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By Eva Tenuto
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In 2016, I found myself sitting beside football coach Jeramie Collins, waiting for a meeting with the principal at Kingston High School in New York’s mid-Hudson Valley. Through TMI Project, the true storytelling organization I co-founded, we were proposing a workshop to help football players talk openly about their lives and develop the courage to speak up in the face of violence against women and girls.
While we waited, Coach Collins and I discovered we had just missed crossing paths decades earlier. He started teaching at my high school the year after I graduated.
During his first year teaching, a young woman raised her hand in health class and asked what she should do if a teacher was touching her inappropriately. Coach Collins asked her to stay after class. She shared more details. He turned to his colleagues for guidance. Every one questioned her credibility and warned him against rocking the boat so early in his career. He reported the teacher anyway.
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"I didn't care if I lost my job," he told me. "A young woman told me she was in danger. I couldn't keep it to myself."
I could feel my own history bubbling up.
"I know who you're talking about," I told him.
"How do you know?"
"Because he did that to me all four years of high school."
...
We stared at each other in disbelief. Of all the people I could have been sitting beside, preparing to address violence against women and girls, here was the man who had stood up to the teacher who groomed me.
It started on my first day of high school. He was my homeroom teacher, a man in his early 50s, standing at the classroom door with a clipboard. I was 14. I had just made it through a challenging time and entered freshman year looking visibly vulnerable. I was his type. An easy target.
"Name?"
"Um, Eva," I replied.
"Oh yes, Ms. Tenuto. How are you?"
"I'm fine," I said nervously.
"I already knew you were fine," he said, looking me up and down. "Tell me something new."
I had never been spoken to that way. I scrambled to my seat.
The inappropriate comments continued, peppered between special treatment. He excused me from study hall to hang out with friends. He found me during lunch breaks and took me for walks around the school. We held hands, just like a couple.
At 14, I didn't understand what was happening. Sometimes the attention felt exciting. I didn't recognize that an adult was crossing boundaries I didn't yet know how to establish.
The grooming continued until my senior year. One day, outside the principal's office, he tried to kiss me. I turned my head, and his lips landed on my cheek.
What had felt like an exhilarating game was suddenly terrifying. I fled. The special treatment disappeared. Now he was angry. I spent the remainder of the year avoiding him.
For years, I minimized what happened. He never actually did anything. It's not like he raped or assaulted me.
It wasn't until I encountered him as an adult and felt an unexpected, full-body rage that I understood how deeply he had affected me. The years I should have spent navigating first crushes and discovering love had instead been occupied by a predator's plan, patiently unfolding.
By the time I met Coach Collins, I knew the teacher had left abruptly but I didn't know the details. Coach Collins told me he wasn’t fired but given the option to retire early or face further investigation. He chose to retire. He still got his pension and faced no criminal consequences that would prevent him from working with girls again.
The student paid a different price. She was ostracized, slut-shamed and accused of "asking for it." It had such a negative impact on her life she later told Coach Collins she wished she had never said anything at all.
...
Coach Collins had done what his colleagues urged him not to do. He believed a young woman and spoke up, knowing it could cost him his job. Yet the institution failed to protect the student who reported the abuse or fully hold the teacher accountable.
Now, decades later, our paths had crossed, bringing us together to prepare to help young men develop the courage Coach Collins had demonstrated.
The idea for this program had come to me a year earlier, in 2015, when I attended a talk by Tony Porter, CEO of the violence prevention organization A Call to Men. He described the "Man Box," the cultural expectations that men be strong, dominating, fearless, in control and emotionless, except for anger. Boys and men are taught not to ask for, offer or accept help. These expectations, he said, help sustain a culture in which violence against women and girls persists.
Walking to my car afterward, I wondered: The men in the audience were so engaged and inspired. If they wanted to change, how could they do it without training?
I knew TMI Project could help. We get people to tell the parts of their stories they usually leave out because of shame, embarrassment or cultural expectations. I approached A Call to Men and Coach Collins. Our collaboration became the story told in the documentary Locker Room Talk, which premiered in 2023 and was recently screened at the UrbanFest 360° Film Festival in Orlando, Florida.
At the start of the film, Porter introduced the concept of the Man Box to all of the football players at Kingston High School. Chapman, a 16-year-old quarterback, responded, "Me and my brothers were always crammed into the Man Box. We never expressed feelings. I don't think I've ever seen any of my brothers cry. If we had an issue we went to the basement where we had a boxing ring and worked it out there in a bare-knuckle brawl."
The players were reluctant at first. Coach Collins and Porter participated alongside them, sharing their own stories and modeling emotional honesty. Session after session, the students practiced speaking despite fears of judgment, listening without ridicule, and staying present in uncomfortable moments; in other words, asking for help, offering help and accepting help. Eventually, they read their stories on stage in a public performance for the community and their peers, becoming role models for younger boys.
Ten years later, one participant told me of the workshop: "It completely changed my life. I couldn't talk about anything before that. Now talking about emotional experiences is not really a big deal. I have a great relationship. I can talk to my girlfriend about anything."
When I read about the recent gang rape allegations involving a Cornell University fraternity, I felt that full-body rage all over again. Once again, we're having a national conversation about what boys and young men should do when confronted with violence against women and girls. But then the conversation dwindles. Nothing changes. Soon it will happen again.
We need to put training in place. Speaking up under pressure requires skills that don't suddenly appear out of thin air. It takes practice, repetition and modeling from adults. We wouldn't expect someone to run a marathon if they’ve never jogged around the block.
Learning to communicate under duress is crucial, and it needs to take place in tandem with other essential strategies: teaching consent, strengthening and enforcing laws, holding perpetrators and institutions accountable, and confronting the ways people in power protect one another at the expense of those harmed. Young men need practice speaking up, and they need to know that leaders will act on what they say.
I'm grateful Coach Collins spoke up despite pressure from his colleagues to remain silent. I see no call more urgent than making sure the coming generations of boys and men have the skills and support to do the same.
Eva Tenuto is the co-founder and executive director of TMI Project, a true storytelling organization.
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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