Isolde Raftery

0:00Speaker 1:Before we begin, the stories told in this podcast may be difficult for some to hear. Many discuss sexual assault, domestic violence, and suicide.

0:09Speaker 2:Please take care while listening. Ella just said we need to go back. We need to find out what happened. And you would think as the journalist in the duo, I would have been excited about it. But I also know as a journalist that when you start digging, you find a lot of ugliness and you have to sit with that ugliness and you have to figure out how to talk about the ugliness, all of which happened, by the way.

0:37Speaker 1:Isolde Raftery comes from a family of journalists. Her aunt, Mary Raftery, was a well-known investigative documentarian in Ireland. her work there helped uncover some of the abuses of the Catholic Church. So perhaps it shouldn't have been surprising when, in the late 1990s, during her senior year at Seattle's Garfield High School, Isolde and her friend Ella published a piece in their school newspaper that deeply fractured, even shattered, the image the school had of itself. Isolde and Ella were both editors on the student newspaper when a scandal broke.

1:16Speaker 1:The principal, who had been sleeping with a cheerleader, was put on leave. They wanted to address it.

1:23Speaker 2:We came up with the very benign-seeming idea of student-teacher relationships. Like, what is appropriate, what is not? Just get people to kind of meditate on how close is too close.

1:36Speaker 1:But as they were reporting the story out, they got wind of something else.

1:41Speaker 2:We learned from a reporter on the paper that the beloved science teacher was abusing a boy, maybe more than one boy.

1:53Speaker 1:This teacher, a man named Mr. Hudson, was respected and well-liked by his students. But this wasn't the first story Isolde had heard about him. It made her uncomfortable. As they talked to more students in Mr. Hudson's orbit, they heard more stories. Anecdotes being passed off like secrets to be hushed. To Isolde, though, they increasingly felt like crimes.

2:20Speaker 2:I reported the allegations of abuse to my mom, and we agreed to go forth with allegations to the district and to authorities.

2:30Speaker 1:And then they put out a story in their student newspaper, in the edition that questioned the school's culture of closeness. They were careful not to name Mr. Hudson and removed other identifying information. But shortly after the story was published, Mr. Hudson was placed under investigation by the school district and put on leave. The fallout for Azolda and Ella was swift. They were blamed for his exit.

2:57Speaker 2:We were really ostracized. We became quasi-pariahs in the school. The teachers were really angry with us.

3:08Speaker 1:But it soon got worse. Two months later, Hudson died by suicide. The school district never finished the investigation into him, so the community never found out if the allegations were true. Instead, many people continued to blame Isolde and Ella, two high school girls, for Hudson's death.

3:27Speaker 2:We carry that guilt, frankly, for 25 years until we decide to go back and reinvestigate and say, like, were we to blame?

3:36Speaker 1:Isolde, who is now the managing editor at KUOW in Seattle, and Ella, a civil rights attorney, decided to reopen the investigation themselves. The result of their reporting, a show called Adults in the Room, came out earlier this year. The podcast is about what happens in an environment where rumors go unchecked, where a culture of permissiveness means not only are boundaries pushed, they're broken. It's also about the friendship of two brave teen girls who who stood up for themselves and their peers, even when many adults told them they were wrong.

4:11Speaker 2:I realized at some point, like, wait, it's better if we're the villains. Because if we're right, that means kids were abused.

4:23Speaker 1:I'm Melissa Jeltsin, and this is What Happened to Her. Today, a conversation with Isolde Raftery on reporting out this personal story the pernicious nature of grooming and about how this event shaped the journalist she is today. What made you and Ella want to revisit this story? Was it the kind of thing that you guys would talk about with each other over the years? How often did it come up, this thing that happened in high school?

5:00Speaker 2:It came up maybe once a year, late at night, after a glass of wine, other people would clear out from the table and we would start talking. And we would go round and round in circles. It was the same thing, how wronged we'd been, how we wondered, were there victims out there? It was sort of a giant question mark. At the baseline, we were feeling some guilt about We were feeling like, did we overstep? And then we would have these discussions about like, wait a minute, we did the right thing. It's what kids are supposed to do. That's crazy that they were mad that we came forward. I mean, which it's crazy that they were mad that kids came forward. So it was this very defensive anger. And we were also angry about how we were treated by our journalism advisor, because he was really treated us very poorly, not just as students, not just as kids who reported these allegations of abuse, but also as girls in his class. So that's why I agreed to do it. And then, you know, you get the bug and you kind of can't give it up.

