A Case Study in How to Review an Independent Investigation Report
Any time an independent investigation finds wrongdoing, the alleged perpetrator will be upset. They often file lawsuits against the investigator or the youth organization or both. A story about a recent lawsuit from California illustrates the pitfalls of not asking enough questions in an investigation and why youth organizations should never simply accept investigative findings without asking hard questions.
The lawsuit stems from a 2022 investigation of a teacher at Oakland School for the Arts (“OSA”). A former student accused the teacher of engaging in a sexual relationship with her beginning when she was 14, nearly two decades earlier. The school hired an independent investigator, which found the allegations more likely true than not. The school fired the teacher, and prosecutors charged him criminally.
By last year in 2025, the case had fallen apart. In March 2025, the Alameda County District Attorney dismissed the criminal charge against the teacher, citing insufficient evidence. The accuser also dropped the civil lawsuit that she personally filed against the teacher. Before then, OSA settled the accuser’s lawsuit against it for $1.1 million.
Recently, the teacher filed his own lawsuit seeking at least $4 million from OSA, alleging the school-commissioned investigation contained serious errors and omitted key evidence that would have contradicted the findings. In February 2025, he sued the investigative firm that conducted the inquiry, making the same allegations.
At this point, all we have is the allegations from the lawsuit that remain to be proven in court. The accuser continues to maintain her claims, and the civil settlement she received from the school — $1.1 million — reflects the school’s assessment of its own exposure. The newspaper report linked above is sympathetic to the teacher’s claims, citing review of police files and witness statements, as well as evidence that the teacher and his criminal defense team collected. The investigation firm declined to the newspaper. However, if the allegations in the lawsuit and the newspaper’s summary of evidence prove to be accurate, we have a cautionary tale about a youth organization that didn’t ask enough questions about an investigative report before acting on its findings.
Alleged Missing Evidence
The core of the lawsuits and newspaper report is that investigators accepted the victim’s allegations without doing enough to corroborate or disprove them. According to the Chronicle’s review of court records and the allegations in the lawsuits, investigators found no corroboration of the sexual relationship the victim described. There were no intimate communications between her and the teacher. No friends she confided in at the time came forward to confirm the relationship. Her high school diary contained no entries about the teacher or an alleged affair. Years of therapy records contained no mention of him. And the email record between the teacher and the victim — 108 emails over her time at OSA, half sent to all students, none after 7:15 p.m., none sexual in nature — was not consistent with the victim’s account of daily, often late-night communication.
The absence of corroboration, in and of itself, is a common, although not insurmountable, problem in investigations of this nature. But according to the lawsuits, investigators did not pursue the corroboration that the victim herself said existed — specifically, the best friend she told police would confirm how “weird” and “gross” the relationship was. When that friend was interviewed, he reportedly told police he had never seen anything inappropriate, and said he was surprised by the case. This information, according to the lawsuit, was not reflected report’s findings in a way that meaningfully tested the credibility of the victim’s account.
A thorough investigation follows the evidence wherever it leads — including when it leads away from the initial allegation. The question every organization must ask of any investigation report it receives is not only “What evidence supports the finding?” but “What evidence did the investigators seek to challenge it, and what did that evidence show?”
Alleged Missing Follow-Up Questions
The specific investigative gaps that the lawsuits allege are instructive precisely because they represent the kind of follow-up questions that a careful investigator — or a careful organization reviewing an investigator’s report — should raise. For example, the victim described a specific geography: the teacher’s taking her to his apartment near Zachary’s Chicago Pizza in Rockridge for sexual encounters. According to the newspaper, records show the teacher lived more than four miles from the only Zachary’s location that existed at the time. This was a verifiable fact, but apparently no one verified it before OAS fired the teacher.
The victim described sexual encounters in what she said was a reading corner of the class classroom — a canopied area with lounge pillows. The teacher says this corner never existed and would have violated fire regulations. According to the lawsuit, any number of people who had been in that classroom could have confirmed or denied the description, but no one ever asked that question.
The victim told investigators the teacher communicated with her by phone almost every day, with the calls generating significant charges on her family’s phone bill. But according to the lawsuit, no one confirmed that the number on the bill was the teacher’s. And an email exchange included in the investigative report itself showed the teacher’s expressing surprise upon learning the victim had a cellphone — which the lawsuit argues he would not have done if they had been talking by phone daily.
Perhaps most significant is evidence the investigators never sought or reviewed. The lawsuits allege that investigators failed to request all of the victim’s emails from OSA’s records. When the defense team obtained those emails, they discovered nearly 190 emails between the then-14-year-old victim and a 31-year-old security guard from her former middle school. According to the lawsuit, these emails contained sexual content and references to late-night phone calls — including messages asking her to delete communications, counting down until she would be 18, and referencing what the guard described as their inexplicable feelings for each other. OSA turned these emails over to the teacher’s legal team in December 2024, under court order, nearly three years after his firing.
