James Keivom/New York Daily News
A lawyer for Horace Mann filed court papers asking for details of its two settlements with former students confidential.
Horace Mann, the exclusive Bronx private school rocked by a sex abuse scandal involving dozens of students, has asked the courts to seal the details of its settlements with two victims.
The tony Riverdale school says it wants to protect the privacy of those former students — one of whom has committed suicide.
However, lawyers also want to protect Horace Mann from demands for higher settlements from other victims who have pending claims or haven’t filed claims yet.
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“Given that additional claims are pending and new claims remain a possibility, it would be detrimental to potential future settlements if settlement related documents were made public at this time,” Horace Mann’s attorney, Howard Epstein, said in papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court.
Several years ago when the scandal first broke, school officials met with 32 victims and their families to learn what happened and they have settled with most of them.
The school wants to seal a 1993 letter by one victim to school officials where he complained about sexual advances made toward him by a teacher.
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That letter was written by Ben Balter, who later committed suicide. His mother, a retired teacher who worked for decades at Horace Mann, received $ 900,000. The school also wants to seal confidential questionnaires completed by two victims about the abuse and the confidential settlements with those two.
Epstein says that by refusing to reimburse the school for the cost of those settlements, three insurance companies — all off-shoots of the American International Group — forced Horace Mann to sue them and “bring this dispute in a public forum. The former students’ right to privacy should not suffer as a result.”
The motion was filed as part of Horace Mann request that the court grant summary judgement and order its insurance companies to pay up.
The companies refused to do so after school officials refused to disclose who knew what and when — and what the school did or didn’t do — about allegations of abuse.
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