“The innocence that feels no risk and is taught no caution, is more vulnerable than guilt, and oftener assailed.”
– Nathaniel Parker Willis
Sunnyside is a five-acre wooded and flowering enclave that nestles quietly into the landscape of Plains Road in New Paltz, where the folk only speak with kindness, listen to one another in deep sincerity, and are truthful, respectful, mindful, reflective and meditative in nature. It has been home for decades to a close-knit group of enlightenment seekers, followers of the “Fourth Way” espoused by the early 20th-century Russian-Armenian spiritual leader, G.I. Gurdjieff.
It is the base of the Discovery Institute, the group’s educational arm headed by founder, “teacher” and Sunnyside community leader Frank Crocitto. It is the incubator and former home of onetime student Jason Stern, who under Crocitto’s wing co-founded and began to publish his now-successful regional alternative monthly magazine, Chronogram. It is also the incubation chamber and bucolic headquarters of a more recently implemented dream, Maria’s Garden Montessori School, the co-founder and proprietress of which, Nikki Garrett, is another longtime Sunnyside student resident and Discovery Institute member.
And Sunnyside is also the home of former physical therapist Thomas Wanning, a convicted Level 2 sex offender whose lifelong attempt to change his ways and better himself under the watchful and caring aegis of friends, family and his spiritual mentor, Frank Crocitto, has devolved into a crisis that threatens to tear apart the Discovery Institute and its Edenic – some observers have described it as “cult-like” – community of spiritual seekers and, most immediately, the Maria’s Garden Montessori School.
The discovery of Wanning’s presence on the property by a group of concerned parents, compounded by disquieting revelations they unearthed upon checking his case file in the county document morgue, have led to families pulling their children out of the Montessori school, four of the five teachers quitting, a deep schism in the greater Discovery Institute community, and a nasty court battle between parties who usually frown on such shallow, unenlightened conflict-resolution techniques.
A pedophile among us
Maria’s Garden Montessori, founded in 2005 by Garrett and her former partner Mary Prentice, exists in a barn – beautifully restored by Discovery Institute members, including Wanning himself – that formerly housed The Academy and the Sunwise School. Maria’s Garden schools children from three months short of their third birthday through third grade in the barn for the 3- to-6-year-old class, and in a new elementary schoolhouse for the 6-to-9-year-olds, built one pebble’s toss away from Wanning’s front porch.
From the time a 23-year-old Garrett arrived as a student on the Discovery Institute campus in 1998, through the time she worked at the Academy and the Sunwise School on the property, and through the entire time she founded and managed the Maria’s Garden Montessori School, she knew Thomas Wanning had in the past had a problem relating appropriately with children. Starting with the compound’s leader, Frank Crocitto, everyone in the Sunnyside orbit allegedly knew it, and dealt with it as a function of the group. Wanning has lived at Sunnyside for at least 15 years, studying under Crocitto and working shoulder-to-shoulder with other members of the community, including Garrett, who in fact borrowed $45,000 from Wanning and his wife Pamela to start the Montessori school in 2005; and Stern, who hired him in 1994 to serve as an advertising rep for Chronogram. While neither Crocitto, Garrett nor Stern allow that they knew anything until recently of the profoundly disturbing specifics leading up to Wanning’s 1994 arrest and conviction, they and everyone else interviewed from the Discovery Institute have long been aware of the mark on his official record and chalked up his admission to having “made a mistake” by having acted once on his “feelings for a child.”
Meanwhile, Wanning, who has not returned repeated phone calls and e-mail for comment on this story, funded and ran the Esoterica Bookstore in New Paltz for the Discovery Institute until it went out of business in 2006. During his time at the institute, he donated or loaned in excess of $600,000 to it, using funds reportedly from an inheritance from his deceased Bard College professor father, uncles, and pediatrician mother, who, according to Crocitto, was so impressed with Wanning’s progress at the institute that she ultimately joined her son on the Sunnyside campus, where she lived for several years until dying of old age.
Crocitto said he has considered Wanning’s progress of maturing into a responsible, trustworthy and self-aware adult as part of the mission statement for the institute. He said that, based on what little he did know about Wanning’s transgressions against children, he made the decision not to abandon his student. Crocitto looked on Wanning with a father’s watchful eye, and was a guiding force as a teacher and someone who cared.
