The thrill had turned into hollow degradation. She thought about telling friends, but the threat of him taking his own life continued to loom. She be
The thrill had turned into hollow degradation. She thought about telling friends, but the threat of him taking his own life continued to loom. She became increasingly isolated, routinely lying to her friends about her whereabouts. On nights when other girls were out socializing with one another, she often stayed in her room, alone, drinking the bottles of wine he’d brought her.
By the time Fares reached her 20s, she tried to break his hold and see other men. But Rutledge did what he could to stop her. He gave her a vibrator and told her she didn’t need to explore other relationships—just exploit it and think of him. She moved to New York in 2014 to attend Columbia Journalism School, where she met a man she started dating. Rutledge created a phony Instagram account to follow her and saw a picture of them together. She recalls one night when she was in a taxi going to meet the recent boyfriend. “He called me and he was screaming and crying. He was so hysterical,” she says. “Completely unhinged. ‘How could you do this to me?’ ” Fares, now 32, finally saw his monstrousness and repellence. But the damage felt irrevocable. She struggled in one relationship after another, often freezing during sex or dissociating. For a time she could only perform the act while intoxicated. As she bluntly puts it, “I always say, or have said to people recently, I don’t know how to make love. I know how to fuck.” At her fifth Miss Hall’s reunion, she had sex with him for the last time, at his mother’s house. “I just felt so little of myself.”
As Fares eventually entered therapy, some truths about herself and her experience began to crystallize. “Why am I so good at lying? Well, he was so good at lying. Why do I feel so much shame? Well, the shame I feel is also his shame. And that’s what predators, I think, do. They take their shame, they put it on you, and you have to carry it.” One day in 2019, her story came tumbling out to her mother, and then to her brother. (Nabil, who died in 2021, had developed dementia, which spared Fares from having to tell him.) Kristina was heartbroken for her daughter, crushed with guilt for not seeing what was in front of her. She supported her in how she wanted to proceed with her story. Melissa knew coming out publicly would hurt Rutledge’s daughter, with whom she had remained friends, and so she held back. But last March, she felt the need to speak up despite that friendship. “I felt like I had forgiven myself enough to be able to come forward and speak from a place of, not authority, but some profound experience that this was not my fault, and this needs to be discussed. This man needs to not be able to teach ever again.”
Through a lawyer, Fares sent a letter to the current head of school, Julia Heaton, who began in 2014, and told her the headlines of her story. At the same time, she reached out to a woman she didn’t know but whose name she had heard—Hilary Simon, née Casper, class of ’05. While Fares was at Miss Hall’s, she’d heard whispers that he’d had a relationship with Simon when Simon attended the school five years earlier. Fares recalls googling her back then. Simon was petite, with obscure hair, obscure eyes, just like her. At the time, Fares asked Rutledge about her, but he denied any involvement. He loved only her, he insisted, and this was his first time doing anything of the kind. Fares accepted it, but doubt nagged at her. Now, 15 years later, Fares decided to put out feelers to the woman—maybe she’d had an experience similar to her own.
That is where this story began. On the same morning that Simon received the frantic text from Rutledge, she went into her office, an insurance law firm in New York, and stared at the email from the lawyer representing Melissa Fares, a name she’d never heard of, asking to talk. She felt like she might throw up. It was now clear to her that Fares was the woman behind the complaint to the school. Her first reaction was jealousy—even though Simon was now married with a three-year-old child. She promptly called Rutledge and unloaded: Who is Melissa Fares?! Rutledge tap-danced on the phone, claiming Fares had been just the result of a midlife crisis and his unhappy marriage. And then Simon went into protection mode as she had so many times before. She promised to collect information from Fares and report back.
Simon, now 37, called Fares. But just moments into their conversation, hearing the voice of the adolescent woman on the other end of the line, “a switch went off,” says Simon. She found herself saying, “I’ve been waiting for this call for 20 years.” As she listened to Fares’s story, a wave of sorrow fell over her: “I just remember feeling so sad that I didn’t protect her, that I didn’t stop him.” Simon shared her story back. For both women the sense of specialness they both once felt was peeled away. Their stories were twin accounts five years apart and overlapping, marked by the same plot points and scenes. But there was a recent angle to Simon’s story—evidence that the school knew the truth about Rutledge and did nothing to stop him.
Much like Fares, Simon is sultry and wise, with a hint of grief behind a pretty face. Notes and photos of her with Rutledge sit in tidy piles on her dining room table; in them she’s baby-faced, eyes twinkling, barely up to his shoulder. Looking at one, she says that she’s telling her story, at least in part, for that girl whose future he stole. Like Fares, 14-year-old Simon found it difficult to make friends when she arrived at Miss Hall’s in 2001. She was dealing with a family member’s mental health issues that required all her parents’ attention. “I was still reeling from a childhood of chaos and violence,” she says.
That first year Rutledge, the faculty member on check-in duty at the dorm, always made a special effort to talk to her from the doorway as she settled into bed, which she found comforting. As with Fares, when she wavered on whether to return the following year, he successfully persuaded her to do so. He became her adviser and cross-country coach that year. In that capacity he orchestrated one-on-one runs together, taking her to state forests Kennedy Park and October Mountain. As he did with Fares, he fetishized her smallness—he’d bend down to tie her running shoe and called her “Little One.” It was here, on these secluded paths, that he began sharing personal stories of his troubled youth, just as he would do with Fares, and opening up about his unsatisfying marriage. She recalls admissions director Kim Boland giving her a peculiar admonishment when she drove off-campus with him in the van: “Be a good girl for Mr. Rutledge.” (Boland did not respond to questions sent to Miss Hall’s School.)
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