American School in Japan Apologizes for Ignoring Sex Abuse survivors
The international day school located in the Tokyo area said in a statement that its administrators repeatedly turned away sex abuse survivors, The Japan Times reported on Friday.
“Survivors attempted many times to expose abuse, and we are ashamed to report that they were rebuffed or ignored by the school,” the school’s board of directors said in a statement to alumni.
“We failed you and we should have done more.”
In a publicly released statement on Friday, the school said it sent three representatives to Portland, Oregon from May 31 to June 3, so they could listen to the Moyer survivors’ accounts.
The school said the accounts are to be published in an independent report submitted by Ropes and Gray, a Boston-based law firm that was tasked with conducting the independent investigation.
According to The Japan Times, Moyer is suspected to have abused and raped at least 32 girls affiliated with The American School in Japan.
Moyer’s pedophilia and subsequent abuse of children at the school continued between 1962 and 1984.
It was unclear whether the school turned a blind eye on the abuse during his term of employment, or in the decades that followed, when Moyer stayed on as a consultant at the school until 2000.
Moyer committed suicide in 2004.
