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 college.

Identified for his mind, charisma, and offbeat sense of humour, within the early Nineteen Seventies he created “Cool Faculty,” an alternate for Hamilton teenagers who struggled in typical 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, usually whereas ingesting and staring into house, burning days and nights.

What ought to he have finished? 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 previous, 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.

All the 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 will not be liable. The assertion provides that “no criticism 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 known as “D.A.” by Cool Faculty college students.

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

Anderson gave Dunford his 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 Sixties within the North Finish, close to Barton Avenue East and Wentworth Avenue 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 dad and mom 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 previous, 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 centered at school and failed Grade 7 at Gibson elementary.

“I wasn’t silly; I learn loads however I used to be a juvenile delinquent, or that’s what they known 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 possibility for teenagers who didn’t reply nicely to standard classroom studying, by using an off-the-cuff, self-directed studying construction, and serving to them operate “as their very own academics.”

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

Together with program co-ordinator Ted Ridley, Anderson wrote within the report that Cool Faculty was for youth “immature in angle,” a few of whom “habitually drug themselves or drink to the purpose of blotting out actuality,” and will have had a prison 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 splendid relationships with their dad and mom” and that 28 per cent enrolled at one level had “a report of a number of convictions for juvenile or prison 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 kind Hamilton Well being Sciences in 1996.)

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

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

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

He acquired Hamilton Citizen of the 12 months honours in 1975, partly for his work with Cool Faculty. An article in The Hamilton Spectator famous that Anderson, then 48, would generally publish bail for youth dealing with drug offence expenses, rise up for them in court docket, and “make midnight home calls within the dingy alleys and backrooms frequented by younger drug customers and youngsters in bother.”

A headline in The Spectator known 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 slightly bit just like the unknown soldier.”

Dunford carried out higher at school 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 known as Webber Home.

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

A good friend in Cool Faculty advised Dunford organize 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 mild 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 ebook ‘The Glass Bead Sport.’”

(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 through 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 enjoying round, guffawing: ‘I gotcha.’ He did it to different boys, not simply me. I noticed it within the (college) hallway. I didn’t prefer it and I made that clear to him, and he stopped it.”

Mark Boardman, a Cool Faculty scholar and good friend 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 electronic mail that he recollects “occasional cases 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 acquired constructive suggestions from the competition decide, he gained confidence.

He phoned Anderson within the spring of 1982.

“Dr. Anderson mentioned, ‘what are you doing (out east)?’” says Dunford. “He advised me, ‘if you’ll find your means 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 wished to be a philosophy professor.

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

Dunford lived in a small condominium on MacNab Avenue South. Quickly he was dropping by Anderson’s home about 10 blocks away, at Herkimer Avenue and Bay Avenue 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, totally revered, and but you may 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 research. 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 presents: books that he had signed, and the typewriter.

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

“I used to be so pleased 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 folks attended.”

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

It was snowing exterior, and Anderson drove him dwelling.

“It was there, in my condominium, 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 number 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 typically afraid for the long run.

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 imagine 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 cherished Dr. Anderson — platonically,” Dunford wrote.

Twice over the subsequent 5 months, he says, he visited Anderson and talked about his remaining college 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 really helpful 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 data” that Anderson was ever Dunford’s instructor 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.”)

Beneath the heading “Letter of Equivalency,” Anderson famous that Dunford, “at all times 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 potential to enter and achieve 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 ingesting 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 good friend 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 useless, and now not capable of think about himself sooner or later confronting him, Dunford’s struggles worsened.

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

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

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

He left his girlfriend. He took a depart 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) therapy. He says he was recognized with despair and common 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 girl he had met at Homewood. The connection didn’t final — “I’ve ruined each relationship” — however they’d 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 influence from the alleged assaults precipitated Dunford to “develop sure psychological mechanisms as a way to survive … (together with) denial, repression, disassociation, and guilt,” and that it contributed towards a “lack of revenue … lack of incomes capability … and pleasure of life.”

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

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

He added that damages awarded by courts in such instances have grown lately.

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

The bizarre nature of Dunford’s case, he advised, is that Cool Faculty was not operated by a faculty 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 had been made by the hospital. Cool Faculty paperwork had been on hospital letterhead, college students utilized to attend and had been admitted by the hospital’s regular consumption course of … And these had been further susceptible youngsters, 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 mentioned he was unable to remark.

Ridley, the Cool Faculty program co-ordinator, advised The Spectator that he’s “shocked 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 had been snug approaching me, or different workers, with issues of any kind, together with mistreatment, assured they’d be handled severely, and their points addressed.”

Tony Hansen labored as a summer season scholar in Cool Faculty in 1979, and as a scholar instructor 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 particular person he had skilled.

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

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

“Jim Anderson acknowledged the unbelievable alternative supplied by the uncertainty of adolescence … He supplied youngsters respect, self-direction and a world of thrilling concepts. They cherished him for it and excelled due to it. Many went to school or different inventive endeavours. Few had 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 demise.

He says he seemed him up within the cellphone ebook, after listening to Anderson now not lived in his household dwelling.

He wished to let him understand how determined his life had been since Cool Faculty.

“I wished to carry up a variety of issues.”

Anderson answered the cellphone.

They engaged in small speak.

Dunford advised him he had been writing for a newspaper.

“Oh, that’s good,” Anderson mentioned.

“I simply mentioned, ‘speak to you later,’” says Dunford. “I wished to carry it up, however I couldn’t.”

As a substitute, he returned to brooding.

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

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

They had 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 particular person, however he couldn’t deal nicely with stress or something remotely like confrontation,” she says. “He was not very steady for most of the years we had been collectively. He was by no means offended, not even when he was ingesting, but when he obtained upset about one thing, he would disappear, be gone for a day, every week. And that’s after we lived collectively.”

A type of occasions, she went in search of him at a good friend’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.”

Ultimately, 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 know that “he didn’t do something flawed, 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 mentioned his reminiscences of Anderson had been “not ‘recovered’ … it’s precisely as a result of I can’t overlook that I’ve had a lot bother in my private life.”

However he says he has realized 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 shall be criticized for focusing on Anderson, given the person’s fame, and that he can now 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, that 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 making an attempt to account for the person he had cherished, 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 suppose.”