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You have nothing to lose but your company-mandated cheerfulness.

By Anya Kamenetz


Daniel Gross standing in front of his employer—and nemesis—on May 15.(Photo credit: Jake Chessum)
Nothing seems amiss at Starbucks Coffee Store No. 7356, on the southwest corner of Madison Avenue and 36th Street. It has a nice view of a nineteenth-century Gothic Revival church. The familiar aroma of dark-roasted Sumatra curls through the air. Most of the staffers are no older than teenagers, but none betrays the slightest hint of sullenness—or simmering political rage. “Here you go, sweetie,” says a barista in blonde pigtails as she hands a grande iced chai over the counter. You’d never suspect that this little island of repose in the crush of midtown is a revolutionary cell. Unbeknownst to its customers (or “guests,” as they’re called), store No. 7356 birthed the first-ever campaign to unionize a Starbucks—a movement that renegade baristas hope will spread through the chain’s 6,668 other U.S. outlets.

The battle has been heated (in fact, steamed-milk injuries are one of the sticking points). Two workers were hauled off to jail. Others have been warned that union sympathies could cost them their jobs. And now Starbucks—used to PR snags no greater than public furor over $3.95 lattes—must go before the National Labor Relations Board next month on charges of bribery, threats, and other illegal attempts to prevent employees from organizing.

The trouble started back in May 2003, when Daniel Gross began work as a barista at store No. 7356. Gross is a 26-year-old from L.A. who’s now at Fordham Law School. He has piercing blue eyes, persistent stubble, and an easy laugh. He’s also a “Wobbly,” a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, the once-storied “one big union,” which was largely stamped out after World War I and only partially revived by campus-activist types in the seventies.






A revolution is brewing at Starbucks store No. 7356.



The grandson of a truck-driving Teamster, Gross may have a predisposition toward rabble-rousing. He was even fired from a Green Corps gig for what he claims was pro-union activity. “I’ve had every bad job,” he says. “I’ve been a delivery person, worked in tree care. Borders Books was my first introduction into the reality of multinational corporate employment.” And soon after his arrival in New York, he decided to infiltrate Starbucks.

When Gross walked into the store for his first morning shift, he was dismayed—and encouraged—by what he saw. Just three workers were completely slammed with businesspeople for the A.M. rush. “In this kind of job,” he says, “you expect to work hard, but you don’t necessarily expect to go home feeling like you just ran a marathon.”

Gross spotted a likely fellow traveler in Anthony Polanco, 23, another new hire with a bad-job résumé similar to Gross’s and a union-man father. A few months into the job, he and Gross were closing the store together. As they walked to the subway, Gross told him about the IWW’s “solidarity unionism” model—any worker could join at any time. When they reached the station, Polanco stuck out his hand. “I’m with you, Dan,” he said. “I’m with you all the way.”

Polanco became Gross’s wingman, helping recruit workers and eventually becoming the only other Madison Avenue employee to go on record as a union supporter. Polanco sums up their rallying cry: “Starbucks pays peanuts, and they treat the workers like elephants.” Most of the workers they approached responded eagerly to their idea that the New York–area starting salary of $7.75 an hour is a “poverty wage.” Furthermore, says Gross, hours—and therefore income—are unpredictable. “The hook for their employment message is that hours are flexible. But they’re flexible for the boss, not you!” Gross complains that managers post schedules no more than one week in advance, and that workers’ hours can vary from 8 to 37 a week.

Soon, co-workers were meeting covertly in each other’s apartments. “Some folks were very scared of retaliation,” explains Gross. These were part strategy talks, part epic bitch sessions—someone had been reprimanded for wearing the wrong color shoes, someone else for a $5 shortfall in a $1,000 till.

At work, Gross kept earning high marks—“extraordinary”—on his employee evaluations. Yet by May 17, 2004, he and Polanco had signed up over half of their thirteen fellow baristas, enough to submit a petition for a vote to form a local of IU660, the IWW’s nascent Retail Workers Union.

Starbucks sprang into action. Within days of the IWW’s official petition to represent the Madison Avenue workers, chairman Howard Schultz left a voice-mail message to be played at stores nationwide. News of a union was “very disturbing and upsetting,” he said. “Please, if you have any concerns about our company, reach out to your local leadership . . . I want to conclude by simply thanking you for . . . being the real heart and soul of Starbucks.”

In his 1997 memoir, Pour Your Heart Into It, Schultz, who grew up in Brooklyn’s Bayview Projects, recalls that when he took over the small Seattle coffee-roasting company in 1987, it was partly unionized. Soon after, workers voted to decertify. He took this as a vote of confidence. “If [workers] had faith in me and my motives,” he wrote, “they wouldn’t need a union.”

In many ways, Starbucks does seem like an unlikely starting place for a workers’ revolution. It may have attracted the odd brick-tossing “black bloc” protester during a WTO summit, but it’s no Wal-Mart. There are bags of fair-trade-certified beans for sale and brochures touting Starbucks’ “beneficial relationships” with Third World coffee growers. The unbleached napkins read, MADE FROM 100% RECYCLED FIBERS. Joni Mitchell plays on Satellite Radio Channel XM 75, “The Voice of Starbucks.” And would-be employees are welcomed by a placard on the door that says, DREAM VENTI. OUR CAREERS WILL INSPIRE YOU. CREATE THE EXPERIENCE.


Gross never got inspired. The company calls employees “partners,” he says, but it’s misleading. You’re graded for greeting a guest within twelve seconds of arrival, he charges, and for mixing a macchiato at the precise temperature and weight in grams. As the Siren’s Eye—a company newsletter whose title refers to Starbucks’ mermaid logo—puts it, all this adds up to “Legendary Service.”

But some employees think of the Siren more as a Big Brother. Cecilia (not her real name) is 20 and has been working at Starbucks for two years. “The first I heard about the union was when my senior manager sat us down in groups of five and told us we’d have to pay obscene dues, that it would be a third party making decisions for us.” She signed up anyway.

She pulls her sleeves over her hands and glares. “I have a sarcastic sense of humor, and I’ve gotten write-ups for it, been told to be more perky. You can get fired for not smiling. We have a ‘yes’ policy. No matter what the customers ask, no matter how rude they are, you have to say yes.” In recognition of her efforts to put on a happier face, she once received an award in the form of a button that reads, I ONLY SAY YES.

It sounds very Brave New World, but Gross prefers an Old South analogy. “We’re talking about wage slavery here,” he says, slamming his hand on the table in a non-multinational East Village café so hard that a water glass jumps. “We are very aware of the implications of that term. We wouldn’t use it if we didn’t think there were inherent similarities to plantation slavery.”




Unlike an antebellum cotton farm, however, Starbucks does offer comprehensive health-care benefits to two thirds of its workforce, those clocking twenty hours or more a week. And Fortune magazine just rated it the second-best large employer in the nation.

Gross scoffs. “Their dirty little secret is the repetitive strain injuries,” he says. “Starbucks is not some old-world European coffeehouse. We face an extraordinary demand every day, while an epidemic of understaffing requires us to work at lightning speed.” There’s the bending and stooping, the risk of steam burns, the carpal tunnel syndrome from pulling hundreds of espressos. By the time Gross pauses for breath, Starbucks, which prides itself on being a comforting “Third Place”—welcoming customers into a sphere that is neither work nor home—sounds more like a Dickensian workshop.

By June 2004, Starbucks’ lawyers at Akin Gump, perhaps in an effort to forestall the union election, were challenging the size of the bargaining unit. But according to the IWW’s lawyers, Starbucks also pursued illegal forms of anti-union persuasion—this is the crux of the complaint currently before the National Labor Relations Board. District managers and the regional director of operations cornered Madison Avenue employees at work to ask about their union views. “Senior managers were floating around every single day,” Gross says. “You never see these people. They’re usually in the office running the empire.”

Fabian Vera, who manages a Starbucks at 60th and Broadway, started hanging out at store No. 7356, sometimes yelling at Gross and Polanco. He and another assistant manager would also show up with pizza, gym passes, and Mets tickets for staffers. Audrey Lincoff, a Starbucks spokesperson, has called these actions “random acts of kindness”—part of the company’s regular policy. This was the first that the Madison Avenue employees had heard of it.

The IWW claims that Starbucks also sent a letter to employees that read, in part, “Did you know that: The IWW advocates the overthrow of capitalism, the system that forms the economic foundation of the US?”

Lincoff’s never heard of the letter. And in response to the other charges, she says that “Starbucks believes that it acted in a fair and lawful manner throughout every aspect of the IWW’s campaign.”

At work, the union members were becoming more and more defiant. They stood outside the store on their days off, passing out fliers. “Most of the customers were really wonderful,” Gross says, “but then you had a minority from the managerial and capitalist class” who stopped to say, “You should be happy you have a job.” Once, the workers took a trip to Vera’s store, handing out fliers with his photo.

Within store No. 7356, Starbucks “partners” were divided. “The assistant managers tried to buddy up with people, gathering intelligence,” Gross says. “When people start ratting to the boss, then you’re really on opposite sides.” Polanco believes he was passed over for a promotion in favor of a more loyal colleague.

On July 28, two days before the scheduled union election, Starbucks called a meeting for all Madison Avenue employees. There, according to the IWW’s complaint, a senior vice-president, Martin Annesse, said voting in the union would mean losing the right to pick up shifts at other stores.

Before the vote could take place, however, the NLRB agreed to impound the ballots, pending review of a Starbucks appeal. Recognizing that the process could stall indefinitely, the IWW withdrew its petition.

Besides, playing by the NLRB’s rules had never really been in the IWW’s interest. “We always recommended to [organizers], don’t bother with an election, don’t bother with contracts, but instead fight on the job,” says IWW strategist Benjamin Ferguson.


