The ‘Vague, Horrific Accusation’ That Ruined a Teacher’s Life. Plus. . .

It’s Friday, October 16. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Unpacking the charges against the radical trust fund baby Fergie Chambers. Is dealing with the government about to get even worse? Why is a 2000s pop star feuding with a Brooklyn toy shop over a very expensive bird robot? And much more.

But first: Is any man safe from “Jane Doe”?

Jeremy Taylor worked at Oakland School for the Arts for nearly two decades when the call came. It was the principal, telling him he was being suspended.

Taylor was called for an interview with an investigations company hired by the school. He’d been accused of having sex with a woman when she was a student of his nearly two decades prior.

Investigators didn’t tell him they’d already talked to “Jane Doe,” the woman who accused him. And they didn’t appear to have very much evidence to back up her claim.

“I fully thought I was going to be back in the classroom once they finalized their report,” he told me.

Instead, the investigation concluded that he’d not only slept with Doe but also that he’d exhibited “grooming” behaviors with two other minors. This despite the fact that those former students, in interviews, had said nothing untoward had happened.

Taylor was fired, arrested, and charged with committing a lewd act upon a child before he was eventually cleared. This was in 2022, and he hasn’t worked since.

Most examples of “he said, she said” encounters—including the “Cornell 7” case currently being litigated in the court of public opinion—involve men who, all evidence suggests, behaved in a way that was morally reprehensible on some level. In the case of Jeremy Taylor, however, there was never any proof that he had sex with Doe at all—or did anything that should have cost him his job. On the contrary, there was a lot of evidence that Doe made the allegations in the midst of a severe mental health crisis.

The more I dug into his case, the stranger things looked. What made Doe change her mind about what seemed like an innocent student-teacher relationship between herself and a man she previously believed was gay? And why didn’t anyone even seem to consider the possibility that his accuser might be lying? Read my investigation to find out.

—River Page

Jay Solomon and Leonel Caraciki • International

The radical progressive activist Fergie Chambers fled the U.S. for North Africa in 2023 with his $250 million inheritance. He met with officials from the Islamic Republic of Iran who were eager to gain access to his fortune. Since then, he’s been hiding out in Spain as the U.S. has worked to build a case against him. Until now, the charges have been a mystery. Today, Jay Solomon and Leonel Caraciki explain the charges against Chambers for the first time in the American media. They dive into the evidence, which suggests a conspiracy to support Iran’s terrorist activities. Read what Chambers’s case might foretell for the other deep-pocketed radicals on the run from Uncle Sam.

Philip K. Howard • Tech and Business

Imagine an AI plugged in to every traffic camera in America: Every driver gets a speeding ticket, and millions of New Yorkers get cited for jaywalking. Philip K. Howard believes that’s the risk as the government starts weaving AI into its regulations. Instead of untangling billions of words of red tape, AI could end up enforcing every last one. Used wisely, though, it could simplify the rules and restore human judgement. “The role of software,” Philip writes, “should not be to tell us what to do.”

If you’ve spent any time on social media this week, you’ve probably seen—out of the corner of your eye, at least—that the 2000s icon Kelly Clarkson has been feuding with, of all things, a curiosity shop in Brooklyn called Art of Play. The accusation? That the store refused to sell her a $15,000 mechanical bird, and looked at her like she couldn’t afford it.

What fresh hell is this? And why have so many freethinking Americans devoted hours this week to debating it? Suzy Weiss and Dan Ahdoot break it all down in the latest episode of Second Thought, with the help of special guest Michael Moynihan. “She says she was treated like a hooker,” says Suzy, but “being a sex worker is like the greatest thing you could be in Brooklyn.”

EDITORS’ PICKS

This week, best-selling Irish author Sally Rooney stated that her publisher was pulling her books from shelves in the UK—because of her promise to give a portion of her royalties to Palestine Action, which the British government designated a terrorist group last year. “To publish my work in the UK could now constitute a serious criminal offense,” she wrote. Is Rooney a victim of censorship?

No, writes Eli Lake—and most people are missing the point. The real question, he argues, is “whether it was prudent to include Palestine Action in the same category as groups like Hamas and al-Qaeda.” That is a thornier quandary, and in his latest piece, Eli digs into the arguments on both sides.

In one of the most closely watched midterm Senate races, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed spent the entire primary campaign railing against Israel and the Iran war. But when Audrey Fahlberg asked him about leaked audio from a strategy call—where he said he didn’t want to comment on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today”—he dodged the question and admonished her: “Ask smart questions.”

El-Sayed is favored to win his Michigan race, which may determine control of the Senate. But will his short fuse and sensitivity to questions about Iran turn off enough voters to spoil his chances? Audrey has the story.

In less than two weeks, the people of Israel will decide once again whether to retain Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, or elect a change of course. To mark the occasion, we asked contributors who have followed Netanyahu’s career to evaluate his legacy, and describe where he might take his country next. Among them is Haviv Rettig Gur, who explains why Netanyahu is still competitive and what happens if nobody wins a majority. Don’t miss his interview with Maya Sulkin.

It’s a progressive feeder to the Ivy League. But tremors of antisemitism at San Francisco University High School since the October 7 attacks have caused Jewish enrollment to fall to a trickle. Read Ashley Rindsberg’s latest investigation of how a new strain of radicalism infiltrated one of the toniest Bay Area schools: One teacher denounced Israelis as “colonizers” and later claimed he was being “silenced by the Zionist parent conspiracy.”

Europe burned this week, as a bevy of protests broke out in France, Spain, and Belgium, led by disaffected young people. So, we asked Niall Ferguson: What’s going on? “They are dimly aware that they are being screwed,” he wrote, “but they don’t appear to understand who’s doing the screwing.” Read Niall’s essay on the psychology of the placard-holders, why they’re setting things on fire, and why they should consider blaming their grandparents for the rigged system they inherited.