What Haunts Us

The 1979 class of Porter Gaud School in Charleston, South Carolina graduated 49 boys. Within the last 35 years, six of them have committed suicide. When Paige Goldberg Tolmach gets word that another former student from her beloved high school has killed himself, she decides to take a deep dive into her past in order to uncover the surprising truth and finally release the ghosts that haunt her hometown to this day.

It's a very old story, re-told in an uber-dramatic way by Paige Goldberg Tolmach who clearly wants to make a name for herself. In fact, she inserts herself into the story anywhere she can. It's sort of despicible.

And some of her self-accounts are suspicious. Like driving in a car on a date with an older boy wo tells her he likes to hang out at with the coach who shows him adult movies and touches him. It's a bit difficult to believe a teenager is this naive.

The guy clearly did it. He's on video admitting it. And he only got 20 years. Maybe THAT should have been the story.

I watched this documentary with open eyes. It is easy to say that in the "good old days" these predators had it easy. However, in this film, the high school is a Charleston prep school, filled with talented and often entitled children.

What happened there could happen anywhere--but it was made worse by the status of the school which was willing to hide its secrets to avoid public shame. This didn't work--the rate of suicides of men in the one class is just a leading indicator of the trauma caused by Eddie Fischer and his Citadel buddy Major Anderson. There are other indicators that are have different measures--addiction, cascading abuse perpetrated by victims, among them.

The courage and clarity of Guerry Glover stands out in this film. The director who is an alumnus and had her own story of hearing about the abuse but not reporting it, underlines the ending. This institutional abuse is made more scarring by the refusal of people to stand up and make reports.

That is the specter that haunts us all even if we have never been to Charleston, South Carolina.

Good doc about the abuses at a school but misleading in the tagline. The suicides are glossed over and barely mentioned.

The previous positive reviews have expressed it very well.

Nothing new here- decades after a serial pederast assaulted multiple victims they look back on what now looks to be odd behavior by those surrounding the case. Decades ago we lived in a much more naive ,( or much less suspicious )depending on how you look at it, world than we do today. Like the Joe Paterno case, the "retrospectascope" makes everyone who was in the same city as the perp look guilty, especially if they have good insurance.

Any a baby boomer will tell you that back in the day intergenerational friendships didn't raise eyebrows , and a man walking down the beach surrounded by children didn't raise questions . So drawing a cartoon of a man walking with kids with foreboding music overlay comes off as a comic book horror look instead of actual evidence.

The problem I have with the piece is that they don't look at it thru the lease of the time , and most of the people they interview weren't there . They are women who have dolled themselves up in their "preppy best" for their 15 minutes of fame. One is an older lady who has nothing but hearsay. Another supposedly had a friend or boyfriend that allegedly confessed to her "Eddie Fisher touches me and says it's good because it will help me when I get with girls". WHAT ? ?? I was a teen before these guys, and none of us would ever have bought into such a ridiculous rational for someone to "touch " us., and if we had, we certainly never in a million years would have told a girl about it, one who would think we were an incurable idiot for not immediately leaving the second we heard it. These were regular kids, not special needs.

It reminds me of the Dr. McDonald case where he got convicted of killing his family he said hippies had done it , and his "kill the pigs acid is groovy" contention was so laughable that he ended up behind bars. Most of the on camera people are peripheral women who were not there, or a guy who had major litigation going, and once money gets into the mix it becomes difficult to discover what actually went down.

The admin and school district have been accused of not reacting appropriately, although at that time people knew less, and were much less proactive about stopping people from re offending, because they didn't know the recidivism rates yet . Fortunately, the creep that perpetuated all this is behind bars, but instead of hearing evidence we get what sounds like hearsay accounts , or victim impact statements written by lawyers.

It would have been interesting to hear from some of the actual victims , alleged victims who defended Fisher if there were any, or defense attorneys on the other side. The jury hopefully got to hear everything, and the viewer should get exposure to the same.