Starting with Nikki Garrett, most of the community was, in 2006, to change its mind about Wanning.
All are aware of his history
It was Halloween of that year when Garrett received a phone call from a parent of a child in the school. “They had been mailed a link to the state sex offender registry by a friend, saying, ‘Hey, look, doesn’t this guy live close to your school?’” said Garrett, who on the day of an unscheduled interview was dressed for a rehearsal performance as a gossamer fairy, with blue-painted lips and sheer, glittery wings, sitting on the institute’s porch with Crocitto and, amid the clang of oversized wind chimes, telling her side of what has turned out to be a tragic tale, wrought with classic themes of innocence lost, betrayal, revenge and shattered dreams. “So I went online and got the link right away, and there frankly was a lot of information on there that I didn’t even have. The stuff about there being multiple victims, the actual name of the offense … So I read that and I responded right away by explaining to parents what information I had about the situation.”
Still playing with half an informational deck, Garrett fired off an Oct. 31, 2006 response e-mail to the parents: “A person living in close proximity to the school (on DaVinci Way, the private road) appears on the New Paltz Police website, listed as a level 2 sex offender,” wrote Garrett. “His conviction twelve years ago and the circumstances surrounding it have been known to both (co-founder Mary Prentice) and myself since the founding of the school. I also know this individual personally, as he is a member of Discovery Institute, the organization which has its campus adjacent to Maria’s Garden, and of which I am a member as well.
“Knowing the circumstances of the arrest, and knowing the person, Mary and I were both certain and I remain certain that having the school in proximity to his home does not present a threat to the children at Maria’s Garden. We are assured that we are not faced with a case of sexual predation — where an individual is seeking children to exploit. The actual circumstances were highly ambiguous and left to the interpretation of the justice system, which judged him to the most severe extent of the law. He served his sentence and probation. He has since gotten married, and has proved himself, under the eyes of the community that surrounds him, as a devoted husband and an active, caring stepfather to his wife’s children. I have worked closely with him on many projects and know he is someone with a sincere desire to do what is right and improve himself – and he has, over the eight years I’ve known him.”
The information Garrett had at that time did not include the following from the case file: During his 1994 trial for first-degree sexual abuse, Wanning had been accused and ultimately found guilty of using his position as a physical therapist over a protracted period of time with Ulster County ARC — his specialty being a hands-on form of the Feldenkrais method, a treatment that seeks to improve awareness through movement — to lure very young boys of an average age of 7, at least one of them a cerebral palsy victim, into lying on top of him while he masturbated against them and fondled their buttocks and private parts.
The damning testimony was provided by Wanning himself, as well as by at least one shocked and horrified mother, who stated for the record that she had found her son bouncing naked atop the equally naked Feldenkrais practitioner one summer day, their legs dangling in the kiddie pool. “… At that time it sort of, I guess it just blew me away, for me to think it might be what I suspected it was, so I just grabbed (my son) and left,” said the woman in her deposition. “I kept trying to convince myself it couldn’t have been that, it had to be another type of Feldenkrais that I was not used to.”
Four counts of this sort of thing led to Wanning’s conviction. Earlier, he might have avoided arrest had he not, according to Crocitto, reneged on a promise to the above cited victim’s mother that he would resign his position at UARC in exchange for her not pressing charges. “He was supposed to go to his agency and quit,” said Crocitto. “But he went on a hiking trip; he didn’t show up, and that was it. So she just went ahead and turned him in.”
In addition, the case record mentioned but did not specify the existence of prior convictions of the same nature, evidence for which is presumably contained in the “sealed” portion of the case, hiding in a manila envelope in the case folder beneath a strip of scotch tape, where a good portion of the above revelations probably should have been as well.
Surprise, surprise
The above revelations from the case file are new this month, and it was a fresh set of parental investigative eyes that unearthed them first, just weeks ago. Nestled in their cocoon, no one at the Discovery Institute had ever thought to check Wanning’s case file. Garrett, who is a board member at the Discovery Institute alongside Crocitto, her father Ed Kramer, her husband Howard Garrett, and Times Herald-Record reporter and editor Jeremiah Horrigan, claims that she wasn’t aware that public information was available about Wanning’s charges and conviction. “I have to say – perhaps I’m ignorant – I didn’t know at the time that I could go and get a public record of the case and learn all about it,” said Garrett.