So the Madison Avenue workers took to the streets. With the GOP coming to town, it was already a summer of heightened media interest in activism. On Saturday, August 28, the eve of the convention, Wobblies and supporters staged a small march from the Madison Avenue store to Starbucks’ regional office a few blocks away. A line of cops in riot gear guarded the window at store No. 7356, while customers sipped Tazoberry lemonades within.

“The march was going great,” Gross recalls. “Then, boom, I get whisked off the sidewalk.” He and Polanco were arrested. As officers pinned the young men’s arms behind their backs, Gross shouted to the cameras, “Arrest Howard Schultz!”

For his trial, Gross hired the ultimate in activist attorneys, 71-year-old Leonard Weinglass, known for his work on the Chicago Eight trial and, more recently, for defending Mumia Abu-Jamal. Weinglass got the charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest dismissed. He gives his young client his blessing: “Daniel reminds me a lot of Abbie Hoffman.”

Gross certainly sounds the Yippie part, as he gears up for the next stage of the battle. “Starbucks managers are in a war room right now. Your picture is on the wall,” he says, pointing at me. “They’re trying to form a message for you,” for this story. “They have posters of stores where they think organizing is going on. They’re modern-day Pinkertons using sophisticated socio-psychological techniques to scare people.”




Is the Siren Eye, in fact, working overtime? “I was told to look for red flags, like if employees hang out too much,” says a shift supervisor in the East Village who, unbeknownst to her managers, had already joined the movement.

Store No. 7356, however, is no longer the center of the action. Gross says union-sympathetic workers have moved on to other locations. Asked if rumors of a union were true, a barista there smiled and said, “No, not here.” Another employee added, “Starbucks is a great place to work. The pay’s not incredible, but the benefits are wonderful.” What about all the union talk? “That was just a few people, and they’re gone now.”

But Gross is still at Madison Avenue, though these days his shifts pass without incident. He’s working just ten or twelve hours a week; some weeks he gets no hours at all. He’s busy with school and the organizing effort, but he’s determined not to leave the job, no doubt to Starbucks’ chagrin. Last year, he was served with a two-page memo that supervisors called a “final warning before termination.” A district manager told him he displayed “personal animosity toward Starbucks.”

While the memo includes the disclaimer “Starbucks continues to respect the right of you or any other partner to engage in lawful activities with respect to unionizing,” it presents a case that Gross is, frankly, a pain to work with.



“I have a sarcastic sense of humor,” says one barista, “and I’ve gotten write-ups for it, been told to be more perky. You can get fired for not smiling.”



“When the shift supervisor asked you to ‘please move a little faster,’ you intentionally proceeded to move at a slower pace than before. You also challenged [him] by saying, ‘Julian needs a whip to beat the partners so they can go faster, like a horse.’ ”

Gross says he was just joking, and that the rest of the charges are false. They haven’t fired him yet, he adds, because of the outpouring of support he’s received from “courageous working people”—letters, petitions, even an IWW rally in Scotland.

Stuart Lichten, the lawyer representing the IWW, says the reason may be simpler: “I think they know that he’d probably sue.”

The NLRB’s ruling is expected sometime this summer. A finding that Starbucks has engaged in unfair labor practices would be good PR for the workers, but that’s about it. “Starbucks is not facing any punitive damages,” says Lichten. “Usually, the worst that can happen is they’re forced to post a notice that they’ve been found in violation of the National Labor Relations Act.”

If the NLRB allows an election at Madison Avenue or any other location—and the union wins—Starbucks could always do what Wal-Mart did in February with a newly unionized shop in Quebec and simply shut the place down. “They have another one down the block,” Lichten notes. (Actually, the closest is on 33rd and Fifth Avenue.)

Gross and his comrades say they’re more focused on the national effort, aided by the Website starbucksunion.org. He hints that job actions and even wildcat strikes may be in the works: “When people push you against the wall, you have to fight back.”

At a recent fund-raiser, held at a Brooklyn warehouse, an old Wobbly banner, ABOLISH THE WAGE SYSTEM!, hung outside. Inside, a young woman billed as “an award-winning slam poet” read a work called “Bomb Starbucks,” which drew an appreciative yell from a woman in the crowd: “I eat out of the garbage because I work for them!” Another Starbucks foot soldier explained that one of his workmates was fired from an East Village store for trying to organize, but the tactic backfired. The pro-union camp now has a majority of the store’s staff. “The IWW is basically a fan club for anarchists and labor geeks,” the barista admitted. “But we’re making it into something real.”

It remains to be seen just how real things get. The IWW is a distinctly ragtag operation, with fewer than a thousand members worldwide (Starbucks has 80,000 workers in the U.S. alone). In a way, the baristas’ campaign offers the union more hope than the IWW can provide them.

However, old-style labor tactics—or numbers—may be irrelevant here. What the Starbucks insurgents have going for them is something that Wal-Mart workers do not: the brand itself. Thus far, the chain’s fair-trade reputation remains almost entirely intact. A perfect opportunity, in other words, for even a small gang of pesky PR-savvy revolutionaries. “Starbucks is selling an image more than coffee,” says the fired-up East Village barista. “That’s a very vulnerable point for them.”

As head boy at a legendary choir school, Lawrence Lessig was repeatedly molested by the charismatic choir director, part of a horrific pattern of child abuse there. Now, as one of America’s most famous lawyers, he’s put his own past on trial to make sure such a thing never happens again.

By John Heilemann


(Photo credit: Corinne May Botz)
The e-mail arrived unbidden four years ago, bearing the stamp of a sender whose name he didn’t recognize. All the message said was, “Are you the Lawrence Lessig who went to the Boychoir School?”

It had been a long time since anyone had identified the Stanford Law School professor that way. But it was true: From 1972 to 1976, Lessig had spent his sixth-through-ninth-grade years at the American Boychoir School in Princeton.

So Lessig wrote back, “Yeah, I’m the guy who went to the Boychoir School. What’s up?” And with that, he opened up a closed doorway to his past—and found himself swept right through it.

Now, on the last Monday of November 2004, Lessig has just arrived at the Richard J. Hughes Justice Complex in Trenton, New Jersey. He is here to make an argument before the Supreme Court of New Jersey. His client, the plaintiff, is his e-mail correspondent. The defendant is their alma mater.

Since its founding in 1937, the nonsectarian Boychoir School has gained worldwide renown for producing a choir rivaled only by the more famous one in Vienna; its kids have sung for presidents, popes, and behind Beyoncé at this year’s Academy Awards. But now Lessig’s client, John Hardwicke, is claiming that in the seventies, the school was a ghoulish sanctuary for the sexual abuse of children. In his two years there, Hardwicke says he was repeatedly molested and raped—induced, as the brief on his behalf to the state supreme court puts it, to “perform virtually every sexual act that could conceivably have been accomplished between two males”—by the music director, the headmaster, the proctor, and the cook.




This is not the sort of case for which Larry Lessig is famous. At 43, Lessig has built a reputation as the king of Internet law and as the most important next-wave thinker on intellectual property. The author of three influential books on the intersection of law, politics, and digital technology, he’s the founder of Creative Commons, an ambitious attempt to forge an alternative to the current copyright regime. According to his mentor, the federal appellate judge Richard Posner, Lessig is “the most distinguished law professor of his generation.” He’s also a celebrity. On a West Wing episode this winter, he was featured as a character. “The Elvis of cyberlaw” is how Wired has described him.

I have known Lessig well, professionally and socially, for nearly five years. I’ve never seen him look as nervous as he does this morning. Dressed in a dark suit, his hair slicked back, tiny wire-rims perched on his nose, he moves slowly, ponderously, as if the weight of the stakes in the case is resting literally on his shoulders. The school (known until 1980 as the Columbus Boychoir School) has argued that, under New Jersey’s Charitable Immunity Act, a statute designed to shield nonprofits from negligence lawsuits, it can’t be held financially liable no matter how heinous Hardwicke’s abuse. If the supreme court agrees, Hardwicke’s case will be dismissed before even being heard by a jury. And scores of sex-abuse suits against New Jersey Catholic churches and schools will be rendered void as well. The church, not surprisingly, has weighed in on the side of the school.

During his work on the case, Lessig has been asked more than once by the press if he had experiences at the school similar to Hardwicke’s. And Lessig has replied, “My experiences aren’t what’s at issue here. What’s at issue is what happened to John Hardwicke.”

The answer is appropriate, politic—but it’s not entirely true. For Lessig has told me that he too was abused at the Boychoir School, and by the same music director that Hardwicke claims was one of his abusers. Lessig is by nature a shy, intensely private person. The fact of his abuse is known to almost no one: not the reporters covering the case, not the supreme-court justices. The fact of his abuse isn’t even known to Larry Lessig’s parents.

In taking this case, however, Lessig has cast aside his caution about a secret that haunts him still. And while his passion about his client’s cause is real and visceral, Hardwicke isn’t the only plaintiff here. Lessig is also litigating on behalf of the child he once was.

The Boychoir School sits on seventeen acres not far from the Princeton campus, surrounded by stands of evergreens and a scattering of suburban houses. You approach the grounds up a narrow drive, past a PRIVATE PROPERTY sign, until you come to a big grass oval in front of a handsome brick Georgian mansion. Three stories high, with 50-odd rooms, the mansion is known as Albemarle and was once the home of Gerard Lambert, the founder of the chemical company that morphed into Warner-Lambert.

