With its stately limestone façade, Saint Ann’s School is the best choice for New York City’s leftist power couples to give their children an arts education, a shot at Ivy League universities, and careers in the arts and the entertainment.
Lena Dunham, Jennifer Connelly and Jean-Michel Basquiat are among the creatives who, as young people, passed through its ornate wooden door, in Brooklyn Heights, the borough’s most luxurious ZIP code.
Now the $60,000-a-year private school is mired in its latest scandal: hiring as a teacher a convicted and formerly imprisoned fraudster who was later arrested for allegedly sharing lewd messages and pornography with students on social media.
What really damages the school’s reputation is how Vietnamese-American educator Winston Nguyen became a kind of purity test for Saint Ann’s progressive values and its support of immigrants, people of color, and criminals.
Parents and teachers were afraid to question Nguyen’s record and strange behavior at school “for fear of being labeled as not progressive enough,” says a scathing new report on the matter.
Some feared their children would lose a spot at one of the East Coast’s most exclusive and prestigious schools, which is no longer considered a “good fit” for its group of A-list liberal artists, the document says.
It’s too early to say whether Saint Ann’s will recover from this latest scandal: the K-12 school did not respond to DailyMail.com’s requests for comment.
But perhaps it’s already clear that celebrity parents interested in admission, which in the past have included Matt Damon, Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, can pause for thought before applying today.
Winston Nguyen, pictured in court on July 25, 2024, is accused of exchanging lewd messages and pornography with private school students.
Saint Ann’s School, in Brooklyn Heights, the most expensive zip code in the neighborhood
Jeff Korek, a Manhattan lawyer who has investigated abuse allegations at the school in recent years, says its administrators and teachers typically follow a manual to keep its frequent scandals under the radar.
“Go around the lines, go around the carts, and less information is better than more information,” Korek says.
The new report shows how Nguyen, 38, the son of Vietnamese immigrants, began working at the school amid Covid-era staffing shortages in mid-2020, before his background check was conducted.
He told school bosses he had been convicted of a crime, for which he served a four-month jail term in 2019.
He had pleaded guilty to defrauding an elderly couple in his care of about $300,000. He also admitted endangering the welfare of an incompetent or physically disabled person.
However, school bosses hired the charismatic and well-groomed entrepreneur, who had attended one of the best schools in Texas, studied at Columbia University and been a champion on the game show ‘Jeopardy!’
He was promoted to mathematics professor in 2021.
Staff allegedly ignored early warning signs about Nguyen’s erratic behavior, the report says.
The alleged child predator regularly slept overnight at school, used gifts and food to “gain trust and access” to students, and confronted his teenage charges outside of class, the report says.
The biggest problem with Nguyen was revealed on June 6, when he was arrested by police on the street near Saint Ann’s.
From late 2022 onward, a group of students from Saint Ann’s and other private schools in Brooklyn had been receiving lewd requests on Snapchat from what appeared to be another teenager.
The user of accounts such as @HunterKristoff and @HaircutBongos encouraged girls and boys between 13 and 15 years old to share naked photos and videos of themselves.
Police had identified Nguyen as an alleged predator disguised as a teenager.
Prosecutors charged him with 11 felonies, 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 about 14 years old, showed a teenager “masturbating on a bed and ejaculating,” a criminal complaint says.
Writer, director and actress Lena Dunham, pictured here in London in September 2024, attends the Brooklyn school.
So did actress Jennifer Connelly, star of Labyrinth, A Beautiful Mind and other films.
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 Harlem apartment and is understood to be negotiating a plea deal that will put him behind bars for at least five years, according to The New York Times.
At the time, the school condemned Nguyen’s alleged “profound breach of trust.”
Saint Ann’s acknowledged its failure to “create an environment where our students are safe and supported.”
Its board of directors hired the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton to find out what went wrong.
Their 39-page report, written by two attorneys, Helen Cantwell and Arian June, and released this month, paints a devastating portrait of Nguyen’s hiring and the resulting crisis.
He places much of the blame on three top administrators: Vincent Tompkins, the school’s principal, Dean of Faculty Melissa Kantor and Senior High School Principal Maureen Yusuf-Morales.
Since then, everyone has dropped out of school.
Administrators had decided to hide Nguyen’s criminal record from his parents, to give him a “second chance,” the report said.
Nguyen and other people of color who worked at the school were considered “protected,” he adds.
Those who opposed the hiring of a convicted fraudster “were afraid to speak out for fear of being branded as not progressive enough,” the report said.
The parents of a student who expressed concern about Nguyen felt “embarrassed for not supporting restorative justice,” he adds.
School officials also allegedly attempted to sweep student catfishing on social media under the rug.
For months, Nguyen allegedly sent messages with lewd comments to students, using pseudonyms.
Only the affected students, their parents and a “small group of administrators” knew about the mess.
Jean-Michel Basquiat received a scholarship to 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 in an episode of Jeopardy! July 18, 2024
The school muted the messages to avoid “unwanted attention to victims of catfishing,” the report says.
The scandal over Nguyen’s hiring is just the latest in a series of controversies at Saint Ann’s.
In 2021, eighth grader Ellis Lariviere committed suicide after being expelled from school because he was struggling academically.
The boy’s parents sued the school last year, blaming its policies for their son’s death. The school denies it.
In 2018, an administrator resigned after hosting parties for students and recent graduates at his home, where marijuana and alcohol were available.
The school issued a report in 2019 detailing a history of sexual misconduct among teachers from 1970 to 2017.
Korek, the attorney representing Lariviere’s parents, says Nguyen’s scandal makes a mockery of the school’s altruistic discourse.
“Saint Ann’s decided that it was acceptable to hire someone with a criminal record who was abusing vulnerable people and putting him in a situation among vulnerable children, and that Ellis, a kid with a great record, was disposable,” Korek said.
“It doesn’t make sense.”