Now almost everyone has learned all about it, and most are appalled. Once the entire story – Wanning’s identity, his close proximity to the school, the notably predatory nature of his crimes and his integral relationship with the Discovery Institute, including a lifetime tenancy agreement in exchange for the forgiveness of $100,000 worth of a loan – started becoming clear to parents, more than a few of them completely balked at the school administration’s lack of candor about Wanning and what they perceived as a particularly galling form of naiveté. With the school already straining under the weight of the initial shock from the first group of parents’ discovery of Wanning’s sex-offender status info on the web, the new information began a firestorm of defections that shows no signs of abating.
Garrett says that, much to her dismay, there’s been a plummet in student enrollment from 34 children to 27, with every parent citing identical reasons for leaving. Additionally, she has been handed a resignation from every one of the four teachers (other than herself), including one from Wanning’s own stepdaughter, Maria’s Garden head teacher Shannon Murray, who resigned Monday morning. Murray said that she was not ready to release any comments yet because she first wanted to speak with her family and her students.
Casual readers, as well as concerned parents of Montessori schoolchildren, can be excused at this point for wondering how such an individual could be found in 2008 living in a compound a stone’s throw from a preschool-elementary facility. They also may wonder how it came to be that Wanning not only lives next door to the school but as a trust-fund millionaire was instrumental in its financing and very existence. Despite what ambiguous information Crocitto or Garrett admitted to knowing about Wanning’s background as having sexual interest in children, she accepted loans amounting to $45,000 for her school, and even built it within a few hundred feet of his front porch.
“When I started Maria’s Garden, I did ask Thomas (Wanning) and (his wife) Pamela for a loan,” admitted Garrett. “As I think it has been described, this is a wealthy person. He financed almost any project that has ever gone on here. He loaned money to it. He didn’t donate money to me; I don’t know who he ever donated money to, but he’s a resource. You’ll get a better rate from him than you’ll get from a bank. And he had this enthusiasm about education. He wants to finance educational projects. He loaned money to the Academy and to the Sunwise School at another point. … You know, I don’t see how it could have happened any other way.”
Garrett says that she paid the loans back in full by the fall of 2006.
Maria’s Garden board president and fellow Discovery student Glenn Nystrup said that he was not aware that Garrett took loans from Wanning until recently, but accepting the loan was okay in his book. “It didn’t seem to be a big problem to me. It was separate from anything else. (Wanning) didn’t have anything to do with the school. (Wanning) supported education. He had an inheritance. It didn’t buy him anything. It was just a loan, a financial agreement. It didn’t stand out to me as blurry boundaries at the time, no.” Nystrup also helped run the Academy and Sunwise schools, both funded in part by Wanning as well.
Public records show that Wanning also donates money to the public library and Red Fox Friends (the name of which will soon evolve into Wild Earth), a not-for-profit children’s wilderness exploration and appreciation camp in New Paltz, where Wanning’s stepson Devon Murray is now a counselor. Founding camp member David Brownstein denied knowing anything about Wanning’s history. “I have no idea. We just thank him for supporting us. We don’t make any judgments for who makes donations.”
Wanning also supports the Clearwater organization.
Shock and awe
Several weeks ago the Montessori parents held an emergency parents’ meeting, and invited Garrett. Her husband Howard attended the meeting as well to represent the Discovery Institute and speak about what actions were being taken against Wanning, which some parents said they thought were either awkward or inappropriate.
The meeting also led to more questions and suspicions. “Is the Discovery Institute a cult?” One later questioned, “How many people are involved with this school? At what point is it safe to say that this school is cult-run?” (Only two of the school’s board members are Discovery students).
During this meeting, parents learned the truth about the $45,000 in loans to start the school, “and at this meeting she just keeps saying that (Wanning) is ‘a line-crosser.’ It went from ‘we know him’ to ‘we’re evicting him,’” a parent expressed. “Garrett said that he was railroaded into these charges. New parents started to dig because they were not told; they are the most hurt. There are new parents who are angry, and felt like there was no disclosure.”
Parental reactions ranged from enraged to saddened to betrayed. All, however, feel heartbroken and conflicted about their school. “Even the parents who have taken their kids out think the school is great, but they are upset over the omission. Some families think that the school is worth saving,” said an anonymous parent who has chosen to keep her children enrolled, despite the mounting pressure from other parents to leave.