In the late sixties, there were several dozen fifth-to-ninth-grade boys living in Albemarle. Every morning, a bell would ring to signal the start to their day, in which classes were interspersed with three one-hour rehearsals, along with private voice tutoring and piano lessons. “Music was in the walls of the school; it was everywhere,” a former student recalls. Decked out in uniforms of navy-blue pants and button-down shirts or turtlenecks, the boys sang Bach, Handel, Mahler, Copland, Bernstein, and American spirituals. All through the school year, they toured the United States, driving around in a big bus kitted out with desks and a lunch counter. In the summer, the best of the choristers were taken on tours of Europe; on one occasion, they performed for Pope Paul VI—who placed his hands on the head of a soloist, Bobby Byrens, and declared, “He has the voice of an angel.”



Donald Hanson, right, with former Boychoir student Charlie Wilfong at Wilfong's wedding. Wilfong claims to have been a victim of sexual misconduct while at school.(Photo credit: Courtesy of Charlie Wilfong)
In 1968, the choir director, Donald Bryant, was fired over “a love affair with a little boy,” one of the school’s former board members later told the New York Times. (A number of such accusations would ultimately be leveled against him.) But Bryant’s departure failed to set things right. Instead, the Boychoir School hired his replacement, along with a new headmaster, on the recommendation of John Shallenberger, the wealthy scion of a Pennsylvania coal-mining family and a patron of boys’ choirs. Shallenberger also happened to be a chronic pedophile: Convicted over four decades on multiple charges related to child molestation, he eventually fled the country to avoid prosecution in his home state. (He died this February, at 87, in Mexico, where he was overseeing an orphanage.)

The following year, John Hardwicke arrived at the school as a 12-year-old seventh-grader. The son of a prominent Maryland lawyer, Hardwicke had no special love for choral singing; he enrolled in the school because his father encouraged him to do so. “What turned my dad on was that beautiful mansion, the idea of me associating with good families and touring around the world,” Hardwicke says. “A stupid decision, in retrospect, but he had my best interests at heart.”

One night in his first year, Hardwicke was visited in his room by a man he recognizes from pictures today as having been John Shallenberger, who was following the Vienna Boys’ Choir on a tour of America at the time. It was bedtime, Hardwicke recalls, and although Shallenberger did nothing untoward, he offered a piece of advice: “He told me that I really oughtta not sleep with underwear on.”




In the fall of 1970, the music director Shallenberger recommended, a Canadian named Donald Hanson, took up residence at Albemarle. In his late twenties, terrific-looking, with a thick shock of dark hair, he was just about the coolest adult the boys had ever encountered. He was a brilliant pianist, he drove a Jaguar, and the women who worked at the school all seemed to have a crush on him. “He was very charismatic, like a teen idol, a rock star,” says Hardwicke. “He was an incredibly charming master manipulator.”

About a week after Hanson’s arrival, the music director asked Hardwicke to lend him a hand washing his Jaguar. As Hardwicke remembers it, Hanson touched him suggestively on the shoulder—and from there the contact escalated into a horror show.

Over the next several months, Hardwicke says, he and Hanson had sex “two, three, maybe even four or five times a day.” Sometimes Hanson would masturbate on Hardwicke’s body. Sometimes he would urinate on the boy in the shower. Hardwicke says that Hanson read to him from pornographic books and showed him child pornography. Also that Hanson once had sex with him inside his parents’ house.

Nor was Hanson the only perpetrator, Hardwicke says. He claims he was fondled once by the headmaster and twice by a proctor. He claims to have been masturbated on by one of Hanson’s friends. And he claims that, during a spell the next summer when he was visiting Hanson at Albemarle, the school’s cook came upstairs and raped him in his sleep.

The morning Hardwicke awoke with his underwear off and the cook still in his room, Hanson drove him back to his family’s home in Maryland. Because Hardwicke’s voice had started to change, he wouldn’t be returning to the Boychoir School that fall. He said good-bye to Hanson, walked into the house, and thought, Nothing will ever be the same.

That same summer, Larry Lessig first came to Albemarle. He had just turned 10, a sweet-voiced kid who sung at his church at home in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He’d come to attend a summer camp that the school conducted for choirboys. And after auditioning, he was invited to stay and enroll as a fifth-grader.

Lessig’s father, who ran a steel-fabricating firm, was adamantly opposed. “There’s no way I’m going to send you away to school!” he thundered on hearing the suggestion. But Lessig was seduced by what the school promised, and the next summer, he asked again. His father was torn, but finally relented for the sake of his son’s future. “It was a kind of Billy Elliot moment,” Lessig says. “You could see him making this sacrifice—just hating the idea of losing me.”

Lessig’s first hint of Hanson’s proclivities came one day when another boy scaled a wall outside the mansion. Climbing down, the boy told Lessig he’d seen Hanson in bed with a student. Lessig’s response was total disbelief. “I remember thinking I could no longer trust this kid,” he says. “It was obviously so ridiculous.”

In the fall of his eighth-grade year, Lessig learned otherwise. On a Friday night, after Hanson had taken the boys shopping at the mall in Princeton, they all came back, as they often did, and gathered in his quarters to watch TV. As Lessig sat beside Hanson on the couch, the music director covered their laps with a blanket and proceeded to fondle him. Forever after, Lessig would remember the movie that was playing on TV: Run Silent, Run Deep.

The following June, on Lessig’s 14th birthday, after the choir had returned from touring in California, Lessig was preparing to head home for the summer when Hanson pulled him into his room—“to give me a ‘birthday present,’ ” Lessig says. “I remember feeling totally overwhelmed by him. It wasn’t forcing in the sense of violence . . . It’s not like I was afraid. But there was this recognition of, wow, there’s nothing I can do. Here I am. Bam. It’s over.”

And yet, of course, it wasn’t.




John Hardwicke at home in Whitehall, Maryland. (Photo Credit: Corinne May Botz)

Lessig had been a bright light at the school since his first year there. With a perfect-pitch soprano voice, he’d been a soloist next in line behind Bobby Byrens (“My idol,” Lessig says). And with a sharp and probing mind already in evidence, he soon emerged as an academic star and student leader, a striver, intensely driven. Now, in his ninth-grade year, Lessig was named head boy, which made him “in charge of taking care of the kids,” he says. “There was no proctor when I was head boy; I was discipline. And there were kids who were real shits—it was a Lord of the Flies–like experience.”

Being head boy also signified something else: He was Hanson’s favorite. And accordingly he was assigned a room next door to the music director’s, at the far end of a hallway on the third floor. By midway through the year, the two of them were essentially living together. “We put up a door in front of our rooms, blocking off the hallway, blocking out the rest of the world. We created a suite. And there was a classroom right next to it. So every day the teacher comes up, watches me come out of that door—which is also Hanson’s door—and walk into class. There’s no way anybody doesn’t know what the hell is going on. But nobody says anything.”




Lessig may have been head boy, but he wasn’t Hanson’s only prey. All along, Lessig says, he knew that Hanson was sleeping with “at least ten” other boys. “The weird thing about the sexuality was that there was no jealousy attached to it at all,” he explains. “It was totally recreational. It was just like playing squash. He’s playing squash with me, he’s playing squash with him. Who cares? What does it matter?”

Among the boys, Hanson’s promiscuity was well known, Lessig says. He would call students out of class to satisfy his cravings. The private voice and piano lessons he administered were especially notorious: “It was five or ten minutes of music, then it would turn into other things,” Hardwicke recalls. And while none of this was ever spoken of explicitly among the boys, there was ribbing, teasing, nodding, winking—constant signals of in-the-knowness. As for the teachers, Lessig says, “Hanson was the boss. What was going to be said?”

Sometimes on trips home, Lessig felt faint stirrings of unease. But it never occurred to him to tell his parents. His relationship to Hanson, unlike Hardwicke’s, was tender, sustaining; his parents would never understand. “Like all pedophiles, Hanson was really good at connecting with kids,” Lessig says. “You just felt you were together; there was no ambiguity about it. He was a friend. A deep, close friend. We talked about everything. He told me about music. He told me about the world . . . For a kid cut off from everyone else in this weird universe, to have the most important person in the world give you love and approval is the greatest thing you can imagine. What else is there?”

On some level, Lessig realized that the relationship was “fucked up and shouldn’t happen,” he says. But he also had a precocious 14-year-old’s exaggerated sense of his own maturity. “I felt that I could handle it,” he says. “That everything was under control.”

There were moments, however, when reality came crashing through. In Lessig’s final year, he found himself gripped by “an insane depression,” he says, over “the insanity of what was happening.” In his closet he’d found a hatch in the ceiling that led to a crawl space above. He climbed up there and crouched alone for hours in the dark.

One evening near the end of Lessig’s final year at the school, he went with Hanson for a walk around the grounds. As darkness descended on Albemarle, Lessig finally, tentatively, gave voice to his gathering misgivings about Hanson’s behavior.

“Is this really right? Should you really be doing this?” Lessig asked.

“You have to understand,” Hanson replied, “this is essential to producing a great boychoir.” By sexualizing the students, he explained, he was transforming them from innocents into more complicated creatures, enabling them to render choral music in all its sublime passion. “It’s what all great boychoirs do,” Hanson said.

After Lessig moved back to Williamsport for high school, he brooded on what had happened in Princeton. Two years later, he contacted the boychoir’s headmaster, Stephen Howard, and persuaded Howard to appoint him as the alumni representative to the board of directors. Then Lessig went and told Don Hanson that what he was doing was wrong—wrong for the kids, wrong for the school, even wrong for Hanson.

“It’s harmful, it’s destructive, you’ll get caught, you’ll get hanged,” Lessig said. “It’s really got to stop.”

Hanson didn’t argue. Instead, he told Lessig that he had a boyfriend now, a former student who’d left the school with whom he was carrying on. All of his needs were being met.

Lessig wasn’t satisfied. “You should recognize that I’m now on the board,” he said. “If it doesn’t stop, I’m going to out you.”

