In 2016, I found myself sitting beside football coach Jeramie Collins, waiting for a meeting with the principal at Kingston High School in New York’s mid-Hudson Valley. Through TMI Project, the true storytelling organization I co-founded, we were proposing a workshop to help football players talk openly about their lives and develop the courage to speak up in the face of violence against women and girls. While we waited, Coach Collins and I discovered we had just missed crossing paths decades earlier.
He started teaching at my high school the year after I graduated. During his first year teaching, a young woman raised her hand in health class and asked what she should do if a teacher was touching her inappropriately. Coach Collins asked her to stay after class.
He turned to his colleagues for guidance. Every one questioned her credibility and warned him against rocking the boat so early in his career. He reported the teacher anyway.
"I didn't care if I lost my job," he told me. "A young woman told me she was in danger. I couldn't keep it to myself." I could feel my own history bubbling up.
"I know who you're talking about," I told him. "Because he did that to me all four years of high school." We stared at each other in disbelief. Of all the people I could have been sitting beside, preparing to address violence against women and girls, here was the man who had stood up to the teacher who groomed me.
It started on my first day of high school. He was my homeroom teacher, a man in his early 50s, standing at the classroom door with a clipboard. I had just made it through a challenging time and entered freshman year looking visibly vulnerable.
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