Another level of anger entirely was expressed by parents whose children had been involved in playgroups held by Murray, Wanning’s stepdaughter, at the family’s house, with him present. Parents stated they would not have been likely to attend the playgroup had they known who Wanning was. “We didn’t know what he looked like, who he was, that he was the neighbor, or that the head teacher (Shannon Murray) was his stepdaughter,” said another parent, who refused to give her name. “His stepdaughter had playgroups with parents and kids over at her house, and we were all interacting with him. Several times we were there; (Murray) never said a word.”
Crocitto’s response would not have been much succor for concerned parents. “I can’t police (Murray),” said Crocitto, when asked who was watching the play group, which was not held under the auspices of the Discovery Institute, of which Murray was not a member, or the school. “What she does is what she does. (Murray) certainly knows about (Wanning’s predilections). It’s nothing new. It’s known. He lived there. Every time I’ve heard about it — (the Wannings have) two girls and a boy, they’re grown up now — they were quite content. He was a very good father to them; he paid for their education. He cared about them. They view him as their father. There isn’t a sense that there is something wrong.”
Though Crocitto insisted that Wanning was carefully watched, he added, “(Wanning and the children) have been living in that house as a family, and it isn’t my place as a teacher to be in that house supervising their family. ... The boundaries have been set. He knows the boundaries, and they’ve been set for a long time. Is it possible that someone does something without me knowing about it? Yeah. But I can tell you what I do know, and what I have seen, and what I have done. That is what I can tell you. So, admittedly, he blurs boundaries; that’s what got him into trouble,” said Crocitto.
Habitual line-stepper
In talking about Wanning and their shifting attitudes toward him, Garrett and Crocitto returned often to the theme of boundaries, as in Wanning’s losing battle adhering to them, which ultimately became his undoing.
Garrett said that although she always observed “socially inappropriate” behaviors from Wanning, the issue at hand became his inability to abide by what she considered to be simple rules. “… I did speak with (Wanning) and say, ‘Look, you are not to come to the school,” said Garrett. “You are not to come around the children. You are not to be interacting with the school community.’ I would give this to him in writing, a couple of times a year, to remind him. If an event was happening in the school, I would remind him, ‘Look, don’t come around.’ Just because I knew that about him. He didn’t seem to take any offense to it, and he was cooperative, except when time had gone by he would find these fuzzy ways to come in. For instance, there was a tree being cut down here by some parents, and he came over and helped, and didn’t see that he pushed the boundaries. His brother is a tree surgeon, and they’re coming over to look at this tree while school is in session. You know, when I call him a line-crosser, it’s that if there was any fuzziness to be found, he would find it.”
Crocitto’s talk about Wanning’s lack of boundary sense was of a more physical, interpersonal nature. Crocitto describes his student as “childlike and immature” when he first showed up at the institute 15 years ago, and said he chronically exhibits a lack of understanding about the physical boundaries between people. In fact, Crocitto very early on became concerned regarding Wanning’s early-’90s choice to become a practitioner of a Feldenkrais.
“That was the only thing that he thought he could make a dollar on, and try to become a man in that respect,” said Crocitto, adding that Wanning had told him about his predilections “a little bit” by this point. “So he started doing it, but he had kind of a ‘sticky’ touch, you know? I don’t know if I can explain this well enough without sounding like I’m putting him down; I am not putting him down. It was a quality that people felt uncomfortable with. So, although he did it, he’d work with people … people didn’t want to go back.”
The last straw
A full year and a half elapsed from the first general knowledge of Wanning’s presence on the property and the current enrollment and staffing crisis. Sometime not long after Nikki Garrett’s October 2006 e-mail to parents more or less backing up Thomas Wanning’s right to coexist on the property with her school, she had a revelation of her own, and did a full 180-degree turn.
“We had a meeting with all the parents,” recalled Garrett. “And the feedback that I got from the parents who were there at that point was: ‘We don’t care what you think you know about this. We have to take this to the letter of what it says on his conviction. And there are details in here that you don’t know about and that we don’t know about. We have to trust the judgments of the courts on this, and take this as seriously as it was taken there.’