“You’re right,” Hanson said. “Absolutely, I promise, it will never happen again.”


Lessig believed Hanson utterly. He had yet to learn that pedophilia is an illness, an all-consuming compulsion. At 17, he was flush with the sense of his power to defuse such a delicate situation. “I knew all these things that nobody else did,” he recalls. “I was keeping the institution together. I really wanted it to succeed. And the picture of the institution succeeding with Hanson continuing as choir director was really what I thought should happen.”

But in the fall of 1981, Lessig got a call from Stephen Howard: Hanson had been accused of molesting two students. Lessig by then was an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, studying economics and management with an eye to following his father’s path and going into business. Lessig drove up to Princeton for an emergency board meeting, where he learned that Hanson had tried to kill himself by putting his head inside a gas oven. Lessig thereupon told Howard everything he knew about Hanson’s history of abuse.

In March 1982, Howard sent a letter to the school’s parents, informing them that Hanson had resigned “for reasons of personal health.” Without mentioning the scandal, the letter lauded Hanson for his service: “He alone held the school together in the early seventies . . . hiring and firing staff, running the admissions and concert offices, from time to time driving the bus and even washing the dishes . . . His story at the Boychoir School is one of total devotion to the boys and dedication to the best interests of the School.”




After his dismissal, Hanson retreated to Canada, while Lessig gave up his seat on the board and got on with his life. His academic brilliance now unfurling in earnest, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied philosophy for three years before entering law school. For a time, his attitude to what Hanson had done, he says, was, “No harm, no foul.”

Then, at Yale Law School, Lessig took a course taught by arch-feminist Catharine MacKinnon and began to ponder his relationship with Hanson in a different, more sophisticated light. “There was this moment when I realized that I had been, in the traditional way, a woman in all relevant respects—totally passive, an object of sexual aggression,” he says. “I’d adopted this supportive, protective role with respect to him.” Among his many other afflictions, Hanson was an alcoholic. “There was this one time I literally saved his life,” Lessig recalls. “I came into his bedroom and he was passed out, vomiting, and I had to flip him over to stop him from suffocating. And this, I felt, was my role. I was his wife.”

Lessig had been involved with a number of women in college and graduate school. And he began to see self-destructive patterns in his relationships. “I remember throwing tantrums,” he says, “as I recognized how this thing had intruded in my life.”

After landing a plum professorship at the University of Chicago Law School, Lessig entered therapy. “The therapist was really great,” he observes with an ironic chuckle. “He said, ‘This is very significant, but you’re lucky—at least you didn’t become a homosexual.’ ”

What happened next is something Lessig refuses to discuss. But according to Hardwicke’s lead attorney, Keith Smith, Lessig sued the Boychoir School and received a settlement. Both the suit and the settlement are officially under seal, with a confidentiality agreement that bars either side from disclosing their existence, let alone any of the details. What Lessig can say, however, is that the school and its lawyers are aware of his abuse by Hanson. And that, in his interactions with them before the Hardwicke case, he thinks that “they behaved well.”



Hanson would call students out of class to satisfy his cravings. Piano and voice lessons quickly turned to other things.



In the next decade, Lessig had almost zero contact with the school, as his legal career went supernova and his personal life settled happily. From Chicago, he moved on first to Harvard Law School and then to Stanford. He married, had a son, and set up digs in a rambling Spanish house not far from the ocean in San Francisco. Soaking in the hot tub on his balcony at night, watching the fog creep in, Lessig believed, with good reason, that he had put the Boychoir School behind him.

And then one day in 2001 came the e-mail from John Hardwicke.

The distance from Lessig’s to Hardwicke’s house is vast in every sense. In deepest rural Maryland, not far from the Pennsylvania line, it’s a small Cape Codder with rickety shutters and a mudslick for a driveway. On the day I visit, in February, the front walk is covered with snow; horses graze in a pasture next door. Inside, John and his wife, Terri, pad around in stocking feet, smoking Marlboro Medium 100s one after another. There are stuffed toys strewn around the house—Terri’s creations. In the living room, a court jester sits amid a metric ton of bric-a-brac, next to a full-size harp.

After a while, the Hardwickes’ 15-year-old daughter bounces through the door in a pair of pink Chuck Taylor high-tops. Her father worries about her taste in music—the Velvet Underground—and the fact that she has a steady boyfriend. “When I hear her listening to ‘Heroin,’ well, I don’t know,” Hardwicke says. “There’s only two things that can ruin your life: drugs and sex.”

Hardwicke pours a cup of coffee and sits with his legs tucked underneath him on the floor of the TV room. At 47, he is tall and thin, with pale-pink skin, a snow-white beard, and watery blue eyes. He begins by telling me about the first time he discussed his abuse with a reporter. “I felt this incredible evil hovering around me that I just knew was going to kill me,” he says. “And then this evil communicated, ‘No, it’s not you, it’s your wife. We’re going to start with her.'”

If the effects of Lessig’s abuse were subtle and slow to emerge, for Hardwicke they’re glaring and have plagued him relentlessly throughout his life. After he met Terri at Catholic University, they were married and started a business together doing freelance PR, graphic design, brochures, and such. But Hardwicke, who was told repeatedly by Hanson that he was gay, has struggled for many years with confusion over his sexual orientation. Well into his marriage, he found himself engaging in anonymous trysts with men.

“It made me feel awful,” he says, pulling his knees up to his chest. “It became sort of this thing that I couldn’t control, and I’d literally want to throw up afterward . . . I was pretty convinced that it was some kind of demonic possession, almost. I mean, I can remember several times after the event where I’d get gas for the car and it would be, like, 16 dollars and 66 cents.”

At one point, Hardwicke concluded he was gay and announced he was leaving Terri. But a friend who knew of his experiences suggested he seek therapy instead. Because he felt complicit in the acts, he didn’t think of them as molestation. But his therapist, Dr. Emily Samuelson, a trauma specialist, disagreed with that assessment.

Within 24 hours after Hardwicke told Samuelson about being raped by the school’s cook, Hardwicke’s mother was killed in a car accident, propelling his paranoia to imponderable heights. His daughter was in the car, too, but she “walked out unscathed,” he says. “And I got to thinking later it was a metaphor for molestation. Some are killed, some are scarred, some are crippled. Others walk out untouched. It all depends where you were sitting in the car.”


After a few months of seeing Samuelson, in 1999, Hardwicke decided to approach the school and asked his father to help him do it. Hardwicke’s father, who by then had become Maryland’s chief administrative law judge, is a faculty member at Johns Hopkins. So they arranged to meet the school’s then-president, John Ellis, at the Hopkins Faculty Club. Ellis arrived with the school’s attorney. Up to that point, Hardwicke had never contemplated suing the school. “My intention was to have them apologize,” he explains. “I was trying to have somebody say, ‘It’s not your fault.’”

Hardwicke takes a long, deep drag on his cigarette. After several months of back-and-forth, he realized that no apology would be forthcoming and decided to explore a lawsuit. His father contacted some friends of his at Piper Rudnick, the largest law firm in Maryland, where he had briefly been an associate in the fifties.

Assigned to handle the litigation was an earnest, 33-year-old, chubby-cheeked associate, Keith Smith, who was startled by the depths of Hardwicke’s depression when they first met in late 2000. “I’ve never seen anyone as black as John was,” Smith tells me. “He couldn’t work, couldn’t get out of bed most days.”

Not long after the firm signed on, the school made a settlement offer of $200,000. Hardwicke considered the sum “insulting.”

I ask him if he can quantify the damages he’s suffered. His back stiffens, face reddens, voice rises an octave or two.




“This is what bothered me so much about filing a lawsuit. The first thing Piper Rudnick wanted to do was create a list of ways that I’d been damaged. And I’m just, like, fucking unwilling to do this. What do you mean create a list? I’m not going to give you a list . . . because I can’t. I know I’ve been changed, hurt unbelievably. There’s not a moment that goes by that I haven’t been affected by this. Mr. Hanson used to masturbate the stick shift in the car, so I get in my car and immediately that memory comes to mind. Mr. Hanson shaved my face one of the first times it was ever shaved. So I put on shaving cream and he’s there. Mr. Hanson drank brandy, so I can’t stand brandy. Beer tastes like his urine. I kiss my wife and Mr. Hanson’s tongue is in my mouth. How do you count damage like that?”

Obviously, I say, the damage is very real to you.

“It is real,” Hardwicke says. “There’s a snake that was put inside me, and it coils through my intestines and has become mixed up in my whole being. It’s alive and it talks and I can’t get it fucking out.”

Piper Rudnick filed Hardwicke’s lawsuit in January 2001. And around that time, Hardwicke started calling and e-mailing alumni from the school. He wanted to tell his story to people who might understand. He also wondered if there were others who had suffered similarly. It didn’t take long for him to discover that there were many others—several dozen by his current count. There was his classmate Robert Staab, for one. There was also Bobby Byrens. There were Chuck Clinton, Mark Goebel, and Doug Palmatier. And, of course, there was Larry Lessig, the famous lawyer in California.

When Hardwicke first telephoned Lessig, the call did not go smoothly. Hardwicke asked about Lessig’s experiences with Hanson, promising he would keep the information confidential. But Hardwicke had already mentioned the names of some former students he’d spoken to. Lessig, agitated and deeply wary, told Hardwicke, “You’ve already revealed other people’s secrets to me. I don’t know why I’d trust you to keep my secrets confidential.”

Lessig, however, did agree to talk to Hardwicke’s lawyers. But when Keith Smith called, Lessig said, “I’d love to talk to you, but I can’t.” The implications of Lessig’s phrasing were plain to Smith: “It tells me right away there’s a contract, a settlement agreement, that says he can’t talk.” Smith was interested in deposing Lessig as a potential witness. Now he knew that he would have to subpoena him—overriding any past confidentiality agreement.