6:19Speaker 1:Did you have any hesitations about taking on a project like this where you would be a central character? I.

6:27Speaker 2:was warned that it could end up being really ugly because there was a possibility in which I am not quite the villain, but there was a possibility that I would find out that, yes, I had pushed a man to his death. And by the way, I kind of still think I sort of did push In many ways. I mean, you know, at the end of the day, from the moment that I reported him to the moment he died, about two and a half months passed. So for me, it's impossible to say I didn't. I don't believe I caused his death, but I, you know, I played a role. I mean, I was warned by our chief content officer that people might be mad at me.

7:19Speaker 2:And I'm not used to that, right? I'm used to people being mad at me, but I'm not used to being a central character. I'm not used to being a memoirist. And it really was uncomfortable for me to write the first three or four episodes when it truly was about me and about Ella. And then when we pivoted into hard reporting into what happened and I started meeting people I hadn't known before, then I got real comfortable because I was back back into journalism mode.

7:48Speaker 1:So talk me through the actual reporting process. I remembered from listening to it that you had some primary documents that you had sourced years ago, and you held onto them for a really long time.

8:01Speaker 2:So I had actually really wanted other reporters to tell our story. So to try to convince them, I was collecting records. in the form of filing public records requests from the school district about Tom Hudson and about my journalism advisor who had tried to fire us. Actually, he was one of the teachers who tried to ostracize us and succeeded in doing so. So I was collecting records from the district. And when I received them, I held on to them because I kind of knew somewhere in me that these would be important someday. I didn't quite know how. And so I had official records. And then Ella, my best friend, was a prolific journaler. And she kept all her diaries from that time. And she also printed out all our emails from the time because she worried that our emails could disappear. You know, we just didn't know what could disappear, which was very smart because we no longer have Yahoo accounts. And Ella and I would email each other our thoughts of the day almost every every day when we were seniors in high school. And we truly were documenting. We would actually say that, you know, and she's an attorney today. I'm a journalist. It sort

9:21Speaker 2:of makes sense that we were doing that. But we knew that we were putting things down for the record and we didn't quite know for what. And where we got really lucky is that as I started poking around, asking friends, people would say, you know, my dad has a VHS tape. I know somebody who has This record or this tape or all these notes that they kept because there was something about this story that was so different and weird. And I think everybody was sort of waiting for the moment for it to be told.

10:11Speaker 1:Tom Hudson taught science at Garfield High, but he was really known and even gained a kind of cult following. for his leadership of the school's wilderness exploration program, a club called Post 84. In it, kids learned survival skills. They went hiking in the Olympic Mountains and scuba diving in Hawaii. Many kids in the program loved these outdoor challenges and adored Mr. Hudson. He was larger than life and seemed kind of unrestricted by more conventional norms in his interactions with students. But Tom Hudson was not only cultivating a space for nature enthusiasts, he was creating intimate grooming opportunities between him and his students. Grooming is the deliberate and strategic process of building trust and an emotional connection with a vulnerable person, like a child or teen.

11:03Speaker 1:This trust is then manipulated or controlled, in Tom Hudson's case, for sexual exploitation and It started slow and just with certain kids and outside of class. Maybe he'd mention sex or bring in porn to look at or even watch together. Sometimes on outdoor expeditions, he'd ask a boy to take a nap with him. He took kids out on his boat and got drunk with them. He normalized nakedness between him and his students, having boys strip down and dance on the boat's dock. Other times, after inviting a boy to play racquetball, they would shower together in the gym locker room. These were just some of the stories Isolde and Ella had heard in high school, including from close friends who had experienced this behavior firsthand. But now, reporting this story as adults, they would soon learn how big and troubling this abuse really was.

