Greenville Christian College University Preparatory School in Brookville, Ontario.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Ewan White’s latest book is Changing Paradigms: Essays on Art and Culture.
On November 16, 2023, the 16-year class action lawsuit against Greenville Christian College finally came to an end. As a former student, I can’t believe it. The notorious boarding school, located outside Brockville, Ontario, and its affiliate, the Massachusetts-based Society of Jesus, seemed too powerful to defeat. Its leaders have used incredible deception and the lure of powerful, wealthy donors to silence students for decades. Film producer Sir Arthur Chetwynd was a backer. Trevor Eaton, an Ontario businessman and senator, was also a strong supporter, as were three successive Ontario Conservative MPs, Pauline McGibbon, John Blackaird, and Lincoln Alexander, who all sat on the school board. Former lieutenant governor Hal Jackman even gave a speech at the graduation in Greenville. These prominent figures would have been shocked if they knew what happened to the students of the school and how they were unwitting enablers of a mind-controlling cult that did horrific things to children in the name of God.
Many of its former students – some of whom were children of the province’s elite – claimed to have been subjected to varying levels of shocking abuse at the hands of the school’s administration and staff, including severe corporal punishment, persistent verbal and emotional abuse, sexual harassment and assault. Abuse, screaming, scapegoating, distancing, sleep deprivation, forced manual labor and isolation. While I was a student there, I was assaulted, isolated, thrown down the stairs, repeatedly kicked, deprived of food and sleep, locked in walk-in freezers, forced to sleep in a dirty mattress for a week, sexually harassed, and I witnessed child sexual abuse. (When she complained about assaults on adult staff, she was beaten two by four.) Not surprisingly, the effects of abuse follow students into adulthood.
“The list of suicides by former students is very long and heartbreaking,” Andrew Hill Byrne, one of the student plaintiffs’ representatives, said after the final hearing.
I spent three long years in Greenville in the 1980s, during the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. Before that, I was an involuntary member of the Society of Jesus. My parents were members of this “church,” which was founded in Massachusetts in 1970. It is by far the most radical of the three original surviving covenant communities of the Charismatic Renewal in the United States, which began in the early 1960s and picked up steam as a reactionary reaction to the Power movement. Venus in the late 1960s. The group’s founders, Kay Andersen and Judy Sorensen, were middle-aged housewives who spent several long stays in a German sect called the Evangelical Sisters of Mary, from which they borrowed much of their fire-and-brimstone theology and punitive reason. Control techniques, called “light sessions”. Ms. Andersen and Ms. Sorensen exported their own version of the technique to Greenville, where they convinced employees to become members of the Society of Jesus and live its radical lifestyle. This included taking lifelong vows of obedience.
I’ve endured these light sessions many times, more times than I can remember. The student suddenly finds himself surrounded by other adult staff members. They will forcefully confront a list of spiritual defects or character flaws. Often it seemed completely random. The targets are then interrogated forcefully and relentlessly, until they collapse psychologically under the threat of violence, in sessions that can last for hours. A complete emotional breakdown was not uncommon. They will then be “love bombed” by the same people they encountered so harshly. They were told that they had undergone a worthwhile spiritual ordeal in pursuit of the Christian life. And then it will start all over again.
The school closed in 2007, and this newspaper exposed its sins shortly afterwards. Mr. Hill-Byrne soon launched a civil class action lawsuit against the school and the estates of two of its late principals. The lawsuit did not go to trial until 2019.
I wasn’t the only former student who came to watch the trial. Others came from across Canada and the United States, filling the courtroom seats. Some came to finally hear former students detail the horrors of what they experienced but were never able to express aloud. We – we – wanted the world to know what we went through all those years ago. I remember that when a clinical psychologist and expert witness acknowledged the impact of abuse on the lives of several former Greenville students in her testimony, many of the former students in the crowded courtroom burst into tears. Many of them had to leave the courtroom overcome with emotion. It was a moment when, for the first time, someone in a position of authority acknowledged what we had been through.
Judge Janet Lieber issued her decision on February 23, 2020, concluding that “evidence of mistreatment and types of abuse committed on students’ bodies and minds in the name of… [Community of Jesus] The values of submission and obedience were at the class level and at the contract level. It was, in the words of Margaret Granger, one of the plaintiffs, “a precedent-setting case, and the first historical abuse case to be won at trial in Canada.” (The defendants appealed the judge’s decision, but it was upheld in 2021.)
The 70-page ruling also clarified the school’s financial and spiritual involvement with the Society of Jesus. Donald Farnsworth, son of longtime Greenville School Superintendent Charles Farnsworth, testified that the school gave about $100,000 annually to the community, even purchasing a house within its complex. Mrs. Andersen and Mrs. Sorensen sat on the school board.
The Ontario Superior Court of Justice ordered him to pay $10,875,000 in damages. The money each student received after 16 years of legal battles was minimal; After subtracting the amounts, the total is $6,628,781 divided among approximately 1,350 students. But we did not seek justice for money. We wanted to hear.
The final court hearing, at which the case management judge approved the proposed settlement negotiated between the plaintiffs’ legal team and the insurance companies representing the shuttered school, was online and brief. All four representative plaintiffs were present: Mr. Hale-Byrne and Ms. Granger, joined by Lisa Cavanaugh and Richard Van Dusen. About 30 former students were allowed to listen via Zoom. The judge quickly approved the agreement between the former student representatives and the school’s attorneys.
The outlook for many school graduates is bleak, with high rates of suicide, addiction and lifelong mental health problems, all hallmarks of severe trauma. However, the closure offered to us on November 16 was a victory.
“This settlement represents a huge relief, and confirms and validates everything I’ve been trying to tell my family and friends for decades about how the school treated us without our parents’ knowledge or consent,” Liz Goldwyn, who was a student in the 1980s, told me afterward.
Despite the trial, and hours of testimony from former students and employees, many of the supporters I encountered were either dismissive, in complete denial, or refused to acknowledge anything that happened at Greenville. I think the light, addictive nature of the sessions has convinced many people that they are participating in something truly spiritual. I disagree with that view – and neither do many of the plaintiffs who won the suit against Grenfell.
Although it has lost much of its influence, the Society of Jesus still operates, overshadowing its connections to Grenfell and its successful class action lawsuit. To the children still trapped inside, as I once was: we have not forgotten you.