Brooklyn Quaker School Janitor Raped 8-Year-Old For Months: Suit

DOWNTOWN, BROOKLYN — A prestigious Brooklyn quaker school "catastrophically" failed to protect an 8-year-old student from a janitor who repeatedly raped her in a school closet, a new lawsuit claims.

Amala Muhammed Redd, 47, filed a civil suit in Brooklyn Supreme Court on Thursday against Brooklyn Friends School, the Quaker school on 375 Pearl St. she attended from 1978 to 1990.

"I was left broken," Redd said through tears at a press conference Thursday. "The scars have been deep since that time."

The abuse began when Redd was in second grade and janitor Jesus Flores would stop by Redd's classroom with claims she was needed somewhere else, she said.

Redd's teachers allowed her to leave with Flores, who pulled her into a sports closet a few feet from the school's gym, kissed her, forced her to perform oral sex, and raped her, she said.

"An 8-year-old child that he treated as if she was his girlfriend, and nobody seemed to care," said her attorney Irwin Zalkin. "How does that happen?"

(Anna Quinn/Patch).

One of Redd's teachers eventually became suspicious of Flores' visits and stopped letting him take her out of class, but did nothing else to report his behavior, the lawsuit claims. Flores started telling Redd to leave gym class on her own and meet him in the closet, she said.

As the abuse continued, Redd started biting her lips until they bled or banging her arms against the wall to try and get out of class to avoid seeing him, she said, but teachers didn't catch on to her desperate attempts to show something was wrong.

"Here we have a prestigious private school managed by presumably intelligent and progressive people," Zalkin said. "[They] witnessed a young child being taken out of class by a janitor, trying to avoid going to gym class, acting out, and did nothing in the face of these glaring red flags of abuse."

Flores' abuse stopped when a teacher walked in on him with Redd and reported it to administrators, Redd's parents, and police, but it Flores didn't end up facing criminal charges, the lawsuit says.

That was last time Redd saw Flores, whose name she only learned decades later, she said. Her attorneys said they are still trying to find where Flores is today.

Redd tracked down her former Brooklyn Friends School teachers and administrators years ago, but said, for some, their apologies fell flat.

"There was a lot of crying," she said. "These are good people that helped raise me, but there was a grave error."

The 47-year-old is now able to pursue legal action through the recently-passed Child Victims Act, which opened one-year window in August for survivors to bring legal claims previously precluded by statutes of limitations or notice of claim requirements. The new law has spurred an onslaught of civil suits.

Zalkin said Thursday that Redd's story is unfortunately not unique.

"We've all heard of clergy child sexual abuse...but what we have to understand about child sexual abuse is that it knows no bounds," Zalkin said.

The lawsuit claims that Redd was likely not Flores' only victim, but lawyers said they cannot yet reveal more details about that claim yet. Zalkin said the attorneys also plan to look into what background checks were done before Flores was hired.

Brooklyn Friends School, where tuition costs upwards of $45,000 a year, is the sister school to quaker institutions across the nation that count Malia and Sasha Obama and other celebrities among its alumni.

The school did not immediately return a request for comment.

Redd said she hopes the lawsuit will shine a light to others who might have gone through the same thing and bring some sort of closure to the "tortuous ordeal," she said.

"I have carried this my entire life — it's like walking every day with a bag of bricks in tow," Redd said. "I'm hoping by sharing this I can finally put it down."