“It was like everyone assumed he had done it,” said Kris Bradburn, an Oakland School for the Arts teacher from 2008 to 2022. The accusation “was like touching the third rail on BART — you’re just like dead. There’s no coming back from it.”
Taylor’s story made headlines at a critical moment.
California schools, churches and Boy Scout groups were facing a wave of lawsuits after a 2019 law that expanded the statute of limitations to include decades-old sexual abuse.
At the same time, students across the Bay Area, including those at Oakland School for the Arts, or OSA, staged walkouts and other protests in response to claims of widespread and unaddressed sexual harassment on campuses.
But then, much more slowly and quietly, the case against Taylor fell apart.