Lessig had few doubts about the merits of Hardwicke’s suit. “Sometimes he described the sexual acts in sadistic terms that were hard for me to credit,” Lessig says. “But there were certain signposts that were totally credible to me,” ranging from Hardwicke’s description of Hanson’s brazenness to the special handshake he used—a little tickle on your palm with his middle finger—to signal his desire for sex.

Lessig wished the plaintiff well, hoped he’d win, would be compensated. But Lessig didn’t want to be deposed. He worried about having the seal broken on his past, about having these furtive scenes from his boyhood recounted in a court proceeding. Besides, his mind was elsewhere: on an epic copyright case, Eldred v. Ashcroft, that had become his abiding obsession. But Hardwicke continued badgering Lessig with a stream of calls and e-mails. Finally the lawyer told Hardwicke, “John, I’m in the middle of an extremely important battle—and this is not it.”

In January 2003, three months after arguing Eldred v. Ashcroft before the U.S. Supreme Court, Lessig read a story in the New York Times about Hardwicke’s case. Earlier, the school’s lawyers had moved to have the case thrown out on the grounds that the Charitable Immunity Act provided the school blanket protection from such a lawsuit. Now the trial-court judge, Jack Sabatino, had sided with the school. “The Act insulates charitable organizations from liability for any degree of tortious conduct, no matter how flagrant,” Sabatino opined. “Accordingly, plaintiff’s contentions that employees and agents of the American Boychoir School acted willfully, wantonly, recklessly, indifferently—even criminally—do not eviscerate the School’s legal protection.”

Lessig was floored. Enacted in 1958, amended in 1995, the Charitable Immunity Act, as he understood it, was designed to shield nonprofits from being sued for negligence. But Hardwicke’s suit had nothing to do with negligence—his injuries had been inflicted intentionally. Thus Sabatino’s ruling was “flagrantly wrong,” Lessig says. “Here was this innocent who was being doubly screwed—first literally by the Boychoir and now by the legal system.”

Angry as Lessig was at the opinion, he was angrier at the school. “It’s like, what the fuck?” he says. “You know this happened. You know this was pervasive. Why do you force people to hire lawyers to fight all these bullshit claims when you know you’re guilty? You ought to be figuring out ways to make people whole again. It’s this failure to take responsibility for what they did that just began to make me furious.”


Six days after reading the story in the Times, Lessig received the news that he’d lost the Eldred case. Crushed, despondent, and perhaps in need of a new obsession, he called Keith Smith and volunteered to argue Hardwicke’s appeal. Hardwicke was thrilled; Smith, conflicted. He had devoted thousands of hours to the case, but now Lessig was going to get the glory of making the argument in the higher courts. Smith was aware that Lessig’s track record as an appellate lawyer was limited to two arguments in the Eldred case, both of them unsuccessful. But Smith was swayed by Lessig’s legal stature and his biography. “I felt Larry could approach the argument from a standpoint that I can’t,” Smith says. “He experienced this.”

For the past two decades, Lessig had kept the story of his abuse a closely guarded secret—especially from his parents. By plunging into the Hardwicke case, Lessig says, he understood that it was likely he would “be forced to confront this with my family; people are going to look at me differently.”

The argument before the New Jersey appellate court took place in November 2003. Its essence was straightforward. To Lessig’s knowledge, there was no prior case in the history of New Jersey in which the courts had ruled that charitable immunity applied to intentional wrongful acts. And the acts at the school in the seventies, he said, were not merely intentional: The sexual abuse that occurred was “pervasive and institutionalized.” If the supreme court granted total immunity in such cases, Lessig concluded, New Jersey could become “a haven for sex abuse by charitable institutions.”




When the argument was over, the school’s litigator, Jay Greenblatt, told Lessig the performance was “one of the best oral arguments I’ve heard in my career.” Four months later, the three-judge panel sided 2-1 with Lessig and Hardwicke, prompting the school to appeal to the state supreme court.

Lessig was in Washington when he learned the news, about to board a train for New York. Ten minutes later, his first victory as a litigator notched in his belt, he was in the bar car, beaming, babbling, buying drinks for everyone.

After hearing so many awful things about the Boychoir School, I drove down to Princeton to hear what its officials had to say in its defense. The school’s current president, Donald Edwards, gave me a tour of the grounds. We stopped at the rooms that once made up the Hanson-Lessig suite. “He lived here? You know more than I do about that,” Edwards said in a tone of mild shock.

Bearded and bespectacled at 63, Edwards feels beleaguered by the case. “This is the only litigation I’ve ever gone through, and it’s the only one I will ever go through,” he said in his genial, soft-spoken way. “It’s an adversarial process, and I’ve built a 40-year career on being nonadversarial.”

Edwards joined the school’s staff as head of fund-raising and publicity in 1999, then was elevated to president in 2002. In the spring of 2000, a few months after Hardwicke surfaced with his allegations, the school sent out a letter informing the parents and alumni for the first time about the reasons behind Hanson’s firing (though it didn’t name him). The school encouraged former students to come forward with information about past incidents of sexual abuse (though it didn’t disclose that it had, in fact, settled several other lawsuits in the eighties and nineties). And it hired an expert for advice on its child-protection policies.

In April 2002, the New York Times and Nightline, fed leads by Hardwicke, broke the story in tandem. Hardwicke then set up a Website that further spread the details. The fallout for the school was harsh. Concert bookings evaporated; recruiting students became an uphill slog.

Edwards’s frustration with all of this isn’t hard to comprehend. The abuse took place long ago; today, the school is safe and ever-vigilant, he says. “The irony is, probably the one person who will never bear any burden if there is a judgment against the school is Donald Hanson,” Edwards notes. “The people who are bearing the burden now are our students, faculty, parents, and trustees, none of whom were around in 1970 and 1971.”

All of that is true, of course. But one of the legal system’s central functions is to allocate responsibility for harms that occurred even decades ago—thus creating incentives for sound behavior in the future.

In any event, it would be easier to sympathize with the school had its fight against Hardwicke not been so vicious—and, at times, so ham-handed. When, for example, the lawsuit was filed, the school’s lawyers submitted an official reply that argued that Hardwicke had no case because he consented to the sex with Hanson—and that by not revealing it sooner, he was more negligent than the school. (To be precise, the term the document used was “fraudulent concealment.”) Both statements were leaped upon by the Times and Nightline.

“That was very unfortunate,” Jay Greenblatt, the school’s litigator, tells me one afternoon in his office in Vineland, New Jersey. Greenblatt was appointed to the case by the school’s insurance company, which also pays his fees. He came aboard after the reply was written. “It was a boilerplate-type pleading,” he limply explains. “I don’t even know if it was reviewed.”

Greenblatt is a past president of the New Jersey State Bar Association. At 68, he’s got a rumbling voice, close-cropped gray hair, and wears a big gold signet ring. He tells me the school would have preferred to settle with Hardwicke, if only to avoid the flood of adverse publicity. But, Greenblatt goes on, “this isn’t just a matter of money. His goal is to close the school. I think that he along with his id wants to do it. He’s looking to punish someone for what unfortunately occurred to him at the hands of a man 35 years ago.”


In the absence of the prospect of a settlement, Greenblatt says, the school turned to charitable immunity, which, he maintains flatly, “doesn’t apply only to negligence.” Besides, he argues, the school can’t be held liable for Hanson’s private behavior—which he equates with an employee’s stopping in a bar after work and slugging someone in the mouth. “Is the company responsible?” he asks. “No. Why not? Because they’re not acting within the scope of employment.”

If the case does go to trial, Greenblatt clearly intends to wage an assault on Hardwicke’s credibility. “I don’t know where fact ends and fantasy begins with John,” he says. “I believe he was molested. I believe that molestation took place in private and that no one knew about it or reasonably should have known about it. However, of course, if he was being molested fifteen times a day in half of the rooms of the institution, it could create the implication that somebody should have known . . . So the more notorious it was, the better for his case.”

Yet despite Greenblatt’s assertions to the contrary, what shines through all the school’s dealings with Hardwicke is a stark unwillingness to countenance that the plaintiff might be telling the truth. “I don’t know a lot about what the school was like in 1970 and 1971,” Edwards says. “I do know that the kind of schedule we live with today doesn’t leave enough time for what John Hardwicke describes happened multiple times a day. That sort of thing—I just find it very hard to believe.”




The night before the state supreme-court argument, over dinner in Philadelphia, Lessig tells me he intends to describe obliquely, before the justices, the years-ago conversation in which Hanson said he needed to sexualize the boys for the sake of the choir’s splendor. “It shows, however ridiculous it is, that Hanson believes he’s doing this for the benefit of his employer,” Lessig explains. “So it makes the abuse within the scope of employment.

“Now, we don’t yet have that conversation in the record,” Lessig goes on, “and I’m in this weird position of knowing it. So we’re just going to simply say, look, we will establish at trial that fact. And they could say, how do you know you’re going to establish it at trial? And then I’m in this very awkward position of having to say why.”

And how do you intend to resolve that awkwardness? I ask.

Lessig says, “I don’t know.”

The next morning, at the supreme court, a windowless modern space with walls of marble and frosted glass, Greenblatt argues first. He is peppered with questions and seems at times unfamiliar with his own brief. After 35 minutes, Lessig rises to take his turn. At the podium, he reaches down for a paper cup; his hand quivers so violently that water spills en route to his lips.

