New lawsuit seeks damages over abuse allegations at Sonoma Academy

Twelve female graduates of Sonoma Academy have filed suit against the school, two former teachers and two former administrators, alleging they were subjected to acts of childhood sexual assault, harassment or molestation while they attended the prestigious Santa Rosa prep school.

The 81-page suit, filed Friday in Sonoma County Superior Court by the law firm of prominent attorney Gloria Allred, is the most sweeping, detailed and explosive of three civil cases now alleging the campus and its leaders failed to protect female students from staff misconduct and abuse over nearly two decades.

It names two former teachers, Marco Morrone and Adrian Belic, who were accused of inappropriate conduct toward students that included grooming, touching and, with Belic, sexual assault.

Sonoma Academy lawsuit filed Friday in Sonoma County Superior Court by the law firm of prominent attorney Gloria Allred.pdf.

It also names two founding administrators, Janet Durgin and Ellie Dwight, along with other unspecified John and Jane Does. Durgin retired in 2020 and Dwight resigned in 2021.

The suit cites “repeated failure … to protect underage (Sonoma Academy) students from the pervasive inappropriate mental and physical abuse and sexual misconduct of certain members of its faculty and staff.”

It also accuses administrators of engaging in a “cover-up of incidents of sexual assault and sexual harassment of … female students by … faculty and male students.”

The abuse allegations became public after a Press Democrat investigation in 2021.

Much of the new case relies on findings outlined in a 49-page independent investigation paid for by the school and made public in November 2021. That report, by New York-based firm Debevoise & Plimpton, concluded Morrone had acted inappropriately with 34 students during his 18-year tenure at Sonoma Academy.

The suit puts forward new details that fill out public allegations and investigators’ findings against Belic, an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker who taught a film course at the school in 2004. School investigators found he had fostered a sexual relationship with two students.

The lawsuit names one of those women, then 15, who alleges Belic engaged in sexual acts with her at the time, when she was too young to provide legal consent.

In response to a request for comment Saturday, Sonoma Academy spokesperson Lily Thompson provided a letter from the school’s board of trustees to the campus community outlining various measures the school has taken since the release of the Debevoise report.

“The last two years have been a transformative period for our school as we fully recognized the misconduct that some members of our community experienced in their time at (Sonoma Academy),” the board stated in its letter, which was distributed on Saturday.

“While we regret that we have come to this point in this process, we remain focused on the healing of our impacted alumni and we will continue to support their recovery and healing through the Sonoma Academy therapy fund,” the board added.

The Santa Rosa Police Department said late in 2021 it was investigating several reports of suspected child sex abuse “associated with staff at Sonoma Academy.” No charges have been filed and an update on the investigation was not available Saturday.

The lawsuit represents a sharp pivot for the original group of seven women who in 2021 first publicly shared their accounts of sexual harassment and inappropriate conduct by Morrone, a popular former humanities teacher. The group, which calls itself The Athena Project, has pressed the school for greater transparency and action in response to the misconduct claims.

Since last summer, it has been in mediation talks with the school geared toward avoiding litigation. The group also sought to establish a claims process that would pay restitution for the harm suffered by Sonoma Academy abuse survivors.

In December, however, amid what the group said was stalled progress in those talks, Athena Project members announced they had decided to pursue a lawsuit. The group said Sonoma Academy attorneys were poised to assert that anyone 26 or older who had not filed a claim by Dec. 31 would be barred from doing so.

“In light of the lack of progress in our restorative justice process effort to set up a non-litigation claim process and the potential issue with the statute of limitations, we have decided to file a lawsuit against Sonoma Academy,” The Athena Project members said in a Dec. 15 announcement.

The Dec. 31 deadline was established by the California Child Victims Act, a state law that went into effect in 2020 and which temporarily gave abuse survivors the chance to bring claims that would have otherwise been barred because of the statute of limitations.

Four of the named plaintiffs in the new case — Linnet Vacha, Cleo Wilde, Savnnah Turley and Morgan Apostle — are among the original seven members of The Athena Project. Seven others are identified as Jane Does. The Press Democrat is not identifying a 12th plaintiff named in the suit because she is the victim of alleged sexual assault.

The plaintiffs are seeking compensatory, special and punitive damages to be determined at trial against the school and other defendants, as well as attorneys’ fees.

The lawsuit alone represents a significant new legal and financial threat to Sonoma Academy, which reported net assets of $104 million, including $61 million tied to land, buildings and equipment, according to tax records filed in 2021.

