Newly unsealed court documents suggest administrators at Montreal's Selwyn House knew about sexual abuse allegations two decades earlier than when they have previously claimed.
The documents were released after a Quebec judge rejected a proposed $5-million settlement between Selwyn House and former students, stemming from a class-action lawsuit. The students allege they suffered abuse at the hands of three former teachers at the private boy's school.
The judge said he wanted the settlement re-worked, and CTV and The Globe and Mail requested that affidavits from parents and former students be opened to the public.
When the first lawsuit was filed against the school about two years ago, administrators claimed they first knew about abuse allegations in 1991. An anonymous tip claimed that Leigh Seville, who was teaching at the time, had sexually assaulted a student.
When staff confronted Seville, he went home and committed suicide.
However, in one sworn affidavit, a mother said her husband told the school in 1971 that Seville had assaulted a student.
"My husband and I had expected that Selwyn House would take steps to prevent Leigh Seville from assaulting other students, such as forbidding him from tutoring or from being alone with students in any circumstance," she said in the affidavit.
But Seville continued to work as a teacher at the school for another 20 years.
Another affidavit suggests parents expressed concerns in 1983 that Seville was a pedophile, but were reassured there was no cause for concern. The parents then allowed their son to go on a lengthy field trip with the teacher.
"When we picked him up upon his return, he cried and said he never wanted to go on a trip like that again," the mother said in a sworn statement.
The two other teachers named in the lawsuit are James Hill and John Aimers, a former president of the Monarchist League of Canada.
A former student who is part of the lawsuit said he was relieved the court documents were made public, but angered by what they contained.
"I think what hurts the most -- no, I know what hurts the most -- is the fact that people were in possession of knowledge and did nothing," the student, who did not want to be identified, told CTV Montreal.
"I'll never understand it."
The documents also reveal that in 1993, Selywn House reached an out-of-court settlement with one former student, and paid him $8,000 for therapy on condition that the agreement remained strictly confidential.
With a report by CTV Montreal's Tarah Schwartz