Lessig speaks for only twenty minutes. He is rarely interrupted. The judges’ eyes widen when Lessig says that “between 30 and 50 percent of the boys at this school were sexually abused or harassed.” And they squirm in their chairs when Lessig—emboldened by the fact that a Piper Rudnick associate has found something in the record to support the Hanson revelation—announces, “It was the perversion of this music director . . . to believe that sexual abuse was part of producing a wonderful boychoir.”

When Lessig is done, Greenblatt, clearly irritated, stands up and offers his rebuttal. Of the Hanson revelation, he says, “How convenient . . . I know of no such fact.” And of the 30 to 50 percent figures, he continues, “[T]hat might be personal knowledge of Mr. Lessig, but it hasn’t been in the record of this case.”

Sitting in a high-backed chair, Lessig cringes as if he’s been stabbed in the stomach, glares at Greenblatt, and shakes his head. He’s just been outed in open court.

Afterward, Lessig, the Hardwickes, and the legal team drive to Princeton for lunch. While everyone believes that the argument went well, they are stunned by Greenblatt’s indiscretion. Walking into the lobby of the restaurant, a French place off Nassau Street, Lessig turns to his companions and says softly, “Hanson took me here for dinner.”

Later that afternoon, Lessig flies home to California, where he receives a barrage of vituperative faxes from Greenblatt—which the school’s lawyer has helpfully cc’d to the press. Greenblatt insists there’s nothing in the record to support Lessig’s surprise assertions. He makes repeated insinuations about Lessig’s “first-hand knowledge.” And, hurling charges of “mendacity,” he says that “Hanson surely would have been fired years earlier” had Lessig spoken out during his stint on the board.

A few weeks later, Greenblatt elaborates to me. “He had a responsibility not only to the children but to the school,” he says. “And if he had that knowledge, didn’t divulge it, and any child was injured thereafter by Hanson, then he bears that responsibility—and perhaps, just perhaps, that plays some part in his role in this matter.”

Lessig’s reaction to Greenblatt’s gambit is disgust mixed with shock and rage. In faxes of his own, Lessig calls his outing a “breach of a basic sense of decency” and professes to be “astonished” by Greenblatt’s “ignorance of the facts in this case.”

I ask Lessig about Greenblatt’s charge that by failing to expose Hanson earlier, he bears a measure of guilt.

“I do feel that,” Lessig says. “But I don’t suffer that feeling, because very quickly I recognize what it is to be a teenager.”

To Lessig, Greenblatt’s charge is a tawdry attempt to score points at the expense of his reputation. “Before this case, I never would’ve had a desire that the Boychoir School close,” Lessig says. “It’s an interesting place, it’s a great experience, it teaches kids to work hard. But the way I feel about it now is, fuck it. If they have to shut down because of this case, I don’t care.”


Everyone connected to Hardwicke v. American Boychoir School assumed that the supreme court would have ruled long before now. Every morning, they check the Web to see if the opinion has been posted.

For Don Edwards, victory would mean the school could bury its lurid past, at least legally speaking. A loss would open the door to suits from other boys whose alleged abuse Hardwicke has dredged up. Edwards says, “It’s not like I wake up thinking the case will destroy the school—but it’s not impossible that it could.”

For John Hardwicke—and for all the potential child-sex-abuse litigants against the Catholic Church in New Jersey—a negative ruling by the supreme court would be a devastating blow, if not a mortal one. He is currently among a group of campaigners working on a parallel track to persuade the state Legislature to amend the Charitable Immunity Act so that it clearly exempts cases of child sexual abuse. At the same time, a ruling in his favor would mean that Hardwicke is only one step closer to putting his case before a jury. “I’ll actually be in the position where I thought I was four years ago,” he says. “I think I’ll be 95 years old going, I think we’re just about done.”

Yet even if Hardwicke does collect a monumental payout, it’s far from clear that money will make him whole again. As he sits in his living room, talking about his high-achieving siblings—one brother a partner at a large law firm, one sister an executive at Ernst & Young—his ravaged expectations for himself are never far from the surface. If not for what took place at the school, he says, “I think that I actually could have been a leader of my fellow people. I could’ve gone on to be a lawyer or politician or something really helpful to society.”




Lessig, of course, is exactly that, and the disparity between his and Hardwicke’s lives suggests that the metaphor coined by the latter may in fact be true: When it comes to consequences of child sex abuse, it really does depend on where you were sitting in the car. It affects different people in profoundly different ways.

“This thing happened to me,” Lessig says, “and I can see how it changed me. But to be too angry about it would require me to kind of hate myself. Now, there are certain things I did hate about what it did to me: the way I would destroy relationships and the pain I would inflict on people when I did. But there are other parts—the weirdness of me and my relationship to the world. Being deeply reflective about institutions, responsibilities, and my role. Spinning deeply from the age of 14 about issues. And it’s like, well, if this hadn’t happened to me, who would I have been? Maybe I would have gone to work with my dad and run the steel plant and become a Republican congressman from Williamsport. I would have been a totally different person.”

Lessig’s sense that the effects of his abuse have been less than cataclysmic is among the reasons Donald Hanson has never been his bête noire. A few years after being fired by the school, Hanson decamped for England, where Lessig ran across him one day in Cambridge—and went punting with him on the Cam. (Since then, Hanson has been hiding out in France, or in Switzerland, or in Canada; no one is certain where.)

“I’ve never felt angry, or really angry, at Hanson,” Lessig says. “Hanson’s sick. He’s got a disease. The real evil isn’t the Hitler. The evil is the good German. The evil is all those people who could’ve just picked up the goddamn telephone and stopped it.”

For Lessig, the Hardwicke case is a chance to battle the good Germans he sees as still inhabiting the Boychoir School and other, similar institutions: “I’m not trying to punish them,” he says. “All I’m trying to do is get them to pick up the phone.”

But Lessig’s participation in the case (and in this story) is about something more, I think. All along, Lessig has gone to great lengths to keep his parents from learning that he was working on the Hardwicke litigation—and thus confronting his abuse with them. The question, though, is how far in the dark Lessig’s parents actually are.

Lessig once told me a story about the summer after he left the Boychoir School. Hanson invited him to take a trip to the Hanson family compound in Canada. Lessig badly wanted to go. But his mother said no, and when Lessig asked why, she said, “I don’t know, there’s something weird about this.” Lessig threw a titanic fit. “I screamed, slammed the door, walked out of the house,” he said. “I came back three hours later, and we never said anything about it ever again.” Lessig paused. “They knew.”

So if they knew—that is, they know—isn’t keeping it from them a charade?

“You underestimate the power of the human mind to ignore things that aren’t placed right in front of you,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be such a successful charade to succeed in not forcing them into this deeply depressing, painful recognition of not taking steps to protect your kid.”

What has brought all this into focus for Lessig is the birth twenty months ago of his son, Willem. Lessig recalls his father’s tirade when he asked to go to the Boychoir School. “It wasn’t until I became a father that I understood,” he says. “I can’t imagine sending my son away to school. I can’t imagine how they could do it.”

Willem has also afforded Lessig an insight into his deliberations over whether to reveal his abuse to his parents: “I think to myself, My God, I would never want my child not to tell me something like that.”

But Lessig and his parents remained locked in a silent impasse: the parents too fearful, and perhaps too guilty, to press him about what happened; the son too angry with them to volunteer the information. When Lessig saw his mother and father at Christmas, at their home in Hilton Head, they told him they’d received a card from a friend that mentioned his latest legal adventure: We saw Larry’s name in the paper, the card reported. We see he’s fighting a lawsuit with that boychoir in Princeton.

His parents inquired, What lawsuit? Lessig refused to tell them. Now he doesn’t have to—and they don’t have to ask. For better or worse, the impasse has finally been broken.

Emagrecer a equipa dirigente, mas fortalecer a parte técnica. Esta é a intenção do Governo relativamente à nova Entidade Reguladora da Comunicação Social (ERC).

"A proposta do Governo não implica um aumento significativo de funcionários, mas sobretudo de mudanças de funções", disse Augusto Santos Silva, ministro dos Assuntos Parlamentares com a tutela da comunicação social, na recente aprovação da ERC, em Conselho de Ministros. Para este objectivo contará a redução da estrutura de 11 membros (AACS) para cinco membros ( nova ERC).

Esta constitui uma das vias para a resolução de uma das críticas de que a AACS tem sido alvo estes últimos anos o elevado peso das despesas com o pessoal. Veja-se o parecer do Tribunal de Contas (página 44) resultado de uma auditoria de Novembro de 2004 às contas de 2002,

Os encargos com o pessoal tiveram um peso preponderante de 84,2%, cerca de 1,4 milhões de euros, num total de 1,7 milhões de despesas correntes no ano em análise.

Mas como conseguir uma estrutura nova justamente financiada e eficiente quando se prevê o reforço do número de peritos técnicos? Augusto Santos Silva chega a admitir que as novas competências da ERC, nomeadamente a adopção de regulamentos, directivas, recomendações e decisões, implicam a necessidade de um aumento "não excessivo" dos meios de financiamento.

Segundo o DN apurou, a nova entidade reguladora terá, no mínimo, uma equipa com 50 funcionários contra os actuais 30 da AACS. Mas dado o reforço dos seus poderes e competências , é provável que este número venha a ser ultrapassado, até porque segundo fontes do mercado ouvidas pelo DN, será necessária a existência de colégios de especialistas para melhor cumprir estas funções. E em consequência disto, os custos de financiamento também poderão subir.

Para fazer face a esta situação o Governo confirmou a passagem da dotação de orçamento de Estado da AACS para a nova ERC. A esta verba, na ordem dos 2,5 milhões de euros, será somada a uma nova taxa a cobrar aos grupos de comunicação. Visto que a ERC vai estar dotada de competências de fiscalização, retiradas ao Instituto da Comunicação Social, é das "coimas ou outras sanções pecuniárias" que virá mais financiamento.

