Former students allege psychological, physical and sexual manhandle at Ont. Christian school
Published Saturday, February 6, two thousand sixteen 7:00AM EST
Last Updated Saturday, December Ten, two thousand sixteen 9:17PM EST
BROCKVILLE, ONT – The school yearbooks and glossy brochures all display photos of beaming students getting a good Christian education. And in promotional movies, student after student offers up glowing testimonials, especially about their teachers.
According to the brochures, students attending Grenville Christian College would find academic excellence. Sports. And the Arts. “Educating the entire person in figure, mind and spirit.”
But a CTV W5 investigation has found that Grenville, once an elite private boarding school on the banks of the St. Lawrence Sea, has a dark past.
For hundreds of former students, the school, which now sits empty having closed its doors in 2007, is a place haunted with painful memories.
W5 spoke with several alumni who recounted disturbing stories about their years at the school and the manhandles they suffered – allegations of physical, sexual and psychological manhandle during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.
Mark Vincent attended Grenville in the ’70s. “Probably the worst memory, they strike the crap out of me with a desk top to the point where I couldn’t stand, because God told them to do it to me.”
Standing at the edge of the property, Jacqueline Thomas could scarcely look up at the sprawling campus. She was a student in the ’90s. “This is the very first time I’ve been here in twenty two years. I’m attempting truly hard not to sob. But I feel sick. I’m horrified.”
With a Grenville brochure in arm, Andrew Hale-Byrne recalled his family’s search for a school and thinking they’d found a place like the finest boarding schools in his native United Kingdom.
“My mother commented that it looked better than most country clubs she’d seen. It was beautiful. It was actually breathtaking,” Andrew said.
But soon after arriving at the school, he witnessed first-hand the dark side.
“One thing that stuck out in my mind and I found this particularly disturbing from the very very first moment I witnessed it was the public humiliations in the chapel and the dining room where they (the headmaster and teachers) would haul a student onto the stage and that person would be ripped apart, abjected, shamed in front of the entire student bod.”
What Andrew found troubling was that the brochure promised “love and Christian training,” but, he says, they got neither.
“They took Christianity which is a religion of love which was my practice of growing up Anglican and they inverted it into a cult of hate.”
“I was told that in order to be loved by God I had to pass through the light and that involved going through what they called a ‘light session’ which is one of these public humiliations. And you had to die to self they said in order to be loved by God, and that involved hating yourself,” Andrew explained.
“After two years of being there I came to believe that I was garbage, filth, trash. We were told ‘God hates you. God doesn’t love you. You’re damned.’ And I came to just normalize this.”
Andrew has written a book about his practices, which is available online.
Dan Michielsen entered Grenville in one thousand nine hundred eighty five in grade Ten. He described himself as a blessed go fortunate 15-year-old but all that switched within a duo of weeks with a rude awakening.
Dan recalled being dragged out of bed along with other boys in the dormitory in the middle of the night by staff. “Lights would be turned on and we were berated and screamed at for being sinful boys.”
Sinful boys, but the chicks were singled out by headmaster Charles Farnsworth and other staff for far more degrading attacks simply because they were female.
Sheila Coons recalled the headmaster observing her as the Satan incarnate.
“He would say that I had a satan inspired bod and that I was tempting dudes by my demon inspired figure. He compared me to Lucifer because at the time I was blonde and Lucifer evidently had blonde hair.”
According to Sheila and confirmed by other former students W5 interviewed, Farnsworth often accused ladies of inviting sexual attention.
“Father Farnworth took me into the Vestry and told me that I was a whore and I looked like a whore and I had truly no alternative in life but to be a whore,” Sheila said.
“We were told that women are responsible for anything sexual, for turning guys on, turning boys on, that studs just looked at us as chunks of meat. And if a woman got raped that was her fault. She was a temptress as Eve was a temptress, as Jezebel was a temptress and then the list goes on.”
Farnworth’s tirades about women may have hidden his own fervor.
“He would call me up to his office frequently, take me out of class and tell me what an awful, sinful creature I was.
“On this one occasion he stood up, pressed his assets against mine. He said, ‘you smell good’ and he clenched me to him and he put his mouth on my neck and tongued it and he pressed his hips up against mine.
“At the time I thought he was obsessed with me. I found out later that he was doing it to other chicks as well.”
Today, these students are grown up but they still feel the anguish, and are now part of a $200-million lawsuit – a class act – on behalf of hundreds of former boarding school students, claiming systemic manhandle and bizarre religious practices at the forearms of Grenville staff, especially Father Charles Farnsworth.
Farnsworth’s version of what went on at Grenville may never be fully known. He died in March 2015. But former students had already launched their class activity against the school by this time.
Farnsworth came to the school in one thousand nine hundred seventy two and by one thousand nine hundred eighty three he was named headmaster, a position he held for the next fourteen years. What students likely didn’t know back then was that he and other staff members were disciples of an American group called the Community of Jesus based in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Reports by U.S. news media beginning in the 1980s described the group as a cult which practiced communal living and extreme rituals, particularly when it came to disciplining each other.
As a devout follower, Farnsworth applied the teachings of the Community of Jesus at Grenville on unaware students.
Before his death, Farnsworth wrote about the allegations in a document obtained by W5. “The entire reason for being in our mission was to bring these people into the sphere of the Christ ….”
Farnsworth added: ‘We have been accused of many things that I never knew of and never heard of … But I honestly think some of the people have gone delusional. Some of the things they said happened, some of the accusations of sexual manhandle by me, they just didn’t happen.”
Many former Grenville staff also passionately deny the allegations put forward in the lawsuit.
However, Joan Childs, a former teacher and administrator at the school, as well as a follower of the Community of Jesus and one of Farnsworth’s inward circle, told W5 that the students are telling the truth.
“They aren’t exaggerating. They aren’t making these things up. As sad as it is, these things happened.”
She has apologized for what was done to students at the school while she was there.
Victor Malarek is an investigative reporter with W5. His documentary In the Name of God can be seen on CTV’s W5 Saturday at seven pm.