12:00Speaker 2:Ella learned about a year into this, maybe 10 months in, she got in touch with a man who had been abused and he confirmed that it had been bad. At that point, we knew, okay, there's a lot more here because a 58-year-old man, that's how old Tom Hudson, the biology teacher was, a 58-year-old man in my entire 22 years of journalism, they don't prey on just one person. they tend to have more than one, many more than one. And so that's what made me think, okay, I have to cast a very wide net. And I joined classmates.com and went and found the old yearbooks that are all uploaded there and made a list of every single person who'd been in the program and started making calls to everybody because I assumed correctly that there were many more.

12:59Speaker 1:I In the podcast, you talk a little bit about this murky area of kind of inappropriate behavior. There was so much there. If you're talking about where there's smoke, there's fire. In this case, we have him showering with students, taking students to a nude beach, talking about sex with kids.

13:25Speaker 2:Giving them pornography.

13:27Speaker 1:Giving them pornography, taking them onto a boat to have kind of an isolated experience where the rules don't really apply. But, you know, you had to deal with that as a student yourself with how to report this stuff. But I think we struggle with these same questions today as adults covering stories like this, right? How did your understanding of grooming and sexual abuse and sort of your understanding about what this behavior had meant and maybe the harm that it caused. How did that shift from your teenage self to your adult self? And even as you've gone through this reporting experience and learned more?

14:09Speaker 2:I love that question because the truth is I didn't realize how much I myself had been groomed by, frankly, by Tom Hudson. Our whole community had been groomed. He normalized what, he probably would have described as horseplay. He would have probably been one of those people who would have said the PC police, the politically correct police. Back in the 90s, that was a big thing. People are too politically correct. People are too stuck up. We need to be free. So there were a lot of these dynamics that I was grappling with. And as a teenager, before I went to my mom, I knew... about the porn.

14:53Speaker 2:I knew about the boat. I knew that he drank on the boat. I knew that he had taken a nap with my boyfriend in the back of a truck on a trip to Maui. I knew that he was taking naked showers with boys. And actually a friend of mine had told me that he had whipped his butt with a towel in the shower. So I knew all of that. And I thought, this guy's creepy. I don't like him. But is he an abuser? In my head, I chalked it up to this guy had a Peter Pan syndrome. He was like a giant kid. He was moody.

15:32Speaker 2:Like none of that seemed wrong to me. It wasn't until I learned that there was more to the abuse and that he had kicked a boy that I suddenly something came together in my head that this is wrong. This is abuse. We have to act. This is no longer just horseplay. It was worth bringing forward to responsible adults.

15:58Speaker 1:Isolde told me something that struck her about the insidiousness of Tom Hudson's grooming behavior. That even as an adult, knowing what she did about the science teacher, she still found herself excusing some of the decisions he made.

16:15Speaker 2:We were working on episode six. And episode six is in which there's a boy named Jason Fox. And in 1994, there's a photo of him standing nude with Tom Hudson. And the school district gets a hold of this photo and decides to investigate what's going on here. Now, I knew about this present day and just didn't think it was that big a deal that Tom Hudson was skinny dipping Jason. with this kid. So I actually never went to look for him. I just wasn't interested. I was like, yeah, that was Tom Hudson's shtick. I'm looking for other boys.

16:55Speaker 2:I wasn't looking for Jason Fox. In my head, that didn't amount to, it didn't even amount to smoke. And it wasn't until I got these records requests, I continued filing them. I got a batch of records back. And in one was Jason Fox, whose name had been redacted. But he said, I need closure. I've been in a lot of pain and very depressed about things that happened to me when I was a kid involving Tom Hudson. And I just had this sudden realization of, Isolde, you idiot.

17:32Speaker 2:That guy was key. Like, go find him. And I mean, I felt so stupid. because I realized I'd been so groomed. There was this residual community grooming that I'd been a part of to think like all of that wasn't okay, but it's fine enough. And I think people outside my community would be like, that's crazy. But I somehow to this day carried that with me. And it wasn't until I saw his email in the records showing that he was in pain from this moment. And that really changed my entire thinking about where I thought I need to take grooming a lot more seriously. And the grooming indicates abuse.

