Stacie Love was fifteen when her high school English teacher, Brett Fisher, started showing her more attention than the others in her class. By the time of her twenty-first birthday, the two were married. Two decades later, Love looks back on that section of her life and wonders how it could have happened to her. Not Just a Terrible Story, hosted by Sydney Gladu, lets Love tell her complicated tale in her own words, as well as exploring the extraordinary number of similar stories that took place at her high school.
Though a podcast about sexual relationships between teachers and students could seem lurid, Not Just a Terrible Story is anything but sensationalist. Gladu is always sensitive in her questioning. To the show's credit, her nuanced and respectful reporting remains consistent throughout.
A major theme that emerges in her podcast is how hard Fisher's crimes, and those like them, are to prosecute. From Love's recounting, it's clear that the attention he paid to her when she was his high school student more than crossed the line, yet none of it – the gifts, the comments, the special privileges – was unlawful. And when they started officially dating, she was a legal adult. As Not Just a Terrible Story expands to discuss other cases, it's clear this kind of line-blurring behaviour is a groomer's speciality, and why they are so often able to get away with doing what they do for so long.
The other main reason, which actually ends up being even more alarming, is the complicity in the communities around them; for example, it's staggering to hear how many teachers went to Love and Fisher's wedding. Unsurprisingly, Gladu is able to get almost none of Brett's colleagues on the record.
It's very telling that the teacher she does talk to says that he wishes he'd told Love – a child at the time – to stay away from Fisher. It didn't occur to him to make any effort to stop his fully grown colleague from pursuing her.
While Love's tale gives Not Just a Terrible Story its narrative backbone, after the first two episodes Gladu starts diving into other tales of educator sexual misconduct – shockingly, all of which took place at Love's high school. Hearing Gladu doggedly detail the school’s toxic culture, it becomes clear how the community could let a story like Love and Fisher's happen.
Time and again, efforts to report on the behaviour of the groomers were quashed, or sometimes punished. On more than one occasion here, it was student gossip that finally got disciplinary procedures started. While that perhaps sets a dangerous precedent, when so many of the adults have vacated their positions of responsibility, then what choice did the students have but to protect each other?
When groomers are caught and disciplined by their schools, they still often remain at large. A frequent method of dealing with them is 'passing the trash', where schools let the teachers just transfer to another district without divulging the complaints about them. There are laws against this now in nineteen states. But only nineteen.
If there’s no criminal or disciplinarily record of their crimes, even when abusers are forced to quit teaching, they are still able to be near the vulnerable. One of the former teachers now drives an ice cream truck, and there have been sexual misconduct allegations against another at the business where he now works. Listening to these sweeping failures, sometimes it seems the whole system was set up to protect people like Fisher instead of their victims.
In Not Just A Terrible Story, Gladu deftly and compassionately marries these wider systemic failures with the personal accounts of those whose lives were upended when the ones charged with protecting them took advantage of that position of trust in such a damaging way. They can't get back the years they've lost to their trauma, but at least now their stories can be heard, and hopefully make things better for the next generation.
