Smithfield school officials say they know what happened in the boys’ locker room at the high school on Sept. 30.
But they did not share many details with the few hundred people who waited while the Smithfield School Committee met for three hours behind closed doors at a special meeting at the high school Monday night.
The committee members emerged from executive session to vote unanimously to hire the law firm of the school’s legal counsel, Sean Clough, to investigate the district’s response to the incident involving five seniors who were suspended, then un-suspended, after being accused of hazing a freshman football player and lobbing antisemitic barbs his way. Clough served six years on the School Committee, four as its chairperson.
Reports of the incident provoked outrage across social media over the past month, and drew condemnation and concerns from public officials including Gov. Dan McKee, Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos, and Sen. David Tikoian, the Democrat who represents the Smithfield in the Rhode Island Senate. U.S. Reps. Seth Magaziner and Gabe Amo also spoke up.
“When cruel and hateful actions happen in a school environment, we expect school and district leadership to conduct a thorough investigation and to take action consistent with the findings,” McKee and state education commissioner Angélica Infante-Green said in an Oct. 28 post on X.
The case is also being investigated as a civil matter by the office of Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha. The parents of the student, who has not been named, reported the incident to the AG as well as Smithfield Police.
Committee Chair Richard Iannitelli gave the audience only a brief summary of the event.
“It did take place in the boys’ locker room, football locker room, and it involved some of the students on the football team,” Committee Chair Richard Iannitelli said after the committee’s closed session with Superintendent Dawn Bartz.
“Whether you want to call it hazing, or whether you want to call it bullying or a prank or a tradition, it makes no difference. What happened to the young adult in that room should not have happened.”
Iannitelli did not label the incident “antisemitism” in his remarks. When asked why by a reporter, he said, “At this point, I’m not gonna make a comment on that.”
Sitting right in front of him, occupying the first few rows in the auditorium’s center, were Jewish community leaders. The Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island and the Sandra Bornstein Holocaust Education Center became involved with the case in early October at the invitation of Bartz.
The five seniors allegedly trapped the freshman student, who is Jewish, in a locker room bathroom before spraying at him through the door’s grate with Lysol. Simultaneously, they’re alleged to have flung antisemitic barbs at him. The claims were initially reported by WPRI-12 on Oct. 9 after the news outlet had obtained a letter from Bartz to the school community which alerted people that an investigation was ongoing. The matter was then further publicized by the Jewish Alliance, who had been contacted and informed by the parents.
Bartz joined the committee Monday, with Clough by her side. She did not speak publicly until the meeting ended around 10 p.m. to reaffirm her and the school’s commitment to the investigation and the community.
“Unfortunately, there’s been some information and facts and details around this incident that we have not been able to share due to privacy,” Bartz said.
At first, advocates were pleased when Bartz called on them after the Sept. 30 incident. The seniors received Holocaust education and were suspended on Oct. 10. But the students successfully appealed their suspension to the superintendent and were reinstated on Oct. 22, allowing the players to finish out the last five games of their high school careers.
A handful of parents, mostly mothers of football players, outside the auditorium before the meeting began, handed out a double-sided, one-page flyer authored by “many parents of past and present athletes with firsthand knowledge of the locker room environment.” The flyer asserted that the bathroom where the episode occurred has been a hazing site “for over a decade” — a habitual practice, rather than an abnormal one.
Neither side’s interpretation of the incident found full vindication in the meeting. After a more than three-hour executive session, the School Committee voted unanimously to hire the Providence law firm where Clough works, Brennan Scungio & Kresge, to conduct the probe.
Little of the committee’s lengthy executive session could be shared with the public Monday because of the AG’s investigation, Iannitelli said.
Still, Iannitell said, the night’s discussion could “try to thread the needle. Obviously an incident occurred.”
Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Iannitelli said the committee is “pretty confident as to what happened” but would probe how the district handled the incident and its aftermath, including discipline and the appeal that reversed it.
“When the investigation is done, the parts that can be released will be released,” he said.
‘What a joke!’
The five committee members left the room at 5:35 p.m., five minutes after the meeting began. Iannitelli did not reappear until around 8:13 p.m., and told the crowd the the committee was “close” to returning. He predicted another half hour before the meeting resumed in public.
