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Priest who taught at BC High found not guilty of child rape
Kevin White was accused of assaulting a student while teaching at BC High in 2008 and 2009. His lawyer said the allegations were "fabricated."
Kevin White, a 63-year-old Jesuit priest and former teacher at Boston College High School, was found not guilty of raping a former student this week.
White was indicted last year. Prosecutors alleged he assaulted a student between 2008 and 2009 in a classroom at BC High, when the victim was 15 and White was 46.
After a two-day bench trial, Judge James Budreau issued a verdict of not guilty Monday, according to court filings.
“Yesterday, Father Kevin White was found Not Guilty of a crime that he did not commit. The evidence in the case demonstrated over and over that Fr. White was innocent. He looks forward to getting his life back after having his reputation tarnished for the last four years as a result of the complainant’s fabricated allegation,” White’s attorney, Douglas Brooks, said in a statement after the verdict.
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White’s accuser first made her allegations known in a 2020 Instagram post and then sent a letter to officials at BC High the following year. During testimony, she said that White told her not to tell anyone about the incident, and said that she did not think of it as abuse at the time, according to a reporter from The Boston Globe.
The accuser is a transgender woman who was “the perfect victim” as a gay student at the all-boys school, prosecutors said. She testified that White invited her to his classroom after school and assaulted her multiple times.
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Brooks’s argument rested on inconsistencies with the accuser’s story. There are “no testimony or documents corroborating” her recent allegations, he said.
During the trial, Brooks contended that White would have been too busy to meet with the student after school at the time because he was coaching the BC High cross-country team. He also said that White’s classroom was across from a busy faculty lounge that would have offered no privacy for any alleged assaults, per the Globe.
After the verdict, a spokesperson for Suffolk District Attorney Kevin Hayden’s office defended the decision to prosecute the case and praised the accuser.
“We always advocate to the greatest extent possible for sexual assault victims and never shy away from moving forward with tough cases. This victim deserves enormous credit for taking the stand to testify about a traumatic event in her life,” the spokesperson, Jim Borghesani, said.
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