How UNC School of the Arts alumni pushed sex abuse history from shadows to the spotlight

Editor’s note: This story contains details of sexual assault allegations, which will be disturbing to some readers.

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On Feb. 16, 2021, Elizabeth Wilson typed a simple question on Facebook that launched a landmark lawsuit against this state’s most elite performing arts campus.

For years, Wilson struggled with her experiences at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where she moved to study modern dance at age 14 in 1985.

Wilson posted on a School of the Arts 1980s alumni page to get a sense if people were finally ready to talk openly about years of abuse.

“Curious about how involved NCSA’s founder, John Ehle, was throughout the years. Would he have known about the rampant abuse?” wrote Wilson, now in her 50s.

For decades, sporadic stories of adults sexually abusing teens at the UNC School the Arts haunted the renowned performing arts school.

One former student’s lawsuit, a memoir made into a Prime Video series and news reports described predatory teachers at a 78-acre campus that housed students as young as middle-schoolers to college age.

But there was no public outing that matched the length or scale of what happened at the downtown Winston-Salem campus, according to interviews with alumni who initiated the lawsuit.

Wilson’s post sparked a reckoning for the school, and for alumni themselves, many of whom had until then failed to understand that they were survivors of abuse. The conversation bloomed into some 60 alumni publicly describing harassment, exploitation and abuse.

It was settled for $12.5 million this year, with UNCSA leaders acknowledging the former students’ suffering.

“This has without a doubt been a dark time for UNCSA as we came to terms with accounts of sexual abuse, and we honor the courage it took for these alumni to share their experiences,” Chancellor Brian Cole wrote in May.

The outcome wasn’t all that alumni had hoped for. But it was more than most could have envisioned before 2021.

And it may be much more than many others fighting for accountability for abuse they lived through while growing up in North Carolina will ever see.

A shift in the conversation

Back in 2021, the 1980s alums Facebook group typically shared articles about UNCSA graduates and faculty obituaries. Members reminisced about places they drank and danced in Winston-Salem.

When Wilson posted her question, the conversation pivoted dramatically.

Nearly a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, people were connecting more virtually than face to face. And the #MeToo movement had swelled, with Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein and Larry Nassar all publicly accused of being sexual abusers.

Five months before the Facebook query, federal officials had charged Steven Shipps, a former School of the Arts music teacher, with felonies. He was accused of twice transporting a minor across state lines to sexually assault her while a professor at the University of Michigan.

Prosecutors cited interviews with four women, who said Shipps abused them while they were teenage students at the School of the Arts, The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer previously reported.

When Elizabeth Johnson, a classical ballet program alumna, read Wilson’s query, she quickly tapped out two pointed paragraphs and pressed send.

“I am still processing the **** that went down, people who have died too young, and the depression and self-loathing that clings to us still,” wrote Johnson, now 55 and an associate professor at University of Florida’s School of Theatre and Dance.

Johnson had moved from her hometown of Peoria, Illinois to a School of the Arts dorm at the age of 15 in 1984.

Dance instructors Richard Gain and Richard Kuch were the first people to touch her and others in sexual ways, which happened many times during dance classes, former students contend in the lawsuit.

“Teachers allowed themselves every access to every part of the young students’ bodies and the students were acculturated and groomed to accept this without question,” Johnson said.

As young teens, she and classmates thought they were old enough to handle the sexualized and abusive environment, trusting the professionals who were teaching and mentoring them. It would take them years to understand how wrong they were, Johnson said in an interview.

Patterns of abuse at UNCSA

As more alumni started to type out their abuse experiences, patterns became apparent, several former students said.

While a couple of School of the Arts faculty members criticized Wilson’s question, many people had tragic stories to tell, Wilson said in a recent interview. Some sent more explicit stories of abuse to Wilson privately. Wilson herself started to realize she was a survivor of sexual harassment from Kuch, she said.

“I thought, maybe we’re ready for a bigger conversation,” Wilson said.

The conversation moved from the one Facebook group to subgroups and side conversations that connected alumni decades after they shared dorms and classrooms.

Much of the outpouring centered on the overwhelming influence teachers held over students, which allowed the abuse to thrive, said Kerry Quakenbush, who moved to the School of the Arts from Burlington at around age 16.

Around 1986, a visual arts department dean invited Quakenbush to his home to model for some photographs, Quakenbush said. The 36-year-old man took photos, then sexually assaulted Quakenbush, according to the lawsuit.

Confused, the teenager left school temporarily but returned and graduated. Now an event producer for a national company, he never considered what happened to him to be abuse, until he read the lawsuit and the other incidents of UNCSA teachers luring students to their homes, he said.

“That’s when it really hit me that this was a really, really, really messed-up thing,” said Quakenbush, now 57, of Los Angeles.