“And I heard that, and I agreed,” said Garrett. “So there was a week in there in which I could take some action. And the first thing I did was to meet with the Wannings and make a very serious, legally binding agreement, and I questioned him at that time, and asked him, ‘I read the report. Now why are there two victims on this report? (And he admitted to four). And he said, ‘Oh, yeah, I think there may have been another one.’ And that was one thing that just kind of hit me. As I said before, I’d seen him put teabags in his eyes. I knew that he was eccentric, I knew that he was forgetful, and I knew that he lacked a sense of what was appropriate. But that this issue lacked that seriousness for him really had an impact on my perception of what was going on.”
Another thing happened that weekend. Wanning’s stepdaughter, Shannon, had a family from the school come to their home. “I was there,” said Garrett. “My daughter was there. The stepdaughters had babysat my daughter from the time that she was a baby, so she was coming over there that night.
“I’ve known Shannon since she was 14,” continued Garrett. “And while I was there, I observed Thomas Wanning, who was grandstanding about his ideas about education and about childrearing with this family from the school, when he knows that all of this has been going on. I saw his lack of restraint, and I left.”
Garrett didn’t actually see what happened next, but was told about it by the shocked parents later the next week. “The parents came to me and said, ‘Look, we were there. We met him, and we were creeped out, because he reached over and actually touched my son’s shoulder while we were there.’”
It was then that the gravity of her and the school’s situation was finally brought home to Garrett. “I can’t trust this person to behave appropriately to the situation,” she said. “I have to take this into my own hands, take control of it. It cannot be about trusting everybody around here to make sure the school is safe and doing fine and that I’m safe. And so personally for me it was a big deal. I saw the gravity of my position, and the responsibility is on me. So I called (Wanning) and made it very clear, and in as loud a voice as I could, that I was upset about what had happened at his house and that he needed to move. I made clear to Frank that I felt that he needed to move; the next morning I made it clear to the Discovery Institute board that he needed to move.”
The board backed her up, with Glenn Nystrup dispatched to give Wanning the bad news. “He had agreed and said, ‘Yeah, I see the need for me to move.’ … He left, but was gone for only a couple of days.”
The long goodbye
A flurry of litigation ensued, leading to the current standoff. Immediately upon Wanning’s return, the Discovery Institute started formal eviction proceedings against Wanning. By November 2007, Wanning’s lawyer, Jay Kaplan of Kingston, filed a suit against the Discovery Institute in state Supreme Court, petitioning it to issue a declaratory judgment to uphold what Wanning considered to be the verbal agreement of a lifetime-tenancy contract; an agreement that Crocitto denies striking.
In his deposition, a wounded Wanning adds fuel to the “cult” argument, alleging: “To the best of my knowledge and belief, Mr. Crocitto does not hold any office or directorship in defendant (the Discovery Institute), but in reality he is the defendant boss and whatever he says goes. People like me who are involved in the corporation are called ‘students’ and are required by the defendant to pledge obedience to Mr. Crocitto. This means that students must submit to the will of Mr. Crocitto. At all relevant times, my wife and I did. We even had to get Mr. Crocitto’s permission to marry each other ...”
Garrett’s tone in the next notice for parents, sent on Aug. 23, 2007, had grown icy. “This letter is to inform you that a registered sex offender lives in the vicinity of Maria’s Garden Montessori School,” she wrote. “All the information about the individual that we may legally disclose is included in the attached document. The individual is in the process of being evicted from his current residence, and although until now we expected him to be gone by the time school began, it is now evident that there may be delays beyond September 4th. He is not permitted to enter the school grounds. All staff have been informed of the situation, know what the individual looks like, and have been instructed to immediately inform the head of school if he is seen near school premises. The New Paltz Police Department has been informed in writing that he is not allowed on the school premises under any circumstances, and have assured me that any reported trespassing would be followed up with police action. …”
Though Maria’s Garden is hopeful of getting 20 percent parental representation on its board, right now there are no takers for the post or posts. Though Garrett has considered relocating in light of the situation, Discovery is reportedly continuing with emergency eviction proceedings against the Wannings. Many parents have suggested ending the school year early, but Garrett wishes to honor the contracts and carry on until June, as promised. Since she will be the only remaining teacher, her co-founder Mary Prentice will fly here from her home in California to teach with Garrett to finish out the year. Garrett said that she is now looking to hire one more teacher, either Montessori-trained or a certified teacher, to finish out the school year.
