Federal judge will allow Hyde School abuse and forced labor suit to proceed
An aerial photo of Hyde School in Bath on July 9, 2025. (Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer)
A lawsuit alleging abuse and forced labor by a Bath boarding school will move forward, a federal judge decided Monday, after the school sought to have the case thrown out.
A former student named Jessica Fuller, who attended the Hyde School for seven months in 2014 and 2015, filed suit last summer in federal court, alleging the school and its leaders violated human trafficking, forced labor and negligence laws.
Fuller is the sole named plaintiff, but the complaint asserts that she belongs to a group of more than 100 individuals who had similar experiences, and is seeking class action status.
Many former students, some going back decades, have accused Hyde, a self-described private character education school, of emotional and physical abuse they say caused long-term psychological damage. The school has strongly denied the claims.
In a written decision Monday, U.S. District Judge Stacey Neumann denied the school’s request to dismiss the case, although she did partially dismiss two charges related to human trafficking and remove three former school leaders as defendants.
She has yet to certify that class, a required step in the process.
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The school filed a motion to dismiss the suit last fall, arguing Fuller lacked standing to sue, and attorneys delivered arguments on that motion in Portland this month. Lawyers for Hyde said Fuller couldn’t bring the case because she didn’t personally experience all of the harms laid out in the case, and said three of the defendants didn’t even work at the school during the time she attended.
They also disputed that Fuller’s forced labor arguments met the legal standard, because labor at the school was a punishment for rule breaking, and therefore avoidable to students who followed the rules.
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Fuller’s attorneys said federal statute allows a single named plaintiff to bring an initial complaint on behalf of a class, but said they have been in touch with many other individuals who could be added to the case. Hyde students experienced forced labor as a consequence for rule breaking, they said, but also in other contexts.
In her decision Monday, Neumann rejected the school’s argument that labor was not coerced.
She wrote that Fuller “sufficiently alleges that Hyde induced forced labor by means of threats” and said she successfully argued the school received financial benefits from the forced labor of students. Neumann upheld Fuller’s right to bring the case on behalf of the proposed class, writing that her allegations demonstrate both the way she was personally harmed by each of the claims, and how other class members might have been harmed as well.
“For far too long the school has hid behind a facade of claiming their mistreatment of children constitutes ‘character development,'” Kim Dougherty, one of Fuller’s attorneys, said Tuesday. “It’s clear that such a mischaracterization of the school’s abusive conduct will not work.”
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An attorney for the school declined to comment.
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The judge did partially dismiss two counts that alleged the school recruited students with false promises, by advertising an educational experience and instead providing a disciplinary one. (She did allow a trafficking argument under a different legal theory to remain.)
Neumann also dismissed as plaintiffs the three former school leaders (Georgia Gauld MacMillan, Donald MacMillan and Laurie Gauld Hurd) who did not work at the school while Fuller attended, but is allowing her attorneys to submit an amended complaint that justifies naming them, which is due Aug. 10. Dougherty said she is still evaluating whether to amend.
Two individual defendants — Malcolm Gauld, the son of founder Joe Gauld, who led the school at the time Fuller attended and now heads the Hyde Institute, and his wife, Laura Gauld, the current head of school — will remain.
Dougherty said her team will proceed quickly with requests for written discovery and depositions of school employees and witnesses.
“Many survivors have been waiting decades for the truth to come out and it’s our obligation to move forward swiftly to gather the evidence to support their claims and prepare for class certification,” she said.
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Tagged: hyde school, U.S. District Court
Riley covers education for the Press Herald. Before moving to Portland, she spent two years in Kenai, Alaska, reporting on local government, schools and natural resources for the public radio station KDLL. More by Riley Board
