With its majestic limestone facade, Saint Ann’s School is a top choice for lefty New York City power-couples to get their kids an artsy education, a shot at Ivy League colleges and careers in the arts and entertainment.
Lena Dunham, Jennifer Connelly, and Jean-Michel Basquiat are among the creatives who, as youths, passed through its ornate, wooden doorway, in Brooklyn Heights, the ritziest zip-code in the borough.
Now, the $60,000-a-year private school is mired in its latest scandal: hiring a convicted and formerly incarcerated fraudster as a teacher, who was later busted for allegedly sharing lewd messages and porn with students on social media.
What really hurts the school’s reputation is how the Vietnamese-American educator, Winston Nguyen, became some kind of purity test for Saint Ann’s progressive values and its support for immigrants, people of color, and felons.
Parents and teachers were scared to question Nguyen’s track record and odd behavior at school ‘for fear of being labeled not sufficiently progressive,’ says a scathing new report into the affair.
Some feared their kids would lose a place at one of the most exclusive and prestigious schools on the East Coast, no longer deemed a ‘good fit’ for its liberal artsy A-list crowd, says the document.
It’s too early to say whether Saint Ann’s will recover from this latest scandal — the K-12 school did not answer DailyMail.com’s requests for comment.
But it’s perhaps already clear that celebrity parents keen on admission — which have in the past included Matt Damon, Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke — may pause to think before applying today.
Winston Nguyen, pictured in court on July 25, 2024, is accused of exchanging lewd messages and porn with students at private schools
Saint Ann’s School, in Brooklyn Heights, the most expensive zip-code in the borough
Jeff Korek, a Manhattan lawyer who’s probed abuse allegations at the school in recent years, says its administrators and teachers typically follow a playbook to keep its frequent scandals under the radar.
‘Circle the ranks, circle the wagons, and less information is better than more information,’ says Korek.
The new report shows how Nguyen, 38, the child of Vietnamese immigrants, started working at the school amid a Covid-era staff shortage in mid-2020, before his background check had come through.
He told school bosses he’d been convicted of a crime, for which he served a four-month jail term in 2019.
He’d pleaded guilty to defrauding an elderly couple in his care of some $300,000. He also admitted to endangering the welfare of an incompetent or physically disabled person.
Yet school chiefs hired the well-groomed, charismatic go-getter, who’d attended a top Texas school, studied at Columbia University, and been a champion on the game show ‘Jeopardy!’
He was promoted to math teachers in 2021.
Staff allegedly ignored early warning signs about Nguyen’s erratic behavior, says the report.
The alleged child predator regularly slept overnight at the school, used gifts and food to ‘gain trust and access’ to students, and met his teen charges outside class, says the report.
The bigger problem with Nguyen was exposed on June 6, when he was arrested by police in the street near Saint Ann’s.
From late 2022 onward, a group of students at Saint Ann’s and other private schools in Brooklyn had been receiving lewd solicitations on Snapchat from what appeared to be another teen.
The user of such accounts as @HunterKristoff and @HaircutBongos encouraged girls and boys aged between 13 and 15 to share naked photos and videos of themselves.
Police had identified Nguyen as an alleged predator masquerading as an adolescent.
Prosecutors charged him with 11 felony counts, including using a child in a sexual performance, promoting a sexual performance by a child and disseminating indecent material to a minor.
One video, sent to a student who was about 14, showed a teenage boy ‘masturbating on a bed and ejaculating,’ says a criminal complaint.
Writer, director, and actress Lena Dunham, pictured here in London in September 2024, attend the Brooklyn school
So did actress Jennifer Connelly, the star of Labyrinth, A Beautiful Mind, and other movies
The report says Maureen Yusuf-Morales (pictured) advocated for Nguyen to be hired in August 2020
The school has since placed Nguyen on administrative leave and then fired him.
He is largely confined to his apartment in Harlem and is understood to be brokering a plea deal that’s set to put him behind bars for at least five years, according to The New York Times.
At the time, the school condemned Nguyen’s alleged ‘deep violation of trust.’
Saint Ann’s acknowledged its failure to ‘create an environment in which our students are safe and supported.’
Its board hired the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton to find out what went wrong.
Their 39-page report, authored by two lawyers, Helen Cantwell and Arian June, and released this month, paints a devastating portrait of Nguyen’s hiring and the ensuing crisis.
It affords much blame to three top administrators — Vincent Tompkins, the school’s head, dean of faculty Melissa Kantor, and head of the upper middle school Maureen Yusuf-Morales.
They have all since left the school.
Administrators had decided to withhold Nguyen’s criminal record from parents, to give him a ‘second chance,’ says the report.
Nguyen, and other people of color working at the school, were viewed as ‘protected,’ it adds.
Those who objected to the hiring of a convicted fraudster ‘were afraid to speak up for fear of being labeled not sufficiently progressive,’ says the report.
The parents of one student who raised concerns about Nguyen were ‘shamed for not supporting restorative justice,’ it adds.
School officials also allegedly tried to brush the catfishing of students on social media under the carpet.
For months, Nguyen allegedly messaged lewd comments to the students, using pseudonyms.
Only the affected students, their parents and a ‘small group of administrators’ knew about the filth.
Jean-Michel Basquiat received a scholarship at Saint Ann’s when he was seven-years-old because of his artwork
Nguyen stole $300,000 from Bernard and Florence Stoll. Bernard died in November 2019. Florence in November 2018
Winston Nguyen appears on an episode of Jeopardy! on July 18, 2024
The school hushed up the messages to avoid ‘unwanted attention to the catfishing victims,’ says the report.
The scandal over hiring Nguyen is just the latest in a string of controversies at Saint Ann’s.
In 2021, eighth grader Ellis Lariviere killed himself after being kicked out of the school because he was struggling academically.
The boy’s parents last year sued the school, blaming its policies for their son’s death. The school denies this.
In 2018, an administrator resigned after hosting parties for students and recent graduates at his home, where weed and booze were available.
The school in issued a report in 2019 detailing a history of faculty sexual misconduct from 1970 to 2017.
Korek, the lawyer representing Lariviere’s parents, says the Nguyen scandal makes a mockery of the school’s high-minded talk.
‘Saint Ann’s decided it was acceptable to hire someone with a criminal record who abused vulnerable people and put him into a situation among vulnerable kids — and that Ellis, a child with a great track record, was disposable,’ said Korek.
‘It makes no sense.’