Earlier this week, Maria’s Garden Montessori scheduled mediation for parents, though some questioned what good it would do at this late date. One mom was confused about what a mediator could do at this late stage. “These parents just want to know if they can get their money back, or get some tuition compensation or something,” said an undisclosed mother. “They are just still pretty angry right now. There are a couple of us who are not angry any more. A lot of the other parents are still very angry and want their money back.”
Wanning’s rights
According to New Paltz Police detective David Dugatkin, Wanning has every right to live next to the school if he wishes. “I have to infrequently check in with (Wanning), and he is always available to me. Wanning’s photo must be updated every three years as well.” As a function of an amendment to Megan’s Law, or Sex Offender Registration Act (SORA) signed in 2006 by then-Gov. George Pataki, sex-offender registries were expanded to avail information for Level 2 and 3 offenders for their lifetimes, and include their home and work addresses. However those Level 2 offenders, like Wanning, whose registration time formerly only required 10 years due to the original laws that may have begun prior to 1996, found themselves back on the hook, and filed suit to change that status.
Since Wanning is part of that lawsuit, the New York state’s sex offender registry (criminaljustice.state.ny.us) does not contain Wanning’s profile or photo while the suit is ongoing.
Not everyone looks on Wanning as a socially inappropriate, eccentric millionaire pedophile with dollars to spare. As a fellow Discovery Institute student, longtime friend of Wanning and founding owner of the Chronogram’s Stern has played a major role in the man’s life. He employed Wanning at the magazine, ran his opinion pieces, and so far appears about the only person, besides Wanning’s wife and family, giving him unequivocal support. Stern in December 1994 submitted a written pre-sentencing plea to county judge J. Michael Bruhn in support of his employee and fellow student. His letter evokes an attitude toward Wanning consistent with the apparent esteem and tolerance the Sunnyside community at large once presumably held for him, before the recent developments and revelations made things too uncomfortable.
“The charges brought against Mr. Wanning seem wholly inconsistent with the employee I know and appreciate,” wrote Stern at the time. “Our young company has come to rely on Mr. Wanning. After a long search we found in him a great salesman and ‘idea man.’ His absence would be a great loss to us. Experience has shown he would be very difficult to replace. ... Whatever the truth in this case, Mr. Wanning has obviously learned from his mistakes and is determined to be an agent of service. I believe he will do the world most good on this side of the bars.”
Stern is still in Wanning’s corner. “The turn on (Wanning) is all political,” said Stern, who also lived on the premises until recently. “I’ve seen (Wanning) with seven to 10 children (at Discovery Institute). (Wanning) was there working with (kids) and around (kids). There was never a whisper of concern, including (Garrett’s) own daughter. He was under the full scrutiny of the entire community. They know without a doubt that he’s safe.”
Crocitto and Garrett said they suspected the reason for Wanning’s rapid return after agreeing to leave was actually the fact that he didn’t want to walk away from an income-generating rental apartment he’d built in the basement of his house, originally intended for his now-adult stepchildren. Stern felt it was because he didn’t want to be ousted from his community and family home of 15 years, without any possibility of his many loans and investments being paid back.
“There were assurances that he would be compensated for the house because of his lifetime tenancy. But then they never got back to him because of what that agreement would be. He pursued it; he put pressure on the school. He left immediately to protect the school. He only moved back because he wanted to be treated fairly,” said Stern.
For all his recent negative talk about his failed, student, Crocitto sounds more like a disappointed father than a litigious enemy. “The picture that is being painted of the man is that he is some monster. He’s not a monster. He’s a man who’s split. He’s got a lot of goodness in him. He’s made a tremendous effort to work on himself, to become a better person. It’s not this awful, horrible criminal you read about in the paper. He did something, there’s no question. And everybody’s horrified; yes. But that isn’t the whole story of the man. And if that was the whole story, then there is no justification for him being here, for me making an effort on his behalf. So, that’s the part that bothers me a lot.”
“(Wanning) was an ardent and devoted true-believer in (Crocitto),” said Stern. “After he started to receive this treatment, his eyes opened and he saw something different. He ceased to be a believer. That was the source of (Crocitto’s) ire. He feels jilted by a student (for not immediately leaving and obeying).” Stern, whom Crocitto lauded as his “prize student,” added that though he has now moved on from the Discovery Institute in part because of Wanning’s treatment, “My life would be a wasteland if I hadn’t studied with (Crocitto). The way that this has unfolded has been particularly disappointing to me.”