A former Los Angeles Unified science teacher who is accused in a lawsuit of sexually molesting a Hollywood school student in the 1980s says that a principal at a previous campus where he worked encouraged teachers in the late 1960s to take students to the teachers’ homes.
“This is a requirement and we were urged to do this by the principal,” Rodolphe Demordaigle said in a pretrial deposition while answering questions of his memories at the East Los Angeles School. “And we weren’t held back from the students in any way at all.”
Demordaigle said the rules at LAUSD did not change until a dozen or so years later.
“It was the issue with the priests,” Demordaigle said. “There was the issue with the preschool in Manhattan Beach where the children were making accusations of the teachers, and eventually it was all found to be false.”
Demordaigle is presumably referring to longtime claims of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, as well as the notorious McMartin Preschool case in 1980s.
Demordaigle also testified he did not receive any training about childhood sexual abuse nor was he given any bulletins regarding the subject. His testimony was included in the plaintiff’s court papers filed in opposition to an LAUSD motion to dismiss plaintiff R.V.’s case in a hearing scheduled Oct. 23.
R.V. alleges in his Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit that Demordaigle, his science teacher at Le Conte Middle School, had monthly dinner visits with R.V. and other students at his home. In 1983, Demordaigle took R.V. and another student to the mountains to collect rocks, then directed R.V. to engage in mutual inappropriate touching later at the teacher’s home, the suit alleges.
The ensuing Monday, R.V. returned to school, where the head counselor told R.V. to never go anywhere in a vehicle with Demordaigle again, according to the suit, which further states that other pupils, in reference to Demordaigle, would call the teacher a “creepy weirdo” who “particularly favored Spanish children.”
The school’s head counselor and vice principal later began sitting in and monitoring Demordaigle’s classes, the suit states. However, Demordaigle still managed to molest R.V. up to 12 more times in his classroom, even while other students and a teacher’s assistant were present, the suit alleges.
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Demordaigle pleaded guilty to child molestation in 1997 while still employed by the LAUSD, and he was permitted to go to a high school for about four months to set up lessons for substitute teachers, according to the suit, which states that Demordaigle said “there must have been touching, but definitely nothing like sodomy.”
Demordaigle was allowed to retire at age 55 with a pension, the suit filed in November 2021 states.
In their court papers, LAUSD attorneys maintain the district had no reason to be suspicious of Demordaigle’s alleged student abuses and that the district should not be immune from liability for misconduct that may have occurred off-campus and/or beyond school hours.