Critically, the lawsuit also alleges that investigators failed to obtain text messages between the victim and the friend who first reported the claims to police. According to the lawsuit, in those messages — sent in the week before she made the allegations against the teacher — the victim wrote that she hadn’t been eating, was consuming 20 laxatives a day (which the lawsuit says inhibited the lithium she was taking to control mania), and was “disassociating” and had “lost my grip on reality.” Investigators also allegedly failed to adequately investigate Doe’s documented history of mental illness, including hallucinations while at OSA, two years in a secure facility during high school, and hospitalizations throughout adulthood.
Again: these are allegations in a lawsuit, not established facts. And a victim’s mental health problems can just as easily be a symptom of abuse as a reason to doubt his or her credibility. But the allegations illustrate the danger of gathering evidence to confirm an allegation without sufficiently pursuing evidence that could complicate or contradict it.
The School’s Potential Failure: Accepting the Report Without Analysis
The teacher’s lawsuit alleges that the school “rushed the investigation while ignoring inconsistencies” and his accuser’s documented struggles. The complaint against the investigative firm alleges that the firm omitted key evidence from its findings. If court proceedings confirm those allegations, they illuminate a failure that is entirely distinct from the investigators’ conduct — the failure of OSA itself to engage critically with what it received.
When OSA received the investigative report, the school moved to immediate termination. “[The teacher] was terminated based on the findings of that third-party investigation,” its spokesperson has stated. That is not a defense of a sound process. That is a description of an organization that outsourced its judgment and accepted the result without analysis.
Here is what critical engagement with an investigative report looks like in practice, and what OSA apparently did not do.
A responsible organization asks the investigators to walk through what evidence they sought and didn’t find. If the accuser told investigators that her best friend would corroborate the relationship, and the best friend told police he saw nothing inappropriate, that discrepancy demands examination. Did the report address the discrepancy? If not, why not?
A responsible organization asks what evidence the investigators reviewed from the organization’s own records. OSA had Doe’s emails in its possession. A question as simple as “Did you review all of Doe’s email records from her time at the school?” would have opened a line of inquiry that might have dramatically changed the picture. Or it might not have changed anything. Either way, OSA needed to know whether investigators had factored that evidence into its conclusion.
A responsible organization asks what the investigators did not pursue, and why. “We did not insist on certain topics or details, given the evident emotional impact the interview had on her,” the report alleged stated about its interview with Doe. That sentence should have prompted a follow-up conversation between the school and the investigators: What topics did they not pursue? What details did they not explore? What would you have asked, and might you have obtained, if you had pressed further?
It is always difficult to pursue emotional topics with anyone who has made these sort of allegations. There are ways to broach those topics, however, without further traumatizing victims. If those avenues don’t work, then investigators at least need to quantify which areas they did not explore. Was it details of the abuse that were not relevant? Or was it corroborating facts that the investigators could have tested? The investigation does not need to be adversarial and it definitely needs to be sensitive. The report, however, needs to thoroughly explain whatever limitations it faced.
The Damage Runs in Both Directions
The instinct to simply accept an investigative report — especially one finding misconduct — often comes from a fear of appearing to minimize abuse or side with an accused person. That instinct is understandable. It is also dangerous, because flawed investigations harm everyone.
The teacher described the four years since his firing as an erasure. “It was an erasure of 17 years and every positive memory a student might have had of me,” he told the Chronicle. He remains unemployed, his teaching credential under threat, his arrest still on his record. His legal fees have run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He is, in his own words, “in a position of having to prove a negative.” A colleague described the moment of accusation as “like touching the third rail on BART — you’re just like dead.”
And the damage to the victim is no less real. She appeared in court the day the criminal case was dropped and told the court: “This has been the worst three years of my life.” She described the experience — being taken through years of criminal proceedings in a case she had not wanted prosecuted — as “like getting tied to the back of a truck and getting dragged through gravel.” Whatever the truth of the underlying events, a young woman who was already navigating serious mental health challenges was subjected to years of investigations and legal proceedings that she described as devastating.
What This Means for Your Organization
Youth organizations of every kind face serious allegations and must respond to them. When that response involves engaging an outside investigator, you must treat the investigative work as the beginning of your organization’s analysis, not the end of it.
Before you act on an investigative report, your leadership should be able to answer the following questions. What evidence did the investigators seek to corroborate the allegation, and was it found? What evidence did they seek that might contradict or complicate the allegation, and what did it show? Did they test any specific, verifiable factual claims in the accuser’s account against available records — geography, communications, scheduling, institutional procedures? Did they review all available organizational records? Did they interview the people the accuser said would support her account and if so what did they find? What was the investigators’ own level of confidence in the finding, and where did they acknowledge uncertainty?
If your investigative report does not clearly answer these questions, ask the investigators to answer them before you take irreversible action. You do not need to conduct your own parallel investigation. You need to ask the people you hired to explain their work.
This process is not about protecting accused individuals at the expense of those who may have been harmed. It is about recognizing that a less-than-thorough investigation harms everyone. It harms the institution that acts on incomplete findings. It harms the accused person who loses a career based on an unchallenged report. And it harms the person making the allegation, who deserves a process rigorous enough that its findings — in either direction — can actually be trusted. Without a trustworthy report, you run the risk of harming everyone involved in the process.