Dozens come forward

Seeking justice despite the years that had passed, a handful of alumni reached out to California attorney Gloria Allred, famed for her defense of sexual abuse victims. They set up Zoom calls around June 2021 with her office.

Unknown to the former students then, a recent change to North Carolina law opened a unique two-year window for them to take their accusations public. The law, known as the SAFE Child Act, allowed individuals of any age who were abused as minors to file lawsuits against abusers and institutions that failed to protect them.

Allred’s firm reached out to Greensboro-based Lanier Law Group, which agreed to serve as North Carolina counsel, with attorneys Lisa Lanier and Bobby Jenkins leading the lawsuit filed, at first, by seven alumni in September 2021.

Fifty-eight plaintiffs signed on before the window snapped shut at the end of 2021. Dozens more volunteered to serve as witnesses.

Many had enrolled in the UNC System campus to become professional artists and be trained by teachers who were powerful in their fields.

Some got derailed by a campus culture that promoted submissive and promiscuous behavior, drug abuse and traveling from one unhealthy relationship to another, according to the lawsuit and interviews.

As a result, former students suffered from severe depression, eating disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder, some requiring hospitalizations, the lawsuit states.

The decades-long pattern of repeated abuse appalled Jenkins, he said.

“Literally going back to essentially the very founding of the new school, and hearing that it was part of the culture then, and just continued unabated for two or three decades,” Jenkins said.

Patterns of abuse

Before the window slammed shut, the many-times updated lawsuit against UNC School of the Arts accused about 40 faculty and staff of abusing or assaulting students — or failing to protect them — between 1969 and 2012.

Two teachers mentioned frequently were Kuch and Gain.

The men lived together and regularly threw parties at their Yadkin County farm, where they served alcohol and sexually assaulted young men, the lawsuit states.

But male and female students described sexual assaults by a dozen other teachers.

Some who refused advances paid a price with verbal abuse in the classroom or with not being asked to return to the school, according to the lawsuit. Many alumni said they complained to other faculty, to no avail. At least four times parents complained to school officials about abuse, the lawsuit states.

“Sometimes the students were told just to put up with it. If you’re going to be in this world, you’re going to have to deal with it,” Jenkins said.

When a 17-year-old’s mother discovered Shipps had sexually abused her, the woman reported that to the School of the Arts in 1988, says the lawsuit, which named Shipps as a defendant.

The next year Shipps moved to the University of Michigan, where he worked until he was indicted in 2021 and convicted in April 2022 of transporting a minor across state lines.

One student tried to take a stand

Christopher Soderlund tried to stand up for himself and other students decades ago. Soderlund moved from Boise, Idaho, to Winston-Salem at the age of 15 as a ballet and opera student in 1983. The following year, Kuch and Gain chose him to dance in the spring musical, Soderlund said in the recently settled lawsuit.

Gain flattered him with attention and compliments before he brought Soderlund to his home, plied him with alcohol and sexually assaulted him, the lawsuit said. It was the first of many assaults, according to the lawsuit.

Kuch, in a relationship with Gain at that time, would humiliate Soderlund in dance class, according to the lawsuit. After Gain stopped showing attention to Soderlund, he and Kuch were cruel to him and ignored him, the lawsuit states. And Soderlund was not asked back for the next school year.

Soderlund told adults, including the assistant dean of the ballet department and at least four teachers, the recent lawsuit states. The dean told Soderlund that he would like to have sex with him too, the lawsuit says.

Around 1992, Soderlund was studying and teaching the Japanese martial art Aikido in Granite Falls, Washington, he said in a recent interview. He saw his younger self in the children he was teaching, he said, and felt the cruelty he’d endured.

“I can’t believe they did it to me. This should not happen to children,” he said during an interview.

Soderlund called his mother, and they moved forward with talking with a psychiatrist who diagnosed him with PTSD caused by the school and his teachers in 1993, states the lawsuit that he filed against the school in 1995.

Kuch and Gain denied the allegations in a legal filing, but resigned from the school before a disciplinary hearing. The case prompted University of North Carolina System leaders to create a commission to investigate allegations of widespread abuse.

The first lawsuit was dismissed because it had been filed when Soderlund was older than 21, the cutoff to file child sexual abuse lawsuits at the time.

“I was devastated,” Soderlund said.

And the commission denied a pervasive pattern of improper sexual conduct between faculty and students.

A 2021 News & Observer and Charlotte Observer investigation, however, found evidence that school officials did not make public some of the most damning findings, inaccurately said that most of the accused teachers no longer worked there and took little action.

Kuch died in 2020, according to death records. Gain at the end of 2023.

Despite school officials’ promises to protect students, students continued to report instructors who degraded them, touched them sexually or groomed and harassed them from 2005 through 2011, according to the recently settled lawsuit.

