The music instructor’s lessons on the strict, no-nonsense reform college within the woods of upstate New York would appear to be an adolescent’s respite amid all the foundations, a spot for expression and discovery.
However a felony indictment unsealed Thursday portrayed that instructor as a domineering and abusive tyrant who, throughout one-on-one journeys away from college and outdoors the state, raped his teenage college students or pressured them into sexual exercise.
The indictment follows years of lawsuits which have portrayed the Household Basis College, a small boarding academy in rural Delaware County, as one thing nearer to an unsupervised, violent jail.
The instructor, Paul Geer, 56, was arrested Wednesday night in Hancock, N.Y., the place he lives a brief distance from the positioning of the college, which closed in 2014. He was charged with six counts associated to bringing three totally different kids throughout state strains to have interaction in illegal sexual exercise.
Mr. Geer pleaded not responsible at an arraignment earlier than a federal Justice of the Peace decide in Syracuse, N.Y., on Thursday, and was denied launch pending a detention listening to set for Monday.
For former college students on the college, his arrest vindicated a few years of on-line campaigns and authorized battles involving that place and, particularly, that man.
Liz Boysick, 41, recognized as “Sufferer 2” within the indictment, was 16 when Mr. Geer drove her to Pennsylvania forward of a category journey there and compelled her to carry out oral intercourse in his van, she stated. Many years later, she was in court docket to see Mr. Geer in shackles through the listening to.
“It was actually highly effective listening to what mattered to me counts,” she stated afterward. “He won’t get yet one more tear out of me. Now’s the time for me to dwell my life.”
Mr. Geer was in his 20s and dwelling along with his dad and mom when an older couple approached him at a choral recital he was main and supplied him a job on the Household College, as it’s identified, on the spot. They had been Tony and Betty Argiros, who based the college within the Nineteen Eighties.
For Mr. Geer, that started a profession of greater than 20 years on the college, which billed itself as a final resort for folks pissed off and distraught by their kids’s drug or alcohol abuse or behavioral points. Former college students have stated he requested private questions on their intercourse lives and singled out kids to remain behind with him after class, which was held in a crimson barn beside a pond.
The indictment described Mr. Geer as a bully who, along with subjecting college students to “repeated sexual abuse,” pressured them to eat moldy meals, haul heavy a great deal of rocks across the campus and endure communication blackouts for lengthy intervals.
On three separate events outlined within the indictment, Mr. Geer drove a scholar — two boys and a woman, ages 14 to 17 — out of state and compelled the scholar into sexual exercise.
Mike Milia, 45, of Brooklyn, is recognized as “Sufferer 1” within the indictment. He was 14 in 1994 when Mr. Geer took him on a fishing journey to Maine and sexually abused him, in accordance with the indictment.
On the way in which again to Hancock, Mr. Geer “instructed him to not inform anybody of what had simply occurred,” in accordance with a lawsuit filed by Mr. Milia in 2019. That case is pending.
Mr. Geer was questioned about taking a minor to Maine in a deposition that very same yr.
“In hindsight, I shouldn’t have finished that,” he stated, however he denied any sexual abuse.
“I feel I behaved badly in a variety of methods,” Mr. Geer stated within the deposition, referring to his time working on the college. “I positively was very aggressive.”
The couple that based the college later retired, and their son, Emmanuel Argiros, who goes by Michael, took over day-to-day operations earlier than it closed. In depositions in 2018 and 2021, the youthful Mr. Argiros denied listening to stories of abuse whereas on the college.
In 2018, The New York Instances printed an article describing a sequence of suicides and deadly overdoses by former college students. Extra former college students later got here ahead to explain horrific situations on the college.
Liz Ianelli is a former scholar who recounted her time on the college and described the abuses inflicted on her there in her 2023 e book, “I See You, Survivor.” She recalled being wrapped from neck to ankle in a blanket that was duct-taped closed, and left on the ground of an empty room, shimmying towards a bowl of tuna for meals.
She was among the many former college students who unexpectedly organized journey to Syracuse on Thursday for the court docket listening to.
Sitting close by was Mr. Milia, watching the person who had taken him to Maine 30 years in the past.
“This man threatened my life once I was 14 years previous,” Mr. Milia stated after the listening to. “When he walked via that door, it was the primary time I felt like he couldn’t harm me anymore. I’m not scared anymore.”
