WALNUT CREEK, California (LifeSiteNews) – The family of a high school student allegedly raped by an administrator who later begged her to get an abortion is suing the teacher and school officials for allegedly failing to protect students from him despite warning signs.
KRON reported that former Contra Costa School of Performing Arts official Gerard Michael Flaherty is accused of giving the student (identified only as “Jane Doe”) alcohol in his office while complaining about his day before he raped her in February 2025, then blaming the way she dressed and looked at him. She discovered she was pregnant two months later and had a wiretapped phone conversation in which he implored her to abort the baby, which he claimed would “ruin” the lives of himself and his previous children. He was arrested and charged, and has pleaded not guilty.
While the criminal prosecution progresses, Jane Doe and her mother have also filed a civil suit against Flaherty as well as the Charthouse Public Schools administration, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The suit maintains that Flaherty had a pattern of inappropriate behavior before the rape that was reported to school officials but ignored.
Among the claims were that Flaherty groomed his eventual victim through rides home, personal conversations, and social media messages; another student claiming he was “looking at her body inappropriately,” letting students vape in his office, and a school rumor that he was “having an affair with a student.” School officials neither investigated the claims themselves nor referred them to law enforcement, according to the suit.
“This case highlights systemic failures in ensuring student safety and accountability,” attorney Lauren Cerri said. “Schools, including this one, need to enact and enforce more robust policies and proactive measures to protect students from abuse.”
Despite the abortion lobby’s framing of abortion as a matter of “choice,” it has long turned a blind eye to abortion coercion.
Live Action’s “Aiding Abusers” series draws on news reports, eyewitness testimony, and undercover video to expose Planned Parenthood employees’ willingness to offer abortions to girls as young as 12 without reporting signs of statutory or forcible rape to law enforcement. This enables the men who brought the girls in for appointments to bring them home and continue abusing them.
In 2023, the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute released a study that interviewed 1,000 American women and found that 61 percent of women who undergo abortions do so due to pressure from “male partners, family members, other persons, financial concerns, and other circumstances.”
“Forcing a woman to have an abortion, including a minor, is illegal in all 50 states of the United States of America,” according to the Justice Foundation’s Center Against Forced Abortions, which offers a variety of information resources to help those who are being pressured into killing their babies.
