Adults in the Room: The Boy in the Photograph

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A boy had a crush on a girl from his high school. He told his mentor a science teacher who thought of ways for the boy to spend time with her.

“They drove to the woods, an hour east of Seattle under the pretense that the teacher would show”

them how to drive stick-shift in his esuzu all-wheel drive truck. After the driving lesson, the teacher insisted they go skinny dipping at a nearby lake. As the three of them stood naked, he placed his camera against the truck and set a timer. Three, two, one, click. Months later, that photo would launch an investigation.

Just not the one I was involved in. I found a mention of that naked photo when I was researching this podcast. It was included in records from an investigation into then Garfield High School Science teacher Tom Hudson. But that investigation started in 1994, which meant that district had already investigated Mr Hudson from his conduct, five years before I was a senior at Garfield.

That's when the district launched another inquiry into Mr Hudson's behavior with students,

which led to Mr Hudson's suspension, and ultimately his death by suicide.

Originally, the boy told the district the photo wasn't a big deal. But then, I received a new stack of records from the school district. Included in these records was an email written in 2019 by someone who sounded desperate. The center's name was redacted, but administrators had forwarded the email internally. Referring to the writer as a "he" and "he" wanted to review the investigation that wrapped up in 1995.

My reason is to achieve closure on that chapter in my life, which has recently caused a lot of depression and anxiety the notes said.

“I read it again, and again, could the author be the boy in the photo?”

He'd be almost 50 now. If I could identify him and track him down, I wondered what he could tell me. Did the district miss a chance to stop Tom Hudson years before he abused my classmates? For KW Public Radio in Seattle, this is adults in the room. Episode 6, The Boy in the Photograph, I'm his older aftering.

A former Garfield classmate texted me recently. Her name is Maria Coriel Martin. Back in high school, she was a member of Post-84, the outdoors club Mr. Hudson led. For years, I assumed she was upset with me for pushing the school district to investigate allegations of abuse against Mr. Hudson. But when we connected a few years ago, Maria was nothing but warm.

She wanted to share an experience she had with our former teacher when she was a junior. He'd invited some students to come on a cruise, kind of like an overnight thing, and I was like, "Well, that sounds like fun." Maria said she and three boys from Post-84 joined Mr. Hudson on his boat for the excursion. Maria and her family trusted him.

Maria's mom was close with Mr. Hudson's wife. Her brother was friends with his son, but that day on the boat, the trust evaporated. Maria told me Mr. Hudson was drinking heavily. He was also taking pills, Tylenol with coding.

But she vividly remembers what happened next.

Mr. Hudson got drunk. He started crying and getting sick. The water was choppy. Maria felt nauseous and like a caged animal.

“I remember sitting in a small cabin and having a door, we could look out and see the duck.”

I remember the sound of it vomiting overboard and looking out and seeing him pacing around. They docked a few hours from Seattle on the opposite side of Puget Sound in a town called Port Ludlow. But after a few more hours of drinking, Mr. Hudson was in no state to ferry them back home. The kids conferred and hushed voices and agreed to call 911.

I remember just tension and high emotions and just feeling deep sense of unease

and talking with the other students on board of just how we needed help or he needed help. And we made the decision to call 911 for EMS. I remember us trying to talk to him and him being like, you know, no, no, I'm fine. Don't do that. And we're just like he is not fine.

“When emergency responders arrived, Mr. Hudson was angry and defiant.”

But Maria said he eventually gave into their please. They took him to a nearby hospital and one of the kids dad's drove from Seattle to bring them home. After that, Maria kept her distance from Mr. Hudson. But the fear she felt that night stayed with her for a long time. Driving through Port Ludo until as recently as about five years ago, I'd feel nauseous. It was a deeply uncomfortable experience and I said no sense of safety.

You know, when you're just squirming in a space where there's someone really unpredictable and that someone is, you know, the responsible adult who you're what I feel that you can trust and they feel dangerous. Mr. Hudson didn't abuse Maria physically or sexually. But his actions on the boat did cause her lasting harm.

I asked Maria if anyone had ever told her Mr. Hudson had abused them and she brought up a recent conversation she'd had with her brother. So my brother is six and a half years older than me and he

had a tremendous experience with Tom Hudson and outdoor education and my had never

like had us all had conversation around her. Hey, what happened? Did you ever experience anything and he had experiences that looking in hindsight were pushing boundaries. Maria's brother's name is Carl. He graduated from Garfield in 1993, seven years before Maria and me. I wondered if he was the mystery boy in the skinny dipping photo from 1994. Maria said he wasn't, but maybe Carl and that boy overlapped at Garfield.

Would Carl talk to me I asked the next morning I got a text. Carl was happy to chat. This is Carl, Carl Martin, I can sense you recorded. Carl lives in Canada now. It wasn't long before he launched into a story about Mr. Hudson. I was over at his house and he was showing me a new jamied installment as basements and I felt like there was a coded invitation for he and I had a masturbate together. I pressed Carl on why he felt Mr. Hudson was inviting him to do this.

