Dillon Bates has a surname less suited to politics than to a remake of a classic Hitchcock horror movie. And, it appears, proclivities to match.
Until August 20, Bates was a Democratic state representative from Westbrook. He resigned that post nearly a month after The Bollard magazine published an in-depth report filled with evidence that Bates was a sexual predator. (In the interest of full disclosure, I used to write for The Bollard, and its editor and the article’s author, Chris Busby, remains a friend.)
Before the story broke, Bates, 30, worked as a teacher, coach and theater director at several local schools and organizations. According to The Bollard, he used those positions to groom at least three female students for romantic or sexual relationships. He denies this charge, and none of his victims has so far been willing to speak about them on the record, so he’s not currently facing any criminal complaints. But the level of detail in the story lends a lot of credence to these accusations.
Bates had previously announced he wasn’t running for re-election this year, but his resignation email indicates he somehow doesn’t believe his political career is finished. He wrote that he intends to clear his name, after which “I look forward to finding ways to serve my community, state and country in the future.”
Maybe he could open a motel.
In any case, I’m less concerned with what comes next for Bates than how an elected official was able to get away with these reprehensible activities for months without someone in authority taking some kind of corrective action. We may never know how many girls or young women were put at risk by the failure of school officials, legislative leaders and the news media to publicly acknowledge what was going on.
While Bates’ victims didn’t want their names used, they and others did make some attempts to hold him accountable. After Bates suddenly resigned his position at the now-closed Maine Girls Academy in Portland last November, three people called the state hotline for reporting child abuse to alert investigators to their concerns about him. Nevertheless, he continued to coach boys track at Massabesic High School in Waterboro and, until The Bollard story appeared, was scheduled to coach girls and boys cross country in the current school year.
Whatever the state did about those three complaints is confidential, which protects future victims not at all. And if there’s some informal network among school administrators to quietly pass on warnings about sexual predators, it didn’t function well in this case, since there’s every indication Bates would still be coaching if The Bollard’s deep dive into the rumors had never seen print.
At least one of Bates’ students also told her story to the Portland Press Herald, which published exactly nothing – until after The Bollard piece appeared. (More disclosure: My column appears in the Forecaster and Current newspapers which are owned by Reade Brower, the owner of the Press Herald.) After The Bollard’s exposé, the Press Herald included this lame excuse in one of its stories:
“The Press Herald has been investigating the allegations for months but did not have people willing to speak on the record or official documentation of complaints to support publication of a story.”
Translation: We were too afraid of a lawsuit to publish something that might have protected other students from being harmed.
The newspaper did ask Bates about the allegations back in March, but he denied everything, so naturally, the story was shelved.
University presidents, sporting-association administrators and Catholic bishops get fired and even prosecuted for covering up sexual assaults. Newspapers can just shrug off such negligence.
Likewise, legislative leadership did squat. When Democratic House Speaker Sara Gideon heard rumors about Bates earlier this year, she had her staff confront him. But after he denied he’d done anything wrong, the matter was dropped. House Republicans also got wind of the allegations, but once they were told of Bates’ denial, they, too, took a pass on further investigation. Of course, that didn’t stop the GOP from complaining after The Bollard’s story appeared that Democrats had failed to act.
With the exception of that magazine, nobody comes out of this looking good. And the lack of public reflection by these various institutions on what they did wrong and how they might correct it makes me doubt any lessons have been learned.
Except this one: Before showering, lock all your doors and windows.
Go psycho by emailing aldiamon@herniahill.net.
the new, improved republican party heartily welcomes mr. norman–er, dillon–bates! so much for the tolerant left!
You’re upset because the PPH didn’t write what amounts to a smear piece on the guy? Accused of is not the same as guilty of. If it were substantiated he would be listed on the SOR and the whole state would know about it.
Al:
It would be informative to know the state hotline procedure. It’s one thing for calls of abuse to start a swift and thorough investigation. Obviously, that system needs fixing. It’s quite another for these calls to start a premature ruining of someone’s career by rumor in the media. You can’t put that genii back in the bottle.
If former Rep. Bates was an (R) instead of a (D), the media, several NGO’s and the Dems would have brought it forward.
Jon Reisman is spot on with his comment!!
Every time the state’s largest paper gets scooped, it comes up with a different excuse for missing the story.
Sad for a company that once enjoyed widespread respect as Maine’s leading news organization.
The latest editorial disclaimer is, simply, yet another attempt by the Portland Press Herald to hide in shame from pathetic “newspapering,” if, indeed, newspapering is what is practiced over there.
The paper could publish no excuses when it gets scooped, but then it would have nothing to print.
Speaking of getting scooped, if the paper had real principle – and any self-respect at all – it would ignore The Bollard’s report on the Westbrook legislator.
Think about this…
The Press Herald claimed – in print, publicly – that it had been investigating a legislator for months but had no evidence of wrongdoing against him. That is what we call an excuse that is meant to tell the readers, “here’s why you can trust us – we tell you when we fail.”
However, in the news business, if you fail to nail down what you think may be a story, you move on to the next investigation.
If you haven’t got a story, no matter how hard you worked at it thinking there was, in fact, a story, tough luck. (It happens all the time, folks, all the time. But other news organizations don’t print excuses that subliminally, cynically, simply confirm with a ‘wink-wink’ what they ‘failed’ to confirm.)
Newspapers aren’t in business to tell readers what they failed to confirm because by doing so, they confirm. That is the cynical insidiousness of the Press Herald’s sophomoric approach to the case of the Westbrook legislator.
Merely by telling its readers that it looked into allegations against someone – whether confirmed or not – automatically raises suspicion about the target of that review.
The paper takes its readers for fools.
So, if the Press Herald really has a principle designed to protect people from unconfirmed or unsubstantiated claims, or both, then indeed it has one choice – stay silent. Totally silent.
That means not publishing a story saying it couldn’t justify publicly identifying the target of an alleged complaint since it failed to find any evidence of the supposed behavior that triggered its probe.
When a newspaper that has an alleged policy forbidding anonymous claims then goes ahead and reports that a state lawmaker quit in the wake of unconfirmed claims against him that were published by another news organization, then it is as complicit in violating its own standards as if it had printed the claims without substantiation.
That kind of publishing inconsistency is what makes a newspaper a big joke.