18:14Speaker 2:Almost always it indicates abuse. There were many moments in the making of this podcast where I felt pretty dumb. And like, I think of myself as an evolved, sophisticated woman. And really, I'm not. So it was a really big wake up for me.

18:32Speaker 1:I'm thinking about your experience as a journalism student. You and Ella, after learning about some of these allegations, decide to publish something. And then afterwards, you get this tremendous pushback from the school and from your journalism teacher who really basically accuses you both of publishing unfounded rumors and and says you should quit. I feel like that even today as adults, there is this pushback of publishing things that are rumors or that don't account to criminal behavior, but are immoral or wrong or harmful in some way.

19:24Speaker 1:So I just see such a parallel there that you are already facing A thing that's pretty common, like I've reported tons of stories where there was sexual abuse happening, but we couldn't quite pin down something that would have violated a law. And you have to answer to editors and different people who don't want these stories being told and will also impugn your case. and saying, to try to report a story like this, you are not a good reporter, which is what, you know, your journalism teacher was telling you. Can you just talk a little bit about that?

20:00Speaker 2:Yeah. So what happened is our journalism advisor, Roughly five days after Tom Hudson was put on leave, he called the entire staff together and called for the resignation of two editors who had acted immorally, who had, gosh, the exact language I think was unethical, unsubstantiated rumors. And we were in the room, everybody knew it was us, and he asked us to resign. It's a class, so no, we weren't about to resign. We couldn't resign. But, you know, the message was received. And he basically made everybody believe that we were unethical. Already as girls, girls are often branded as gossips. So here we are, like, not only are we gossips, but we're the most dangerous kind of gossips.

21:01Speaker 2:We're the kind of gossips who... put a teacher on leave and potentially ruin his career and his reputation, ruin a season of these outdoor projects. We ruin kids' lives who are being interviewed by investigators. I mean, basically, that's us. We're like these kind of witches.

21:29Speaker 1:The podcast talks a lot about your feelings of guilt and culpability, right?

21:36Speaker 2:For years.

21:38Speaker 1:And this was not just brought on by yourself. This was also projected onto you from the community that because you guys published this article and because your mother reported and this investigation had happened, that somehow you were responsible for, um, your teacher's suicide. But during this reporting process, you learned that there were other people who were also carrying.

22:08Speaker 2:This guilt, right?

22:08Speaker 1:That they felt like they too, that it was their fault. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like to learn that other people had been carrying that same sort of burden? I.

22:25Speaker 2:really did feel that guilt. And I, as a journalist, have always been like, I have one suicide under my belt I don't want anymore. And I have covered stories about men who abuse women and have been like, please, dear God, please, dear God, don't kill yourself. I can't do this, go through this again. So yeah, that has weighed on me. I Then learned that Jonathan Hill, who was one of Tom Hudson's victims and who listened to him talk about wanting to die by suicide, what he called the suicide talks. Jonathan would talk with Tom Hudson for hours about trying to talk him out of committing suicide.

23:14Speaker 2:And when I interviewed Jonathan very early on, I mean, Jonathan was probably one of the first people I interviewed outside of my circle of comfort of friends. And Jonathan told me how guilty he felt. He felt like he wasn't able to prevent him from dying. And he carried that with him for years. And then, you know, our final episode is with a man who felt a combination of pride and guilt for his role in the suicide.

23:51Speaker 1:This story and this source was one that came to Isolde while she was already reporting the podcast. The victim was cautious and concerned about sharing his story publicly, but ultimately decided to come forward, though he remained anonymous and uses the pseudonym Paul in the podcast. When Paul was in high school, he lived with Tom Hudson for a And Tom convinced Paul's parents that he could straighten the teenager out. But Tom didn't help Paul.

24:27Speaker 2:He hurt him. He calls Tom Hudson a child rapist. It was child abuse that occurred in Tom Hudson's home. He went to live with Tom Hudson. So Tom Hudson had these kind of quasi-foster boys who would live with him. And he said, you know, he was relentlessly attacked by Tom Hudson.