Carl said the teacher wasn't direct about it. He remembered there was a box of tissues on a nearby table and to Carl that insinuated something sexual, but it was all some texts and denial and it was not something I wanted to do. Carl said things didn't go further and while this sounded like an uncomfortable situation it wasn't a lot for me to go on. So I asked if Carl could recall anyone who'd been especially close with Mr. Hudson. I was thinking about the mystery boy in the photograph.

I offered more details from the school records I'd gotten. Any chance he could remember a

“name? There was a boy. Well he's now a 49 year old man, I think, but he wrote to the school”

district and I'm like trying to figure out who he is. Yeah, I think I know he's talking about. Do you know who you're going to get my year box? Okay, okay. As Carl flipped through his yearbook searching for that kid, we made small talk and then in the panda box. Oh, what's his name?

but I was ready to reach out every Jason Fox there was until I found him.

“Sound side brings you beyond the headlines with news and conversation rooted in the Pacific”

Northwest. I'm Libby Dankman every week I sit down with local journalists for sound sides front page where we give you a shortcut to understanding the latest news and cultural moments and how they affect us here in the Puget Sound region. It's all here on sound side on the radio or streaming Monday through Thursday at noon and 8 p.m. on KUW on the KUW app or wherever you get your podcasts. I found more than a dozen phone numbers for men named Jason Fox. I called and texted them all

including a number for a woman married to a Jason Fox. Another Jason Fox had a website. I sent an email to that one. I know this sounds scattershot. Some days reporting is like that, but luckily within a few

“hours I heard back from the Jason Fox with the website. I got your email, your text, and my website”

message. You found me. He said, "Hi, Dawn." "Don't pretty well." Yeah. Today Jason is a sea captain who lives in Maryland with his wife. He met Mr. Hudson as a freshman at Garfield in 1990. Jason had just moved to Seattle with his mom and her partner. Two women looking for an affordable gay

friendly city. New to the area, Jason felt the freedom to be himself. I was always more inclined

to talk to teachers about something more sophisticated, philosophical or what it would have you. I was a kid that would wear a tighta school sometimes. It was sort of presenting myself as a little bit older, more mature. Jason joined the outdoors program and said Mr. Hudson singled him out as a leader early on. He asked Jason to be his teaching assistant to help him plan trips and to feed the python that lived in an aquarium in Mr. Hudson's class, which oh my god sounded horrific to me.

If for whatever reason the snake decided it wasn't going to eat the live road and it just decided

it wasn't going to chase its students who were interested in a kind of circle of life. We

talked to give it the mercy killing so the snake will eat the... You guys have to kill the rat. Yeah, I would have to kill the rat. How would you kill the rat? Usually smash a tent at some riot, he was in hold of by the tail and spend it so it's head would essentially break it's an act. Jason shared this story matter effectively and I shuttered as he recounted it. Not because I'm squeamish. It sounded to me like Mr. Hudson was testing Jason seeing just how far

he could push this boy. Jason didn't disagree with my take but he insisted the so-called mercy killing was in the service of learning. I can almost hear him. His thoughts thinking this about like well you know someone's got to kind of mentor you're long to you know how you're going to get an adult hood if someone's not going to push your boundaries a bit. As high school went on Jason grew closer to Mr. Hudson. He ate dinner at his house and was friends with his family. Sometimes

Jason would stay the night and bite to school with his teacher in the morning. Jason describes Mr. Hudson as many of his former students do, larger than life. He became a father figure and they talked all the time. Eventually those conversations would get now in retrospect you know an appropriate we start talking about sex and talking about girls and an inappropriate way and sexwai and you know

“crude jokes. Initially I just remember being very much like you know you talked to a friend”

your teenage friend except that your teenage friend was a teacher. Mr. Hudson even bought Jason a subscription to playboy magazine which Jason rationalized as part of a typical father son relationship you know talking about the birds and the bees. But then on an outing to the woods Mr. Hudson crossed a line with him. The uh this so called bet. Ocean Mason told us about the bet in the last episode. On group trips Mr. Hudson would often make a wager with a boy. The loser had to perform

a sexually humiliating act. The loser would have to stand on a tree stump naked and sing the national anthem at full attention. So you'd be standing at attention. Is the idea would you be

not necessarily masturbating but uh inevitably having to to maintain the position of attention while

one is singing and and he would just watch. I mean he wasn't pleasure himself or anything like that. Jason said he lost these bets two or three times. I like the attention. I thought it was funny.

