Recently I found out that one of my high school teachers groomed a student into having a relationship with him. He must have been in his late forties and she was apparently 13-14 when it started. He left his family, they married and they are still married now. He stayed teaching at the school until his retirement and some internet sleuthing shows that for a while she was even employed at the school as a teacher in the same subject as him.
It's making me feel sick and I'm trying to work out why it's affecting me so strongly, as if I have to reevaluate my time there. He was my teacher in the same subject and of course it's a horrible situation but I didn't know her (I think I was 3 years or so above her) and he was not a teacher that I'd given any thought to since leaving school.
On the other hand, I did get very good grades in his class, even winning a prize for my final results. That prize is actually one of my 'funny high school stories', since it came out of nowhere and was partly based on me trying to read books that I didn't actually understand. It had always felt that at least for that work the teacher was rewarding me for trying to do something hard rather than the actual results.
I'm likely autistic and my teenage/young adult history is full of boys and men who tried and sometimes succeeded in taking advantage of me. I was that annoying combination of smart and in some ways mature for my age but also very naive and vulnerable in personal relationships. I don't know if I'm being dramatic because I don't remember feeling weird vibes from him (and don't see any looking back), but I do know I was oblivious to lots of stuff when I was a teenager and now I'm wondering if there actually was.
Maybe it's also shaken me to know that our school apparently was not the safe and dependable space I saw it as. I was never a huge fan of it but did feel we were welcome to speak up for ourselves and teachers looked out for us. In my memory, the school was not very hierarchical, quite straightforward and 'playing by the rules' as it were. Especially compared to my family home where personal boundaries were not very well respected, it felt like a place where there was no confusing/dark undercurrent and now it feels like there clearly must have been.
This post is a bit rambling and I'm not sure what I'm asking, other than maybe an idea of how to process this and create some distance between me and this situation - since it doesn't actually concern me and obviously how I feel about it now will change nothing about what happened to someone else 30 years ago.