Os novos suportes de conteúdos de comunicação social, designadamente os telemóveis deverão também estar sujeitos às taxas de financiamento. "Parte das taxas que os operadores [de telemóveis] pagam à Anacom (Autoridade Nacional das Comunicações) poderá ser transferida para a ERC", diz Santos Silva.

No sentido de uma melhor eficiência, outra das críticas feitas à AACS, o Governo vai promover o "reforço da coordenação com as autoridades da concorrência e das comunicações".

Cada um dos actuais dez membros da AACS ganha por mês 3375 euros, acrescidos de 726 euros de ajudas de representação, o que dá um salário de 4100,26 euros, equiparado ao cargo de director-geral, de acordo com o artigo 17.º da Lei da AACS. Já o presidente "tem o direito a um abono mensal para despesas de representação, de valor percentual sobre o respectivo vencimento, igual ao fixado para presidentes dos grupos parlamentares da AR".

"Pagamento de 225 mil euros, relativo a 'remunerações suplementares' não previstas na lei;Pagamentos de 10,7 mil euros e 19,1 mil euros a pessoal nomeado em 'comissão de serviço por tempo indeterminado' e a 'tempo parcial', respectivamente, sem enquadramento legal e sem a necessária publicitação;

Pagamento de prestações de serviços em 'regime de avença' sem formalização contratual (85,8 mil euros) com sujeição ao cumprimento do horário (9,4 mil euros e com remuneração numa base horária (25,6 mil euros), todas sem a necessária divulgação;Pagamento de 393 euros referente a uma comparticipação nas despesas com alimentação e pagamentos de 4,1 mil euros e de mil euros relativos, respectivamente, a subsídios de 'alimentação' e de 'jantar', não previstos na lei e sem inscrição e adequada classificação orçamentais; Pagamento de 12,5 mil euros de 'suplemento de risco' a pessoal não abrangido pela norma legal;Pagamento de 1,5 mil euros referente a 'prestação de trabalho em dias de descanso semanal', incluindo os montantes de 683 euros e de 180 euros relativos, respectivamente, a uma 'remuneração suplementar' não prevista na lei e a remuneração para além do legalmente permitido, sem adequada classificação orçamental."E ainda, uma chamada de atenção do tribunal para "Não ter sido elaborado Plano Anual de Actividades nem o correspondente Relatório e não existir manual de normas e procedimentos, nem um sistema adequado de inventário; Não existe segregação no exercício de funções incompatíveis na área financeira" além de que "a conta de gerência revela erros de cálculo e de concordância com os valores constantes na 'relação de documentos de despesa' e no 'balancete por rubrica orçamental'".Posto isto, o tribunal recomenda que a AACS deve tomar as "iniciativas necessárias a fim de que a legislação aplicável a autorize a proceder à harmonização que vem aplicando 'tradicionalmente' às remunerações que paga às que vêm sendo atribuídas aos funcionários da AR" e de forma rápida.

O Tribunal de Contas detectou vários erros e irregularidades nas contas da Alta Autoridade para a Comunicação Social (AACS), numa auditoria executada entre Março e Novembro de 2004, na vigência do Governo PSD/PP.

No parecer do Tribunal de Contas, relativo às contas e gestão de 2002, a que o DN teve acesso, todas as irregularidades detectadas referem-se a despesas com o pessoal. Uma alínea que, segundo o Tribunal de Contas, absorveu 84,2%, cerca de 1,4 milhões de euros, num total de 1,7 milhões de despesas correntes no ano em análise.

As principais irregularidades apontadas são o pagamento de remunerações suplementares não previstas na lei; o pagamento a pessoal nomeado em comissão de serviço por tempo indeterminado e a tempo parcial sem enquadramento legal; pagamentos em regime de avença sem formalização contratual; o pagamento de suplemento de risco a pessoal não abrangido pela norma legal ou pagamentos referentes a prestação de trabalho em dias de descanso semanal não prevista na lei.

"Com base na auditoria realizada, os auditores não podem formular uma opinião favorável relativamente à conta e às operações subjacentes, em virtude da incidência e natureza dos erros e irregularidades detectados", refere o Tribunal de Contas, acrescentando que dos mesmos "derivam várias reservas" (ver quadro em baixo).

De acordo com o mesmo documento, só as Remunerações Certas e Permanentes totalizaram 1,3 milhões de euros ou 77% do total das despesas com o pessoal. A segunda maior fatia de gastos (14%) correspondeu à aquisição de bens e serviços correntes no valor de 245 mil euros. Nesta alínea cabem normalmente as contratações de juris- tas ou especialistas em determinadas matérias consoante os casos em apreciação pela AACS.

Das contas da AACS, que funciona em instalações cedidas pela Assembleia da República (AR), não consta qualquer despesa com as mesmas, pois estes são encargos suportados directamente pelo orçamento da AR. As re- munerações do designado "serviço de apoio privativo de 37 funcionários" e dos 11 membros (dos quais apenas dez estão em funções) foram responsáveis, em 2002, por 1,4 milhões de euros. No parecer do Tribunal de Contas lê-se ainda "As remunerações pagas ao pessoal ao serviço da AACS têm desde a sua formação, seguido os parâmetros das remunerações praticadas na AR e, juntamente com as remunerações dos membros, representam 84% das despesas totais."

O orçamento total em 2004 da AACS rondará os 2,5 milhões de euros, montante que irá transitar para a nova Entidade Reguladora da Comunicação Social (ERC).

A auditoria às contas de 2002 foi motivada pela declaração de voto de vencido de um dos membros da AACS aquando da discussão das contas. Essa aprovação originou ainda uma abstenção num plenário onde estiveram presentes sete dos 11 membros da AACS.

Na avaliação de "uma amostra de 430 documentos de despesa, na sua maioria relativa a encargos com o pessoal (onde foram identificados os maiores riscos), representando 17,4% da despesa total", foram apontadas várias situações de irregularidade susceptíveis de, "eventualmente, configurarem infracções financeiras sancionatórias", diz o relatório.

Assim, do leque de situações irregulares, destaque para o pagamento de 85,9 mil euros relativos a prestações de serviços em "regime de avença", sem formalização contratual e sem a necessária divulgação; pagamento de 19,1 mil euros a uma jurista contratada a "tempo parcial" para funções de assessoria e sem necessária publicação ou o pagamento de "suplemento de risco" de 12,5 mil euros", de acordo com despacho do presidente da AACS, Armando Torres Paulo, a pessoal não abrangido pela norma legal aplicável (motoristas). Mas "aos seis motoristas foi ainda pago 'subsídio de jantar' sempre que o serviço se prolongou para além das 20 horas". E o pagamento de trabalho em dias de descanso semanal foi "efectuado para além do legalmente previsto".

He was found wandering by the sea, dressed in a dinner suit and tie but dripping wet and unable to speak. Taken to a hospital he still would not, or could not, say a word.

Then someone gave him paper and pencils and he drew, in great detail, a grand piano.

Excited, the hospital staff took him to a chapel with a piano, and the young man began to play.

Over the next few weeks he performed works by Tchaikovsky and what seemed to be his own, melancholy compositions.

He played beautifully, and hospital workers came to hear him give recitals lasting up to four hours. But the young man remained silent.

Five weeks after he was found on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, the identity of the "piano man", as he became to be known, remains a mystery.

No one has come forward to identify him, although his picture was posted on a national missing persons website, and some people have called to say they believe they have seen him play at concert halls in Europe.

Some say he is a professional musician who has suffered a trauma that has caused amnesia. When doctors have tried to question him he has sometimes rolled himself into a ball and retreated to the corner of the room. He seems terrified of any new face. Orchestras around Europe are being contacted to see if they know the man, who is tall, slim and fair and in his 20s or early 30s.

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AdvertisementPolice believe he is probably English, though he drew a Swedish flag as well as a piano.

In echoes of David Helfgott, the Australian pianist whose nervous breakdown and recovery was made into the film, Shine, the man is only soothed by playing the piano. "Away from the piano, he starts to breathe very quickly and nervously shies away from people," care worker Michael Camp told reporters. But when he played, all his anxiety disappeared.

"He likes to play what I would call mood music - quite circular in nature, without defined beginnings or endings," the hospital chaplain, Canon Alan Amos, told The Guardian. "When he is playing he blanks everything else out. He pays attention to nothing but the music." The man has been transferred to a psychiatric unit in Dartford, where he can use the piano.

Some who have heard the "piano man" believe he may be a professional musician.

One theory is that he has suffered a trauma that has caused amnesia, one of the methods the mind uses to retreat from a shock. Personal memories can be lost, while the ability to communicate - or, for instance, play the piano - is not.

- With Guardian

17 de mayo de 2005. Estudien la historia de este desdichado . La policía inglesa lo descubre en una isla, elegantemente vestido y con la mente destrozada. No dice una sola palabra y sus gestos son los de quien conoce el terror de primera mano. Sin embargo, toca el piano durante horas y al parecer lo hace maravillosamente. Dos cosas afirman los médicos con las que no estoy de acuerdo. La primera es que no habla. Es obvio que al piano está diciendo algo, aunque no sea lo que los terapeutas necesitan para realizar su trabajo. La segunda es que ha perdido la memoria. No la ha perdido puesto que recuerda las partituras de obras musicales, de las que se sospecha además que son suyas.
De modo que estamos ante alguien que ha decidido hablar de unas cosas y no de otras, recordar algunas y olvidar las demás. Es decir, ante alguien que, por encima de los palpables traumas y sufrimientos que oculta , ha decidido ser solamente de una manera y ser reconocido solamente por ella. Los psicólogos del arte (la mayor parte psiquiatras, todo sea dicho) denominan "investimiento" al proceso mediante el cual los creadores cubren con las maravillas de la imaginación el pozo negro de su dolor, su miseria o su culpa. Y sólo por esas maravillas esperan el reconocimiento de los otros, y sólo de esas maravillas esperan conversación. En el pozo no entra nadie. De vez en cuando, las cosas salen tan bien que se van a vivir para siempre a ese mundo que han creado, tan satisfactorio, tan inmutable y tan indoloro. La esquizofrenia a la orden del día. De vez en cuando, las cosas salen tan mal que también se van a vivir a él.