“I remember being like mildly uncomfortable from the sense of all right it's time to pay up it's time”

all right here we go. I check on the bet so here we are. But there was another camping trip where Mr. Hudson went further. This was a solo trip just the two of them. Jason was 16 or 17. He can't remember exactly. He and Mr. Hudson were sharing a tent. It was just the two of us and we just in a dark tent we each masturbated. Didn't touch each other. There was no assault. No physical touching. It was just the thing that happened with two people in a dark tent and like you know like

two teenage boys might do. Did he like invite you to or was it just tapping in like how did how did that come about? It was a discussion. It was not spontaneous. It was kind of like

“chaos. I think we could do. That he said that. But he initiated. It was something along the generic”

palette of hey here's a thing we could do tonight. When he returned home to Seattle Jason didn't tell anyone what happened in the tent. And aside from his wife and a therapist I'm the only person he's shared this story with. Jason said that at the time he didn't think much about those naked evenings in the woods. He didn't see himself as a victim or Mr. Hudson as an abuser. Jason graduated from Garfield in 1994. The summer before he left for the US Naval Academy in an

apolis, Maryland. He told Mr. Hudson about a girl he had a crush on. He wanted to spend more time with her so Mr. Hudson suggested the three of them drive to a mountain lake outside Seattle. After that a naked dip in the lake and then the photo which Mr. Hudson took while they were still naked. Mr. Hudson gave Jason a copy of the photo. A few months later a friend spotted the photo in Jason's bedroom. She brought it to her mom who took it to the district. The district launched an inquiry

into Mr. Hudson's behavior. By then Jason was well into his first year at the Naval Academy.

The investigator calls me back in the days of pay phones. I remember sitting on a pay phone at an appointment we made. Jason was ready for the skinny dipping question. He and the girl were 18 years old and recent graduates when the photo was taken. Mr. Hudson was no longer their teacher. Nothing

“illegal there. But he knew the question that would follow. Is there anything else I should know?”

Would Jason tell this investigator this stranger about the bets and the masturbation in the tent? He wasn't sure if that was illegal. But he knew it wasn't normal. Disclosing all that seemed like what he ought to do. What a senior officer would tell him to do. Jason won semester into military school. Was immersed in the ethics of right and wrong. But Jason realized in that moment that speaking up could destroy Mr. Hudson's career

and it could also derail his own future. This was the don't ask don't tell error. When anything that was perceived as gay or anything other than a heteronormal behavior was just treated were just basically your outcast immediately. The Naval Academy was a fresh start for Jason and he felt the investigation could threaten his status there. He made the decision while on the phone. He would stay quiet. I protected myself and just to say no I'm not I'm not going to bring this

upon myself. Jason calmly told the investigator that the photo was a stupid mistake and he had nothing else to report. End of story. The unfortunate consequence of that is that it also protected him. The district sent Mr. Hudson a written warning after their investigation into the photo ordering him

to avoid one-on-one outings with students. But it's clear that warning was never enforced.

For years Jason locked away those memories of Mr. Hudson and then in 2017 the me-to-movement happened. Jason read story after story of people sharing their experiences of abuse and something clicked.

but I didn't have a name for it. It was the Tom Hudson thing and all of a sudden I don't

“like wait a minute. I was abused. Like Jonathan and Ocean it took Jason a long time and a lot of”

work to unspool the psychological damage Mr. Hudson inflicted. He was caught in a tangle of guilt, complicity and shame. I definitely had the illusion of giving consent because it was so so gradual and so slow. You know, if one day Tom just said hey you want to go masturbate in a tent tonight. I'm like no. It's a duh. How do you ask such a thing? Jason began to see how Mr. Hudson operated by slowly violating a thousand small boundaries until he breached the bigger ones.

Mr. Hudson made Jason feel special. He provided incredible experiences in the outdoors and stepped in

as a male role model when Jason needed one, which is how grooming works. Predators first built trust so they can steadily erode the standards of what's acceptable to their victims over time. It's those moments of friendship building that are the hardest for Jason to reconcile. Did Mr. Hudson ever really care about him? He's not the only survivor grappling with that question. Mr. Hudson inspired Jason and the other kids he heard to make the outdoors central to their lives.

He taught them leadership and survival skills that they've relied on to this day.

That makes it hard for Mr. Hudson's survivors to move on from their paths.

“How can they be free of that trauma when Mr. Hudson continues to cast his shadow over them?”

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Was now on the KUW app or wherever you get your podcasts? The reporting we've done for this podcast has confirmed from me beyond it doubt what I'd suspected for years. The Tom Hudson was a predator. Full stop. But Jason Fox is far more ambivalent about Mr. Hudson than I am. There was a lot of good things that, you know, a lot of good qualities that Tom imbued in me and others about self-aliance and dependency and resilience and how to survive

in the world, especially when I go into military and just, you know, how to be compassionate and carrying so so like, now all of a sudden because I now have associated this bad thing with that, does that negate all the good? How do I figure out how to not throw away the baby with the bath water? Jason understands that Mr. Hudson was abusive and manipulative, but he believes Mr. Hudson cared about him too, which makes it easier to hold onto the good parts of his time

in the outdoor program. Adventures that made Jason a leader set him up with life-long friendships and brought him to some of the most remote and beautiful places on the planet. Jason has other questions about Mr. Hudson's impact on him. Today, Jason is an exhibitionist, meaning he likes when people watch him have sex. He's gone to sex clubs to play out this fantasy.