24:49Speaker 1:Altogether, Paul lived with the Hudsons for about nine months. By his junior year, Tom Hudson seemed to lose interest in Paul. The abuse slowed down, but it didn't stop. Paul never felt like he could reveal the truth to shatter the facade Tom had built in the community. Besides, Paul told Isolde he always thought everyone would believe Tom over him. He tried to escape Tom's grip on his life by leaving the state for college. But years later, when Paul realized he wasn't alone, that Tom was abusing other boys, Paul felt Tom needed to be stopped.

25:29Speaker 2:In 1999, he was in his late 20s. He comes back for the holidays to Seattle and Tom Hudson gets in touch with him. Now, back in 1999, Tom Hudson had been placed on leave for the allegations I had brought forward. And he tells them, I'm under investigation for allegations of sexual misconduct. And this boy, who'd always thought he was the only one, suddenly goes, wait a minute, there were others? And he says, well, yeah. And he starts confessing to him. He's not naming names, but he's telling him about other boys. And he says the investigation hasn't caught up to those boys, the current present-day victims.

26:14Speaker 2:And so Paul, in that moment, goes, I have to do something about this. This man has to be stopped. And I don't know how we're going to stop him. But if I don't stop him, he will continue abusing these boys, present day and future boys. On his flight home to the East Coast, where he's in graduate school, he comes up with a plan to murder Tom Hudson, to kill Tom Hudson. And he thinks, I'm going to take him on a hike to a cliff. I'm going to push him off this cliff. And no one will be surprised because Tom Hudson was always a risk taker and he has a bad knee and he's out of shape.

26:53Speaker 2:And here he was doing what he loved most with a student he adored and what a great tragedy for all. And then, you know, he quickly realizes probably a bad idea. If he got caught, he'd probably go to prison. And he doesn't want that. And he spends weeks on his couch, smoking pot, trying to figure out what to do. And Tom Hudson calls him and starts telling him, I'm thinking about dying by suicide. And he says, well, there's the new plan. So he basically says to him, well, if you don't follow through with something, either coming clean or dying by suicide, I'm going to come forward. And he gave him a deadline. So two weeks later, Tom Hudson checks into a motel in Everett, Washington, which is just north of Seattle, and calls up Paul, basically says, here we go. And he was taking pills and dying on the phone with Paul, making good on this deadline. And Paul felt a combination of pride because he stopped the abuse, but he also felt huge guilt for Paul. the role he had played in pushing Hudson to his death. Present day, I have now reframed, and I hope Paul has too, reframed it as us kids came together. We didn't know

28:22Speaker 2:each other. It was across sort of dimensions and time and space and all that. We didn't know it, but we all figured something out together. Like me by pushing it forward, Paul by... Giving him an out, either way, all of it was pretty ad hoc. And the outcome, it's tragic. It's very, a death is tragic. But all us kids work together to stop this man. And that's how I see it today. That's how I'm choosing, trying to reframe it for myself, rather than guilt, is that we stopped him. And the way... Tom Hudson got out.

29:00Speaker 2:Instead of going through the court process, he decided to die by suicide.

29:07Speaker 1:Ultimately, in your case, you discovered that the school knew all about Tom Hudson, right? They knew about him five years before you even, you said anything to your mom. So this was not a surprise to them. And there were other kids who had reported things to, that had you know, triggered an investigation that had nothing to do with you also being very aware and recognizing what the right thing was to do in that circumstance. But that sort of lesson as a young journalism student, that reporting can have real consequences, even if it's not your fault, right?

29:48Speaker 1:You don't have to say, like, I caused a suicide. But like you were saying to me, and I truly believe this too, it does play a role. I remember one of the first big stories I reported was I quoted a sheriff in a town who was very unhappy with how I portrayed him. And he said I was a liar and I made it up and did kind of rattle me a little bit that I had maybe missed the context or somehow got it wrong. And then he died of a heart attack like pretty soon after.

30:17Speaker 1:And I felt, you know, oh, that was a lot of stress that my reporting caused. He was stressed enough about it that he wrote a letter to the editor saying that I got it wrong and he was really unhappy and I don't. I don't hold it that I caused him to have a heart attack, but I do ever since then really try to remember that everything we do can have real consequences. And we're bringing things to light that oftentimes people don't want to come to light.