In the rows of olive seats a man stood up and shouted, “What a joke!”
“You should know by now!” came another voice from the crowd.
Around 8:45 p.m., the full committee and Clough returned to the stage. Bartz returned a few minutes later but did not face the audience. She did, however, appear to take notes throughout much of the 75 minutes of public comment.
The five-minute limit for comments was not enforced. The vast majority of comments came from Jewish people who expressed their shock and displeasure with how the process had been carried out.
“Imagine he was told that there wasn’t going to be the problem of him having to see these other boys who did this to him because they were suspended,” Rabbi Jeffrey Gladstone said of the Jewish freshman student. “Imagine how he felt on the day that he got back to football practice and those boys were there.”
The rabbi excoriated Iannitelli for his reluctance to use the word “antisemitism” in his remarks: “If you can’t say the word antisemitism in addressing this crowd under these circumstances, then I would suggest we still have a problem.”
Gary Rabinowitz, who said he is a grandson of Holocaust survivors, agreed and said, “When you came out of the executive committee and how you danced around using the word antisemitism — that was really difficult to hear. That was embarrassing.”
Rabinowitz was one of the several members of the public who criticized the flyer that suggested the incident was ordinary team antics; he called it an “abomination.”
Ann Frank Goldstein, a Smithfield resident, said she hadn’t planned to speak but felt compelled by the document’s appeal to normality.
“My parents used to say, ‘Wrong is wrong, even if everyone is doing it,’” Goldstein said. “‘And right is right, even if no one is doing it.’”
‘Smithfield football family’
No parents came to the podium to speak. Occasionally, their commentary erupted from the seats, with the shouts correlated to sections of the audience decked out in Smithfield’s scholastic palette of green.
The paper distributed by parents outside the auditorium contained many more protestations. One side of the paper had statements rendered as all-caps word art, proclaiming “FACTS BEFORE HEADLINES” or “HEARSAY ISN’T EVIDENCE.” The other side of the paper, also all-caps, sported a bulleted list of “the facts,” and forcefully rejected the notion the “Smithfield football family” was antisemitic or prejudiced in any way.
It also stated: “PAST AND PRESENT ATHLETES REPORT BEING BLOCKED IN THE BATHROOM FOR ALL FOUR YEARS OF THEIR ATTENDANCE, REGARDLESS OF THEIR ATHLETIC ABILITY, RACE, RELIGION, OR PERCEIVED POPULARITY,” adding that the behavior is not condoned and alleges that the school principal has since removed the door from the bathroom.
The speaker who defended the seniors most fiercely was Dr. Andrew Bostom, who is Jewish and an Islam-critical scholar of antisemitism.
“No more locker room antics, please,” he said. “But I am far more concerned that we be completely accurate before leveling charges of quote-unquote targeted antisemitic slurs at 17 year-old man-children football players.”
Bostom continued: “A month after the alleged incident, not a shred of hard evidence — video, audio — in this age of ubiquitous recording devices, has been produced to prove the claim that…antisemitic slurs were hurled during the stupid locker room antics.”
Bostom’s comments elicited a few cheers from people in the crowd. Sitting next to Bostom was Gregory Piccirilli, an attorney who said he is representing the families of the accused football players. A nine-minute video posted to X Monday night by Bostom showcases Piccirilli’s conversation with two broadcast reporters in the school’s hallway.
In the video, Piccirilli denied any antisemitic motive and repeatedly described the episode as typical locker room or as “camaraderie” and “team building.”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to call it hazing,” Piccirilli said, adding that the incident lasted maybe 90 seconds. Meanwhile, he said that when one of the seniors was a freshman, he “had been locked in a bathroom for 45 minutes.”
Piccirilli did not respond to a request for a follow-up comment on Tuesday. His comments to reporters on Monday conveyed his belief that the incident had turned into a spectacle. He refused to characterize the incident as bullying because he did not find it germane.
“We’re here because of the charges of antisemitism,” he said to reporters. “You’re not here because of bullying, are you? No.”
Piccirilli argued that the Jewish student — “the young boy who was a victim, if you want to call him that” — needs his privacy protected, too.
“These are young boys, and their lives are going to be potentially out there publicly, and it’s going to impact them all for the rest of their lives,” Piccirilli said. “This should be done privately.”
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
