Vanity Fair: Ex-Miss Hall’s Boarding School Teacher Charged with Three Counts of Rape

Matthew Rutledge, a former longtime history teacher at Miss Hall’s School, an elite girls boarding school in western Massachusetts, was indicted on three counts of rape on Tuesday following the grand jury testimony of Melissa Fares and Hilary Simon. The two women shared their stories of Rutledge’s grooming and alleged sexual abuse in a Vanity Fair investigation last year. Rutledge has not yet entered a plea, and his attorney declined to comment on the indictment.

Fares and Simon first connected about two years ago, Simon recalled in an interview on Wednesday, and learned of each other’s experiences with Rutledge. Their allegations set off a cascade of national press coverage, but “what I want people to understand,” Simon said, “is this wasn’t just a two-year fight for us.”

“Melissa and I have been carrying this privately for two decades and publicly for the last two years,” Simon added. “And yesterday was the very first time that the criminal justice system was saying to us and to all the other survivors, ‘We see what happened, we believe you, and now we’re going to finally do something about it.’”

For Fares, the opportunity to tell her story in a courtroom offered a kind of relief. “It was heavy, but also grounding,” she said. “Being in that room, under oath, there’s a kind of precision to that setting. It’s not about convincing anyone. It’s about saying what happened, and letting that stand.”

Rutledge resigned from Miss Hall’s in 2024 after police started to investigate him. The allegations against the teacher prompted an extended reckoning at the bucolic Berkshires institution, which holds a pedigree befitting its status as the first all-girls boarding school in the state. “It was always about saving the reputation of the school when other things would happen,” one former teacher told VF last year. As reported in VF’s original story, after the allegations against him surfaced, Rutledge acknowledged to Simon that school administrators had known about his actions. “I think the school should have let me go,” he said. (Miss Hall’s previously declined to answer VF’s questions for that story, citing the investigation, and provided a statement that read, in part: “We are fully committed to learning the truth about what occurred, so that we may extend support to anyone in our community who was harmed and continue our efforts to safeguard our students today and in the future.”)

An independent report commissioned by Miss Hall’s was released last year, detailing Rutledge’s alleged pattern of sexual misconduct spanning three decades and concluding, in part, “that the School’s leadership failed to adequately investigate and respond to the reported information.” At first, in 2024, the Berkshire County district attorney announced that Rutledge would not be charged with any crimes because his accusers were 16 at the time they said he began to have sex with them—there is now a legislative push underway to change the age of consent, currently 16, in the state. Later that year, though, amid the outcry, the office appointed a team of special prosecutors to continue the investigation, which was subsequently aided by the independent report.

“It shouldn’t take a creative legal team to prosecute, as it did here,” Kristin Knuuttila, an attorney for Fares and Simon, said in an interview. “The law in Massachusetts and across the country should be crystal clear. Teachers can’t have sex with their students—period.”

Still, she thought the news of Rutledge’s indictment represented an encouraging development in the national conversation around sexual abuse at boarding schools. Fares echoed the sentiment. “Hilary and I just looked at each other, both emotional,” she recalled of her reaction, “this small, almost disbelieving smile that sort of held both things at once: the devastation of what we’d been through, and the quiet recognition that it had finally been acknowledged on a legal level.”

“It’s always painful to recount,” Simon said, “but yesterday it felt like I was finally saying it to people who could actually make a difference in what type of consequences and accountability he’s going to face.”

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