30:48Speaker 1:And we're also criticizing people for doing things incorrectly or without care. And that is a thing that journalists carry on. with us, that there are ripple effects to the work that we do, especially when it comes to these kinds of sensitive topics. You learned that lesson so young, and then you still went on to want to pursue this as a career. It's like you are doing the same thing little Isolde was doing at 17, you're still doing today.

31:24Speaker 2:I have wondered, If I am just redoing the same story over and over and over again, trying to get it right, you know, like this time, this is it. And I think there's some itch that is getting scratched each time I do it. And, you know, I have to tell you, like, I just have so much more I want to do. I thought I'd be done. I thought this was it. The itch was scratched. But it's itchier. I just want to do more. So I don't know if I'm a natural journalist, if it's because of what happened when I was a senior, if I was the person who the universe plopped into that school at that time because it knew that Tom Hudson had to be stopped.

32:07Speaker 2:I don't know. But there's something in my DNA that just wants to cast a light on not just sexual abuse or violence against women, although that is very much, and children, that's very much a cornerstone, but also just political wrongdoing and just people doing the wrong thing.

32:27Speaker 1:You did such an incredible job, and I just keep thinking about it and how what happened then and of the obstacles and experiences that you went through in high school is such a microcosm for just working in journalism in general. It's hard to tell these stories and to unearth things that people don't want out there. You're often put in an uncomfortable position. Just in your case, you weren't a professional yet. You were a kid, but your instincts were so right on.

32:59Speaker 2:That is honestly something I think that I've held on to is that I did the right thing. My instincts were right. And there are times when I question my instincts today and I go, you had The foundation when you were 17 and 18, you know this, you're good, you're good. The confidence of my own instincts has actually been probably the bedrock of my entire career.

33:25Speaker 1:Well, I think the podcast was done very, very carefully. That comes across as really driven by curiosity. You know, what did happen? And I think it's just fascinating that you were right. What a horrible thing.

33:44Speaker 2:To be right about. You know, I realized at some point, like, wait, it's better if we're the villains. Because if we're right, that means kids were abused. And that realization was like, oh, no, you know, it's like this moment of joy, there was actual joy in realizing I was right. And it was very short lived, very short lived. Today, it's funny that The story has totally shifted. How we talk now is we talk about the victims. We talk about the survivors.

34:24Speaker 2:And there's something really lovely about that because we feel like we've, I don't know, I'm about to talk for Ella and I shouldn't, but I'll talk for me. I feel like we created an outlet for people to share their stories and for people to heal. And that wasn't necessarily going to be the outcome. There's a world in which we forced people to have a conversation they were not ready to have, and it would have caused a lot more trauma in the community. And we got really lucky because people were ready. That's been the evolution of Ella's and my conversations. Ella and I are really, really lucky that we've had each other. We Didn't realize how lucky we were until this podcast when we realized the other kids were alone. And we had each other. We were in it together. And I guess we're still in it together.

35:18Speaker 1:Azolda's podcast is called Adults in the Room. Get it wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Coming up on What Happened to Her, the Sandra Birchmore story.

35:42Speaker 2:Victims are groomed to keep secrets, and Sandra was very good at that, unfortunately.

35:48Speaker 1:A multi-episode investigation into the death of a young woman whose dreams of becoming a mother and a police officer may have been fatal.

35:57Speaker 2:You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

36:03Speaker 1:Starting next week on What Happened to Her. What Happened to Her is hosted, reported, and written by me, Melissa Jeltsin. Additional writing and story editing by Marissa Brown. Editing, sound design, and mixing by Evan Tyer. Original music by Aaron Kaufman. Executive producers are Jason English, Lauren Hansen, Ryan Murdoch, and Melissa Jeltsin. If you have a story you think we should look into or just something to say, you can reach us at whathappentoherpodcast at gmail.com. If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, please visit the National Domestic Violence Hotline at thehotline.org or call them at 800-799-SAFE for free confidential support 24 hours a day. Thank you so much for listening.