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CdM alumna prefers to move on from incident that gained national attention, but her mother wonders if homophobia has been quashed at the high school.
By Brianna Bailey
Karyl Ketchum and Mike Wiggins display a large portrait of their 17-year-old daughter in the hall of their Balboa Peninsula home. The photograph of blond, smiling Hail Ketchum is surrounded by theater awards their daughter has won. She earned a National Youth Theater award as part of the cast of last spring’s production of “Rent” at Corona del Mar High School. Hail played Mimi Marquez in the musical, an HIV-positive exotic dancer.
“I never thought [Hail] would be teased or harassed — she’s a poster child for Newport Beach,” Ketchum said. “But even if she was the nerdiest kid in school or showed up every day in high heels and a bikini, she wouldn’t have deserved this, nobody would.”
Hail and her parents, along with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Orange County Equality Coalition, sued the school district earlier this year, alleging that school officials did little to stop four varsity athletes from harassing Hail with homophobic and sexist taunts in a video posted on another student’s Facebook profile.
The Newport-Mesa Unified School District will provide a written apology to Hail as part of a legal settlement reached last week.
One day last January, Hail, typically outgoing and confident, came home from a Corona del Mar basketball game acting despondent and withdrawn.
Ketchum confronted Hail the next day, after she continued to behave uncharacteristically sullen. Her daughter eventually told her tearfully that three boys at her school had posted a video on the social networking website Facebook, threatening to rape and kill her. The video had been viewed by hundreds of students at the school.
The three high school boys on the tape only briefly talk about Hail on the three-minute video, but what they said disturbed Ketchum and Wiggins so much that they called their daughter’s school the next morning to meet with school administrators.
“And then you take a sniper to her forehead,” one boy says, referring to Hail according to a certified court transcript of the recording.
In graphic terms, the two other boys then go on to briefly discuss raping Hail in the back of a pickup truck and killing her.
The boys also speak in disparaging terms of gay students at their school in the video.
“It looked like what I imagine the prelude to a gang rape would be,” Wiggins said.
Wiggins and Ketchum said they complained to school officials repeatedly about the video, but those complaints fell on deaf ears.
A fourth boy told Hail “it will be the biggest mistake of your life” at school the day after her parents reported the video, they claim.
The boys, all varsity athletes, were never disciplined and continued to participate in school activities, even earning athletic awards at the school, Wiggins and Ketchum claim.
“They said ‘it was just a joke,’ I guess,” Wiggins said. “But it wasn’t a joke to us.”
Ketchum suggested to school officials the boys be made to do volunteer work with HIV patients or at a shelter for battered women.
School administrators eventually stopped taking her calls, she said.
“This was a systemic failure on every level to protect a young girl who was threatened with rape and murder,” said Tom Peterson, a board member for the Orange County Equality Coalition.
Laura Boss, a spokeswoman for the Newport-Mesa Unified School district, did not immediately respond Friday to a request for comment about Hail or the ACLU lawsuit.
The school district also has agreed to provide training on gender issues to students and staff at Corona del Mar High School and other school administrators as part of the legal settlement reached last week.
“We believe this training program will raise awareness for staff and students and will contribute to an overall positive environment at Corona del Mar High School,” Boss said in a written statement released last week.
The school district admitted to no wrongdoing as part of the settlement.
Hail is now a freshman at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, where she’s studying drama.
She issued a brief public statement her parents read at a news conference last week when details of the legal settlement were announced, but she has decided not to grant any interviews.
“She’s thriving, and really happy, but she wants to move on,” Ketchum said.
Wiggins and Ketchum both say they hope things will be different for students this school year at Corona del Mar.
“I’m afraid we’ve treated the symptom of the problem, but not the cause,” Ketchum said. “We just want to make sure that this never happens to anyone else.”
