The school district, on the other hand, eventually fended off a lawsuit, agreeing to pay about half a million dollars to three students who said Mr. Mayes acted inappropriately.
Obedience comes first
In JROTC classrooms, instructors are not just teachers. They are senior officers and students are taught to follow the chain of command. “Obedience is the first lesson every soldier must learn,” says one of the program’s manuals. Abuse victims said the power dynamics in the program made it more difficult to resist sexual assault. One of them, Jordan Leloup, came from a troubled childhood of poverty and drugs in Tennessee and no longer had a relationship with her parents. He said he longed for something akin to “family.” Jordan Leloup at about 16. When JROTC teacher Michael Bass approached her one day during the 2013-14 school year about joining the program at Hendersonville Middle School, she said she had an attractive sales pitch. “We’re like family,” he told her. After she joined, Mr. Bass, who was 44, invited her to dinner at his home, where he would mingle with his wife and children. Then one night, she said, she arrived to find herself alone with Mr. Bass, who had set up two seats at the table, with wine. He later took her to an upstairs room, where the first sexual assault took place. She was 17. After that, she said, Mr. Bass told her almost every day where to meet him privately — sometimes in a storage room at the school or in an office, where he locked a metal door. When she began to express reluctance, he said, he pushed her. “Whenever he told me to be ready or meet him somewhere, I had to be there,” she said. “If I didn’t, there would be consequences.” One night, when she threatened to tell the police about the affair, she said, Mr Bass hinted that his time in the army had given him the skills to kill her without anyone knowing. Ms Leloup eventually went to the police, who charged Mr Bass, citing a recorded conversation in which he admitted to having sex. He pleaded guilty to two counts of rape in 2019 and was sentenced to four years in prison.
