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Matthew Rutledge, a former longtime history teacher at Miss Hall\u2019s School, an elite girls boarding school<\/a> in western Massachusetts, was indicted<\/a> on three counts of rape on Tuesday following the grand jury testimony of Melissa Fares and Hilary Simon. The two women shared their stories of Rutledge\u2019s grooming and alleged sexual abuse in a Vanity Fair<\/em><\/a> investigation last year. Rutledge has not yet entered a plea, and his attorney declined to comment on the indictment.<\/p>\n Fares and Simon first connected about two years ago, Simon recalled in an interview on Wednesday, and learned of each other\u2019s experiences with Rutledge. Their allegations set off a cascade of national press coverage, but \u201cwhat I want people to understand,\u201d Simon said, \u201cis this wasn\u2019t just a two-year fight for us.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMelissa and I have been carrying this privately for two decades and publicly for the last two years,\u201d Simon added. \u201cAnd yesterday was the very first time that the criminal justice system was saying to us and to all the other survivors, \u2018We see what happened, we believe you, and now we\u2019re going to finally do something about it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n For Fares, the opportunity to tell her story in a courtroom offered a kind of relief. \u201cIt was heavy, but also grounding,\u201d she said. \u201cBeing in that room, under oath, there\u2019s a kind of precision to that setting. It\u2019s not about convincing anyone. It\u2019s about saying what happened, and letting that stand.\u201d<\/p>\n Rutledge resigned from Miss Hall\u2019s in 2024 after police started to investigate him. The allegations against the teacher prompted an extended reckoning at the bucolic Berkshires institution, which holds a pedigree befitting its status as the first all-girls boarding school in the state. \u201cIt was always about saving the reputation of the school when other things would happen,\u201d one former teacher told VF<\/em> last year. As reported in VF<\/em>\u2019s original story, after the allegations against him surfaced, Rutledge acknowledged to Simon that school administrators had known about his actions. \u201cI think the school should have let me go,\u201d he said. (Miss Hall\u2019s previously declined to answer VF<\/em>\u2019s questions for that story, citing the investigation, and provided a statement that read, in part: \u201cWe are fully committed to learning the truth about what occurred, so that we may extend support to anyone in our community who was harmed and continue our efforts to safeguard our students today and in the future.\u201d)<\/p>\n