ANDOVER — Two Phillips Academy alumni have reported sexual abuse by a former longtime medical director who was charged and sentenced on child pornography charges more than a decade ago.
Phillips Academy Head of School Raynard Kington and Board of Trustees President Eric Zinterhofer released a joint statement Thursday afternoon about former students reporting being sexually abused by Richard Keller, who served as the school’s medical director from 1992 to 2011. Keller was arrested in 2012 and sentenced in 2014 to 78 months in prison for receiving and possessing child pornography.
“We are thankful for their courage in coming forward and sharing this information with the Academy,” the statement read about the alumni reporting the abuse. “We recognize that people process trauma on their own terms and timelines, which is why Andover remains open to hearing from alumni, no matter how many years have passed since they were harmed.”
The school asked others who may have been harmed by Keller to report the misconduct or abuse.
Keller was previously sentenced to 78 months and five years of supervised release in 2014 after he pleaded guilty to two counts of receiving child pornography and possessing it. He was 57 and an Andover resident at the time of his sentencing.
Kington and Zinterhofer’s statement acknowledged the school addressed its community in September 2012 after Keller was arrested.
“We wrote at the time that we had no reason to believe that any of our students were involved in, or affected by, Keller’s alleged criminal behavior,” Thursday’s statement read. “In November 2013, Keller pleaded guilty to two counts of receiving and one count of possessing child pornography and served over six years in prison.
“We write today to share that two Andover alumni have since come forward to report that they were sexually abused by Keller while students at Andover.”
“When I was a child, Phillips Andover Academy placed me at the mercy of a sadistic pedophile,” one of the victims, who wishes not to be publicly identified, said on Thursday.
The victim reported he was assault on the school’s campus by Keller when he was a Phillips Academy student in 2008.
“The school failed to uphold the most crucial of its duties, the most fundamental of the promises it makes to every student and their family, to maintain a safe environment for children,” he said. “A predator like Richard Keller is only capable of harming victims to whom he has access.”
The victim said he hopes knowledge of Keller’s crimes while he worked as physician at the school lets other potential survivors know they are not alone.
Keller was also pediatric endocrinologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and a pediatrics instructor at Harvard Medical School when he was arrested in 2012. He had stepped down a year earlier from his role at Phillips Academy, which he held for 19 years.
He possessed images of minor boys, ages 7 to 16, engaging in sexually explicit conduct, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Massachusetts.
Keller “purchased and ordered videos and images,” more than 50 titles totaling more than $2,695, on 19 different occasions between July 2009 and January 2011 from a Toronto company that sold child pornography, specifically of young minor boys, the U.S. Attorney’s Office had said in a 2014 press release.
A search warrant led to 500 “high-gloss” photographs of child porn and between 60 to 100 DVDs of child pornography being removed from the bedroom of his home.
Keller entered a plea agreement and admitted to a sexual interest in adolescents since the 1970s and would watch child porn on the Internet. He said he tried to stop, but failed.
In 2016, Phillips Academy sent a letter to the school’s community stating it had hired a private law firm, the Sanghavi Law Office of Brookline, the year before that had uncovered five cases of sexual misconduct dating back to the 1970s and 1980s. A previous statement to The Eagle-Tribune had indicated three former teachers had engaged in sexual misconduct with students.
The school had learned of another incident in 2018 involving an instructor and sexual misconduct in the 1980s. The instructor had been teaching at the school in 2018, and announced his intention to retire shortly after the investigation came to light.
Kington and Zinterhofer said the school continues to work with nonprofit Learning Courage to “help guide our community from a survivor-centered and trauma-informed perspective while also recommending potential improvements to policies and procedures.”