telephone.

They engaged in small discuss.

Dunford advised him he had been writing for a newspaper.

“Oh, that’s good,” Anderson stated.

“I simply stated, ‘discuss to you later,’” says Dunford. “I needed to convey it up, however I couldn’t.”

As a substitute, he returned to brooding.

“I’d simply sit and assume, and for a very long time I believed perhaps he was a sufferer. I’d make up excuses for him — like perhaps he couldn’t come out as a homosexual man within the ‘60s, when he was establishing the anatomy faculty and drugs faculty. Possibly society pressured him to repress his homosexuality.”

Within the mid-2000s, Dunford began courting Laurie Kallis, a Hamilton artist.

They have been collectively 10 years. From the beginning, Kallis puzzled what had occurred in Dunford’s previous that influenced his mercurial character.

“John is a form and respectable individual, however he couldn’t deal properly with stress or something remotely like confrontation,” she says. “He was not very secure for most of the years we have been collectively. He was by no means offended, not even when he was consuming, but when he acquired upset about one thing, he would disappear, be gone for a day, per week. And that’s once we lived collectively.”

A type of occasions, she went in search of him at a buddy’s home.

“Once I knocked on the door he opened it, broke into tears, and requested why it took me so lengthy to get him.”

Finally, he advised her about his previous.

“It got here out in items,” she says. “It was very painful for him to disclose his expertise.”

Kallis says Dunford struggled to grasp that “he didn’t do something improper, and to forgive himself.”

“I blamed myself for a very long time,” says Dunford. “I nonetheless do.”

He says he has been sober for about 9 years, and has a relationship along with his son, who’s now 21.

Within the letter Dunford wrote to a lawyer in 2007, he stated his recollections of Anderson have been “not ‘recovered’ … it’s precisely as a result of I can’t neglect that I’ve had a lot hassle in my private life.”

However he says he has discovered to focus much less on the previous.

He says he hopes his story will assist others with relatable experiences not really feel as alone, but in addition believes he will probably be criticized for concentrating on Anderson, given the person’s fame, and that he can not defend himself.

Dunford nonetheless has the books that Anderson gave him, and as for the typewriter, he wonders if he’ll destroy it, as soon as the case is over.

Symbolically, which may shut the chapter of the story that started the day Dunford wrote that letter 16 years in the past, laying naked his emotions.

On the finish of the letter, he channels the phrases of Nietzsche, and maybe Dunford is subconsciously referencing himself, when attempting to account for the person he had beloved, after which despised.

“I ponder about so many issues,” he wrote. “What a tragedy, for each of us. Dr. Anderson was all too human, I assume.”