A separate 2021 pending lawsuit filed by 2019 alumni contends the school mishandled their sexual harassment complaints against an opera instructor much more recently.

The cost of abuse

The most revealing pattern in the lawsuit was the cost to so many talented young people who went to Winston-Salem to work hard and learn, said Terence Steiner, who studied modern dance at UNCSA in the 1980s.

Steiner and other students say the school provided an amazing opportunity for them to leave regular public schools and flourish and learn from professional artists daily. It’s an experience that many still relish, alongside the recognition that no one protected them from the power dynamic it created.

At age 12, Steiner moved to Winston-Salem from his parent’s house in Panama City, Florida. On campus, he was regularly groped by Gain, he said, and had to constantly fight off his abusive advances.

“We still are paying a price,” said Steiner, who was one of the first plaintiffs to file suit against UNCSA.

After graduating from the School of the Arts at age 17, Steiner became a professional dancer in jobs where the abuse dynamic continued to thrive around him, he said.

He became addicted to cocaine and ecstasy and was hospitalized and diagnosed with severe depression, PTSD and agoraphobia, the lawsuit said. Mental health challenges continued, including thoughts about killing himself and repeated hospitalizations.

When the abuse conversations started on Facebook and, later, the number of plaintiffs grew, he realized it wasn’t just him. It was a relief in a way, he said, when he saw others struggle as he did.

“I just thought I was such a failure at life. And then I started reading all of these statements from other plaintiffs who I’ve never met, and they are doing the same damn thing,” Steiner said.

An imperfect ending for alumni

After dozens signed onto the lawsuit, alumni started talking about settlement amounts and eventually agreed to approve $80 million, with the understanding that they could go as low as $20 million, Steiner said, describing initial conversations.

All the pieces seemed to be falling into place for the plaintiffs, until a 2022 Zoom call. Attorneys shared concerns about a Republican majority being elected to the North Carolina Supreme Court, saying that may negatively affect the multiple challenges to the SAFE Child Act.

“We don’t feel good about anything right now,” Steiner recalls one attorney saying.

Using the SAFE Child Act window, hundreds of people filed and joined lawsuits against schools, churches, camps and many more organizations that employed teachers, coaches, priests and others accused of abusing children and teens.

Some defendants, including the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charlotte, legally challenged a cluster of cases, moves that may end many more lawsuits.

Amid the challenges, the UNCSA plaintiffs agreed to accept the UNC System’s proposed $12.5 million settlement that they expected to be named in the state budget bill released in September 2023. Steiner and others searched the hundreds of pages of the budget document, but the legislature hadn’t included the money.

It was yet another dip on the emotional roller coaster they experienced after filing the lawsuit, Steiner and others said.

In response, attorneys told the alumni plaintiffs that they planned to move forward with an aggressive courthouse strategy. That was again halted after UNC officials said they found the money and put the $12.5 million settlement back on the table, Steiner said.

That was again halted after UNC officials agreed to settle the case and pay the settlement over four years without a legislative appropriation, Jenkins said.

While not admitting fault, the school acknowledged that the plaintiffs’ allegations show a history of inexcusable sexual abuse and exploitation, Jenkins said.

UNC leaders developed the settlement with “compassion and empathy for survivors,” stressed a written statement that the UNC System and UNCSA sent The N&O.

“Regardless of the ultimate outcome of the legal challenges to the SAFE Child Act, current leadership at UNCSA and the UNC System were driven by a moral imperative to try to make amends for the failings of the past,” the statement says.

The UNC System and UNCSA agreed to pay alumni over four years, with the system covering $10 million of the settlement and the campus paying the rest.

An individual hired by the plaintiffs has reviewed the UNCSA claims to divide up the settlement money. The first payment is set to be dispatched Sept. 1.

A partial victory

When Steiner signed the settlement agreement, he was grateful, considering how hundreds of other SAFE Child Act cases had stalled, he said. But watching as attorneys negotiated over their trauma was painful, he said.

“It’s not a lot. It’s pennies on the dollar, you know, but at least it’s something,” he said of the financial outcome.

The best thing that he and others can do now is to work to protect others, Steiner said. He’s planned to move back to Winston-Salem to start a nonprofit organization to protect youth in the arts.

“That’s the only way I see making something positive come of this is to make sure the guardrails are in place,” he said.

And the many others who filed suit under the SAFE Child Act?

Justices are set to hear arguments in September about whether the SAFE Child Act’s revival window is barred by North Carolina’s constitution.

If you or someone you know is a victim of sexual assault, contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline 24/7 at 800-656-HOPE (4673) or chat online at online.rainn.org.

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Virginia Bridges covers criminal justice in the Triangle and across North Carolina for The News & Observer. Her work is produced with financial support from the nonprofit The Just Trust. The N&O maintains full editorial control of its journalism.