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Katherine Roberts said that when she was an 11-year-old Harvest Park Middle School student more than two decades ago, all she wanted to do was practice gymnastics and spend her time at school — away from the stresses of home.
“My parents were going through a nasty divorce,” Roberts told the Weekly in an interview on Tuesday. “So I spent my time at school looking for a parent figure, looking for a mentor.”
That’s when she said she and her friends started spending time during lunch with Stephen Briggs, her math teacher at the time.
“I didn’t really feel too safe at home — it was really a destructive environment,” Roberts said. “I got an affinity for being able to feel safe and hang out in this classroom.”
But as time passed, she said that Briggs, who was in his late-20s at the time and a teacher at Pleasanton Unified School District from 1997 until 2003, started making her feel more and more uncomfortable.
At first, she dismissed any negative implications because of how highly she thought of Briggs given that she saw him as her mentor.
But the now-35-year-old said that Briggs wasn’t her mentor — she alleges that he was just grooming her so that he could rape her in a hotel room during a school-sponsored Disneyland trip. And Roberts now contends PUSD should have done more to protect her, filing a lawsuit at the end of last year alleging negligence, violation of civil rights and other civil charges for the abuse she suffered some 23 years ago.
When questioned about the lawsuit this week, PUSD director of communications Patrick Gannon told the Weekly, “The District is unable to comment on pending litigation.”
Briggs was arrested in 2003 and ultimately convicted of two counts of statutory rape in 2004 for a case involving another Pleasanton student. Attempts to locate Briggs or clarify his whereabouts for comment about the allegations in the lawsuit were unsuccessful this week.
“I was alone in my room for a small period of time,” Roberts said. “I don’t know how he knew I was alone … and so he came into the room and basically told me to be quiet, not say a word. Then he molested and raped me and threatened that if I ever did say anything, it would look like it was my fault and nobody would believe me.”
And because Roberts said she believed her teacher’s threat, that’s what she did for 23 years — she never said anything about and basically deleted the memory.
But Roberts said that her sister saw a change in Roberts ever since that day.
“When I was in sixth grade, she knew something had happened to me,” Roberts said regarding her sister. “She knew I turned into a different person. After it happened, I became very secretive. I became very shy.”
Then, her sister found out that in 2003 another 15-year-old girl who had attended Harvest Park came forward and reported to authorities that Briggs had molested and raped her as well.
Briggs was criminally prosecuted but accepted a plea deal before trial, admitting to two counts of statutory rape in exchange for the nine other felony counts being dropped and no jail time, according to an article from the Weekly in July 2004. He received five years probation and had to surrender his California teaching credential.
Despite the guilty plea in court, Briggs — a married father of two young children at the time — maintained his innocence but wanted to avoid the embarrassment of a trial for his family, his lawyer said in 2004.
“The ‘Alford’ plea is a statement to the court that although he is not guilty of the charges, he entered the guilty plea freely and voluntarily in an effort to spare his family further grief and to avoid the potential for negative consequences,” defense attorney Elizabeth Grossman said on behalf of her then-client in 2004 – referring to precedent set by the U.S. Supreme Court 1970 case of North Carolina vs. Alford.
“One of the tragedies of this whole case is he was an extremely gifted and generous teacher,” Grossman told the Weekly in 2004. “It’s a great loss.”
After she saw news coverage of Briggs’ arrest, Roberts said she broke down and told her sister everything.
“I couldn’t hold it back anymore,” Roberts said. “I don’t know how I did for so long but it just kind of came out without me thinking about it.”
But rather than filing a lawsuit against Briggs, Roberts and her attorney, Jessica Dayton, wanted to take a different approach to get justice — go after the institution.
And that’s what they did when they filed a lawsuit seeking damages against the PUSD on Dec. 30, accusing the district of negligence; negligent hiring, retention and supervision; child sexual abuse; sexual harassment; violating her civil rights; and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
One of the main reasons Roberts was able to file this lawsuit was Assembly Bill 218, a law that was signed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown in 2019 that extended the statute of limitations for child sexual assault crimes.