“Am I that way because of him? Did he impute that to me or was I way that way before I met him?”

Was it intrinsic? I don't, I can't necessarily unpack the brain of a 14, 15, 16 year old. I certainly didn't have the self-awareness before any of that, so maybe he did create that maybe he didn't. Jason said it's been healing for him to explore his king. As he sees it, you can express non-traditional sexual interests with other consenting adults without abusing anyone. Jason has also thought about the times he's manipulated people or pushed their boundaries.

Was that him or was that Mr. Hudson's influence? Now that I've kind of owned this happened, this was an experience that influenced me, what behaviors, what thoughts do I have now that are a direct consequence of that that were malformed? What do I do now that maybe emulates his behavior

And then just sort of this deep thought process of trying to extract Tom from my psyche,

“not purge him, but isolate him. Jason isn't the only Garfield alum working to untangle Mr. Hudson's”

impact. Ocean Mason no longer idealizes the post-84 days. They now think of those experiences as manifestations of Mr. Hudson's methodical grooming process, but they are still trying to reconcile Mr. Hudson's mentorship and the harm he caused. I am who I am today and I am in the world in the way I am and part do the things that he gave me and that's the part what I can't pull apart is that like they are, they are inextricably linked and it's still hard for me to see cleanly

what was mine and what was not mine. Was the good in service of the harm, you know, from him and I don't think I have an answer to that. I don't know if there is an answer to that, but I do think that there are ways to get the good without the harm that we can have

amazing teachers who trust kids to be themselves who give them adult responsibilities

“without like harming them in the process, right? I think there are ways to do that without”

violating children. Jonathan Hill the former president of post-84 told me he still carries the weight, Mr. Hudson put on him. That doesn't just go away and I still think it's inside of me a bit, just like the deep pain he felt. And then there are the girls you've heard from, Rosie Bancroft and Maria, they still protect and care for the men, Mr. Hudson abused his boys while trying to heal themselves and my best friend Ella who's talking to me, who reported the

abuse allegations against Mr. Hudson and caught hell for it. We have scars some deeper than others

that may never fully heal. I called Seattle Public Schools to interview the superintendent

for this podcast for months they didn't respond. I was eventually told nobody wanted to talk about such an old case, but for a lot of us it's not old, the aftershocks of Tom Hudson's abuses reverberate today in every part of the survivor's lives in how they love, in how they parent, and how they think of themselves and they wonder what might have been different if not for the man who prayed on them. But in this darkness there is light. Jonathan, Ocean, and Jason all

shared their stories because they want other survivors of abuse to know things can get better. They took a leap of fate, took on the risk of personal exposure, hoping that this awareness will prevent abuse from happening to others, or help those suffering from trauma,

realize they're not alone. Here's what Ocean told me about going public.

That's the piece that feels important about this, right? Like that we were each sitting in our own little worlds, maybe with like one or two other people sometimes, without having the picture, right, without having community to heal in, right, if we sit in our silos and we try to heal individually without healing the communal harm too, like I don't think we can heal all the way. It's not fair that victims have to come forward and bear their pain again for change to happen,

“but that's what most institutions demand before they act against predators.”

Too often we wait for a victim to come forward before intervening. But what if we could stop predators before they do their damage? That's next on the season finale of adults in the room. On episode 7 of adults in the room, for years, Tom Hudson's behavior alarmed students, parents, and adults at Garfield. So how did he get away with abusing the kids for so long? I think there were a lot of good teachers, but to survive a number of teachers, just closer

doors, and basically shared, it's not like problem. I'd like to believe that in the years since I graduated high school, things are better and kids are safer, but as new stories of abuse continue

more interested in varying stories of abuse than addressing the problem at all? That's coming up next.

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Brendan Sweeney, our director of marketing is Michaela Gianotti Boyle, our director of community engagement is Zeke Hamie. KUW's chief content officer is Marshall Eisen. I'm Isolder Aftery. Thank you so much for listening. Sound side brings you beyond the headlines with news and conversation rooted in the Pacific Northwest. I'm Libby Dankman, every week I sit down with local journalists for sound sides front page,

where we give you a shortcut to understanding the latest news and cultural moments and how they affect us here in the Puget Sound region. It's all here on sound side, on the radio or streaming Monday through Thursday at noon and 8 p.m. on KUW on the KUW app or wherever you get your podcasts.