Read The Best American Crime Writing 2006 for Free Online Page A

He's got a disease.The real evil isn't the Hitler.The evil is the good German. The evil is all those people who could've just picked up the goddamn telephone and stopped it."
    For Lessig, the Hardwicke case is a chance to battle the good Germans he sees as still inhabiting the Boychoir School and other, similar institutions: "I'm not trying to punish them," he says. "All I'm trying to do is get them to pick up the phone."
    But Lessig's participation in the case (and in this story) is about something more, I think.All along, Lessig has gone to great lengths to keep his parents from learning that he was working on the Hardwicke litigation-and thus confronting his abuse with them. The question, though, is how far in the dark Lessig's parents actually are.
    Lessig once told me a story about the summer after he left the Boychoir School. Hanson invited him to take a trip to the Hanson family compound in Canada. Lessig badly wanted to go. But his mother said no, and when Lessig asked why, she said,"I don't know, there's something weird about this." Lessig threw a titanic fit. "I screamed, slammed the door, walked out of the house," he said. "I came back three hours later, and we never said anything about it ever again." Lessig paused. "They knew."
    So if they knew-that is, they know-isn't keeping it from them a charade?
    "You underestimate the power of the human mind to ignore things that aren't placed right in front of you," he said. "It doesn't have to be such a successful charade to succeed in not forcing them into this deeply depressing, painful recognition of not taking steps to protect your kid."
    What has brought all this into focus for Lessig is the birth twenty months ago of his son, Willem. Lessig recalls his father's tirade when he asked to go to the Boychoir School."It wasn't until I became a father that I understood," he says. "I can't imagine sending my son away to school. I can't imagine how they could do it."
    Willem has also afforded Lessig an insight into his deliberations over whether to reveal his abuse to his parents: "I think to myself, My God, I would never want my child not to tell me something like that."
    But Lessig and his parents remained locked in a silent impasse: the parents too fearful, and perhaps too guilty, to press him about what happened; the son too angry with them to volunteer the information.When Lessig saw his mother and father at Christmas, at their home in Hilton Head, they told him they'd received a card from a friend that mentioned his latest legal adventure: We saw Larry's name in the paper, the card reported. We see he's fighting a lawsuit with that boychoir in Princeton.
    His parents inquired,What lawsuit? Lessig refused to tell them. Now he doesn't have to-and they don't have to ask. For better or worse, the impasse has finally been broken.
     
***
     
    John Heilemann is a contributing editor at New York magazine, where he writes the "Power Grid" column, and also a columnist at Business 2.0. He was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in reporting in 2001, and he is the author of Pride Before the Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era, and has been a staff writer for The New Yorker, The Economist, and Wired.He lives in Brooklyn.
     
Coda
     
    In the days following the story's publication, Lessig's e-mail inbox was flooded with hundreds of messages. Most expressed support and sympathy; others shared stories that echoed his, and sought advice about counseling or therapy. On various Web sites, Boychoir School alumni came forward with stories of their own, few of them as dark as Hardwicke's, but many troubling all the same. Meanwhile, Donald Edwards, in a letter to the Boychoir School's faculty, staff, parents, and trustees, offered for the first time a public apology to the victims of Hanson's abuse-an apology, however, that was marred by the letter's blithe conclusion."There is little any of us can do outside the legal process to address the past," Edwards