The new law allowed victims to file civil lawsuits within three years of the date they discover their psychological injuries were caused by sexual abuse — the deadline for that window closed on Dec. 31, 2022, regardless of the age of the victim or how long ago the assault took place.
“The criminal process took care of — or was designed to take care of — the criminal aspect of what Briggs did,” said Dayton, who primarily represents victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.
“But now, victims have a chance to hold the school accountable for what they did and what they did was allow this abuse to happen,” Dayton added. “They fostered an environment where it was ripe to happen and then they actively, in this case, had someone come forward and they actively turned a blind eye to it. So that is the purpose of this case.”
The blind eye situation the attorney referred to was when Roberts first began feeling uncomfortable with Briggs before the school Disneyland trip in March 2000.
In the lawsuit, Roberts states that she went to her principal at the time, Jim Hansen, to report Briggs’ inappropriate conduct. Roberts claims that before he raped her, Briggs would often find different ways to touch her by “accidentally brushing against her and touching her body or touching her hair.”
“(Briggs) was the all-star teacher,” she said. “He had built himself a reputation for being the cool teacher … and when I expressed myself, I was basically completely shot down and told perhaps I was over-exaggerating, or that he was really just a nice guy and it wasn’t intended to be harmful.”
Roberts said that with her speaking out she hopes more women will come out and share their stories — which has already happened with one former student since Roberts’ lawsuit became public, Kristin Florian.
Florian told the Weekly she was the 15-year-old who originally spoke out against Briggs in 2003, which led him to being convicted and fired from the school.
Another athlete who played soccer at the time and also spent lunchtime at Briggs’ class, Florian said her experiences were almost identical to Roberts, except for when she said Briggs would take her for lunch off campus and would even show up to some of her soccer games on the weekend.
“I never reached out to anyone though, during that time,” Florian said, mentioning that she didn’t go to the principal like Roberts reportedly did. “I had a similar experience of (Briggs) saying that no one would believe me.”
But when Florian confided in an adult during her sophomore year of high school who told her parents and got the ball rolling on criminally prosecuting Briggs, she thought that was the end of it.
It wasn’t until last year that Roberts’ sister somehow found out that the person being referenced in the 2004 articles on Briggs’ conviction was Florian — Florian was underage at the time, which is why her name wasn’t mentioned publicly.
And while at first Florian said she was confused as to why Roberts’ legal team was pushing to sue the district rather than go after Briggs again, given his rather lenient punishment, she began understanding why she needed to support the case.
“I’ve thought that I was the only person that this happened to for 20 years now,” Florian said. “Then (Roberts) comes forward and especially with it happening at the same time my thought is, we can’t be the only people. So I also just want to really encourage and just make a really safe space for anyone who feels like they want to come forward … to start that healing process for them.”
Dayton added to that saying that she sees the lawsuit as an opportunity to not only hold educational institutions accountable in how they respond to possible victims of sexual misconduct, but it’s also a way to educate people about the dangers of child grooming.
“This is two stories and they were mirrors of each other and that should not have gone unnoticed,” she said. “So the way to make an impact, the way to affect change, the way to tell these victims, and the likely other victims, that what happened to them was wrong and didn’t need to happen and shouldn’t have happened is through a lawsuit against the system as opposed to the individual.”
According to court documents from the district’s defense attorneys, the district is challenging the lawsuit by filing what is known as a demurrer, which aims to dismiss the case by questioning the constitutionality of the three-year statute of limitations window granted under AB 218. The bill, passed in 2019, increased the amount of time victims of childhood sexual abuse have to file a lawsuit.
According to Dayton, she has seen these types of challenges before and said that “it’s a game that defenses have tried multiple other times and never succeeded with, but it’s a hoop that we need to jump through.”
“I just literally was in court yesterday arguing it in another case that happens to have the same opposing counsel, and they tried it in another case,” she said. “Thousands of survivors have filed lawsuits under this window, under this opportunity to file and no court has found the law to be unconstitutional.”
The hearing for the district’s demurrer will be on July 12, Dayton said.