The private, coed high school, located on a state-of-the-art campus at the foot of Taylor Mountain in southeast Santa Rosa, marked its 20th year in operation in 2021. The school is an academic powerhouse, with most of its graduates going on to leading colleges and universities.

Annual tuition is $49,900, the highest in the county. About half of the students annually receive a total of nearly $3.9 million in financial aid, according to the school’s website.

Its 17-member board of trustees includes executives from the county's wine industry, as well as banking, law, development and education sectors. Sonoma Academy Board of Trustees Chair Chris Hanna could not be reached for comment Saturday.

Allred specializes in cases of women’s rights and discrimination and has represented a wide array of celebrity clients in high-profile cases.

Most recently she represented three victims of disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein. She also represented the family of Nicole Brown Simpson in the 1994-95 O.J. Simpson murder trial, as well as Amber Frey, the former girlfriend of Scott Peterson during his murder trial.

Allred on Saturday declined to comment on the lawsuit until she received a case number provided by the Sonoma County Superior Court.

Claims in the case against the school, its former administrators and Morrone and Belic mirror many of the revelations published by The Press Democrat and the subsequent investigation commissioned by the school.

The lawsuit details how Morrone, who also taught martial arts at the school, would take advantage of close physical contact with certain female students, often referred to on campus as “Marco’s Girls.”

“Plaintiff Jane Doe 4 specifically recalls one occasion when Defendant Morrone took her to a secluded part of the campus, ostensibly to show her how to break a choke hold. He grabbed her from behind, lifted her off the ground by placing his arm around her neck, while pressing his body against her backside,” the lawsuit states.

“She felt degraded and ashamed by what was happening and felt it was inappropriately sexual … the sexual assault was particularly traumatizing and caused plaintiff severe emotional distress,” the lawsuit adds.

Morrone would often assign explicit reading content, including Vladimir Nabakov’s acclaimed novel “Lolita,” to his “female students so that they could understand his desires, his struggles to control his sexual impulses, and to send a message,” the lawsuit alleged.

It further describes how “Morrone daily ‘groomed’ plaintiff Jane Doe 1, treating her in a way that made her uncomfortable and led some of her peers to comment that he seemed to be sexually interested in her. His eyes lingered on her body. He would ask her to stay after class, ostensibly to discuss her writing, but in reality to spend time alone with her. He would use academic-seeming situations as a pretense for inappropriate physical contact. For instance, on one occasion, he sat down next to her with the full-length of his thigh pressed against her thigh for approximately 20 minutes. He did not discontinue the contact until she moved her body away from him.”

Morrone, reached Saturday by phone and asked for comment, hung up on a Press Democrat reporter.

The lawsuit also describes in graphic detail allegations that Belic groomed and developed a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old student after his two-week run as a guest film teacher on campus in 2004.

Belic, according to the lawsuit, spent a great deal of intimate time with the student, taking her to locations off campus, including a strip club in San Francisco, a recreation area on the Marin side of the Golden Gate Bridge where they kissed.

On one occasion, Belic and the student had a sexual encounter in a hot tub of a house in Tiburon, the lawsuit states. On another occasion, Belic and the student were driving in his car in San Francisco and were seen by a Sonoma Academy teacher and Dwight, the assistant head of school.

The lawsuit states that neither Dwight nor the teacher “did anything to investigate why a Sonoma Academy teacher had a young, female student in his car miles from campus.”

Dwight could not be reached Saturday for comment. On her resignation in late 2021, Dwight apologized in a departing message to colleagues.

“Young people — and our school — have been hurt on my watch and that cannot be excused,” Dwight said. “Sorry is not strong enough.”

Belic could not be reached Saturday for comment. Durgin also could not be reached.

In June, one year after the first group of women came forward with accounts of staff misconduct at the school, several voiced their appreciation for the moves Sonoma Academy has made in the wake of the broader public revelations. Those measures included establishing a campus safety committee; a therapy fund created in partnership with RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network; and an “intensive exploration and investigation” into Sonoma Academy culture, according to the school.

But several of the women said at that time the mediation efforts had stalled. In December, the group said that inaction had led them to move forward with the lawsuit.

“We regret to share that Sonoma Academy, their insurance providers, and their legal representatives have not yet fully committed to such a process,” the Athena Project members said in a Dec. 8 announcement.

The other two civil cases pending against the school include a December 2021 suit that involved several unnamed graduates alleging staff misconduct and a class action case filed in June seeking refunds for Sonoma Academy graduates who felt they were misled about their safety.

Reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 707-521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com.