En el "hombre piano" se aprecian, confiemos en que metafóricamente, esos rasgos trágicos del creador, aunque sobre todo los riesgos del propio arte en un mundo que considera al creador como un modelo de individuos. Hoy en día, todo quisque quiere ser creativo en su trabajo, en su gastronomía, en sus calzoncillos y hasta en su cuerpo. El primer resultado es que cualquier cosa es creativa. El segundo es un riesgo alto de psicosis colectiva y de personal que vive en otro mundo, aunque se sienten en la mesa de al lado y, como tú, sean puntuales a la hora del café.

El joven amnésico fue hallado en una playa británica hace más de un mes - No habla, sólo toca el piano

MADRID | LONDRES.- Ante la ausencia de pistas, la policía británica ha hecho un llamamiento a las orquestas europeas, con el fin de arrojar alguna luz sobre el caso de 'piano man', el joven que fue hallado hace más de un mes en una carretera de la costa inglesa, y del que sólo se sabe que es un virtuoso de este instrumento.


Son varias las líneas de investigación abiertas. El Hospital Marítimo de Medway, en el que se encuentra ingresado 'piano man', ha contratado a varios intérpretes de Polonia, Letonia y Lituania para comprobar si el procede de Europa del Este, por el momento sin éxito.

También siguen la pista falicitada en una de las múltiples llamadas recibidas desde que este lunes la prensa británica recogiera la noticia. El comunicante proporcionó el nombre de una persona del área de Sussex.

'Piano man' fue hallado el pasado 8 de abril caminando, empapado, por una carretera cercana al mar en Sheerness, la mayor ciudad de la Isla de Sheppey, al sureste de Inglaterra. Iba bien vestido, con traje oscuro, camisa clara y corbata. No llevaba documentación y las etiquetas de la ropa habían sido arrancadas.

Al no responder a las preguntas de la policía, decidieron llevarlo a un hospital cercano, donde continuó sumido en su mutismo. Hasta que una de las enfermeras le dio un trozo de papel y unos lápices, con los que pintó un clarísimo y detallado piano de cola.

Pasión por el piano


El piano que diburó el misterioso joven. (Foto: EFE)

En la capilla del psiquiátrico de Dartford, al oeste de Kent, donde está ingresado ahora, hay un piano. A Michael Camp, el asistente social al que le fue asignado el misterioso joven, tuvo la idea de llevarlo allí. Lo que ocurrió lo dejó boquiabierto: el joven no identificado se puso a tocar y no paró en cuatro horas.

El cura, Alan Amos, dice que interpretó 'El lago de los cisnes', de Tchaikovsky y varias canciones de los curas, pero que la mayoría de la música parece composición propia, que alguien ha comparado con las obras del músico italiano Ludovico Einaudi.

Si le dejan, a veces se pasa varias horas al piano: su música es de naturaleza circular, sin principio ni fin, y parece que le sirve para relajarse.

Algunos que le han escuchado interpretar esas piezas al piano creen que se trata de un músico profesional que puede haber sufrido un trauma que le causó la amnesia mientras que otros consideran que es sólo un aficionado.

Un amnésico puede quedarse sin un solo recuerdo y, sin embargo, no perder la capacidad de comunicarse o de tocar un instrumento musical, como en este caso.

Un misterio como el de 'Shine'


El joven, en una foto facilitada por el hospital. (Foto: AP)

Su asistente social explica que, al sentarse al piano, el joven se transforma: "Es difícil pararlo y suena como si estuviera dando un concierto. Cuando toca, su ansiedad desaparece. Cuando se aleja del piano, respira muy agitado y huye de la gente", informa Ana Romero.

Camp lo describió como un ser "muy tímido", de unos 28 a 32 años, y que se alarma sobremanera cuando se le acerca alguien a quien no ha visto nunca. Hasta tal punto, que a veces se tira al suelo, se pone en posición fetal y se refugia en una esquina. Por lo demás, no tiene problemas de salud, ni signos de haber sido maltratado.

El misterioso caso está siendo comparado con la película 'Shine', que ganó un Oscar en 1996. 'Shine' cuenta la historia del pianista David Helfgott, que sufrió una crisis nerviosa mientras tocaba. Las teorías en torno a este joven que no habla son varias.

Una es que se trata de una persona que ha sufrido un trauma y que ha reaccionado a él con amnesia. Por su ropa, algunos mantienen que venía de un funeral. En estas más de cinco semanas, han investigado todas las defunciones de la zona, y nadie da cuenta de un familiar perdido, informa Ana Romero.

Otros afirman que puede ser autista y que fue hallado así de bien vestido porque acababa de participar en un concierto. Además del piano, el joven dibujó una bandera con una cruz, que, según algunos, parecía una bandera sueca, aunque nadie está seguro de que sea así.

Alok Jha
Thursday May 19, 2005
The Guardian

The virtuoso piano player found more than a month ago on the Isle of Sheppey in a drenched suit, apparently with no memory of who he is or what he was doing there, seems to be suffering from some sort of memory loss. What kind of loss this is, how it was caused and whether he will recover are all open questions.
While the mysterious man was unable to offer any information about himself or his background, he is clearly adept at playing the piano.

"Different bits of the brain are involved in memories for everyday events and incidents and for well-rehearsed skills such as playing music," says Michael Kopelman, a professor of neuropsychiatry at King's College London.

"It is well known that in both neurological disease and in psychological forms of amnesia, the ability to play music is preserved. If I knew someone could do it before and now they claim to have lost that skill, I would be thinking they might be faking."

The laying down of long-term memory is closely associated with an area of the brain called the hippocampus. How those memories are retrieved is still a hot area of research, but psychological or physical damage to various parts of the brain - the parietal or temporal lobes, for example - can result in amnesia.

"If someone doesn't know who they were, then one is almost certainly talking about psychological causation," says Kopelman. He adds that people who turn up in hospital suffering from memory loss have often suffered major stress. They are usually also depressed, sometimes suicidal.

The severity of any memory loss depends on the severity of the event that caused it, but the memory loss can last from a few seconds to many months. Recovery depends on the individual case but people usually recall older memories first, then more recent ones.

Anyone with information about piano man should call the National Missing Persons Helpline on 0500 700 700.

Os vencedores do Concurso Literário Vinho Madeira — Conto. De 47 contos a concurso, alguns vieram do Brasil e até mesmo do continente.
O 1.º prémio foi para os contos “Escolhia Afogar”, do pseudónimo Mário Rana, e “Adega de Baco”, de João Lucas. O 2.º prémio foi para “Move o Homem Fica a Fama”, de Emanuel Silva, e o 3.º destinou-se a “Vermelho Incandescente”, do pseudónimo Alice Castro. Além destes quatro contos, outros dois vão também ser publicados em volume.

Ministério
da Cultura

pedro Mexia
pedromexia@hotmail.com
Há dez anos, Paul Auster veio a Lisboa para ler integralmente O Caderno Vermelho. A sala (Monumental) encheu, mas não apareceu nenhuma multidão. Agora, dez anos depois, o Grande Auditório da Culturgest esteve apinhadíssimo para ouvir de novo Auster. E nem toda a gente conseguiu entrar. Parece então evidente que a popularidade de Auster tem crescido. Mas, como se viu, tem crescido também porque o romancista possui uma combinação invulgar de star power e prestígio intelectual.

Na sessão da passada sexta, o editor Manuel Alberto Valente apresentou Auster, que surgiu por entre um cortinado vermelho, com suspense, solenidade e aclamação. Vestido de escuro, com aquele estilo elegante e descontraído de intelectual nova- -iorquino, Auster leu algumas páginas do seu último romance, Oracle Night. Para além de ser inquestionavelmente bem- -apessoado, Auster tem uma voz grave e profunda que serve muitíssimo bem a leitura, mesmo porque no excerto que escolheu se notava todo o trabalho da prosa, precisa e sonora. Cada fragmento foi depois lido em português por Luísa Costa Gomes. Auster seleccionou, naturalmente, a referência inicial ao "portuguese notebook". A plateia ficou desvanecida.

A sessão de perguntas e respostas, longa e muito participada, correu bem. Os perguntadores conheciam a obra ao pormenor, o inglês foi quase sempre de Instituto Britânico e as questões quase todas pertinentes (embora, face a algumas interpretações biografistas, Auster tenha exclamado "That's very funny how people can misconcieve things"). O escritor dissertou sobre métodos de trabalho, sobre traduções, sobre a carreira cinematográfica, elogiou Don DeLillo e Peter Carey e ainda houve tempo para uma referência positiva a Pessoa (palmas) e uma referência negativa a Bush (palmas).

Mais interessante foi ouvir Auster recusar a etiqueta de "pós-moderno" que lhe têm colado, e reafirmar a sua crença na inspiração, na imaginação, na narrativa. Auster decidiu que queria ser romancista aos 15 anos, quando leu Dostoievski. É por isso, explicou, que lhe interessa sobretudo escrever "moral adventure novels". E a maior aventura de todas, precisou, é o encontro íntimo entre dois estranhos o autor e o leitor.