Robert Robertson quits Beijing’s Huijia Private School but issues extraordinary rebuttal, including emails of support from Chinese schoolgirls saying he is love
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More than 40 years after he was caught having sex with pupils in Canada, teacher Robert John Robertson’s past has caught up with him in China. He resigned from the prestigious Beijing Huijia Private School on Friday after Canadian media reported on his new life in China, where he had been teaching physical education and communications and coaching girls in volleyball, soccer and softball.
The 66-year-old was finally banned from teaching in Canada last year after regulators ruled that in 1976 he had sex with three schoolgirls. But authorities had been investigating him for years. Separate probes were launched by the Richmond School Board in 1976 and the British Columbia College of Teachers (BCCT) in 2006, but on both occasions Robertson resigned while the investigations were incomplete. In 2008 he went to China to teach.
Photo : SCMP
In an extraordinary rebuttal, Robertson told the South China Morning Post on Saturday he had done “nothing wrong” and suggested Huijia knew about his past. He depicted one victim of what he called his “indiscretions” as a “psycho-sexual predator”. She was aged 15 when they started having sex.
Robertson also forwarded emails of support, purportedly from Chinese pupils, that included their names and email addresses. The SCMP did not solicit the emails and has not tried to contact the children, apparently aged as young as 13.
“[You] are the best PE teacher forever. And we also love you forever,” wrote one girl. “We all love you Bob!” wrote another.
Some of the pupils’ emails to Robertson dismissed accusations against him as “gossip”. “We don’t know who made up the story for what evil intention” and “I don’t believe the internet”, two purported students write.
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However, Robertson did not deny the underlying case against him: that in 1976 he had sexual relations with pupils aged 15 and 16 when he was a young teacher at the Richmond School Board in BC.
In February 2016, Robertson was ultimately stripped of his teaching certification by the Teacher Regulation Branch (TRB) of BC. He was never criminally charged. The TRB said that the parents of one girl went to police but eventually declined to pursue the case.
The TRB said Robertson’s misconduct towards the girls was “egregious”, and included having sex in his school office and on a school trip to the Mediterranean where he was meant to be a chaperone. On another occasion cited by the BCCT and the BC Appeal Court, he was caught by police having sex with a schoolgirl in a car in parking lot.
Photo: SCMP
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“As someone entrusted by the public [Robertson] failed…he used [their] trust to feed his ego and for his own sexual gratification,” the board wrote in its 2016 decision stripping Robertson of certification.
However, it said it was also “troubling” that Robertson’s sexual liaisons with the girls had been widely known among other students and teachers.
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On the Mediterranean cruise, which Robertson chaperoned, “the relationship with the 15-year-old was openly conducted with the obvious knowledge of other teenage students”.
Overall, “other teachers knew or suspected what was going on between the respondent and the teenaged girls under his supervision”, the ruling said. “To the [TRB] panel, it is clear, the respondent had a reputation.”
Forty years later, that reputation is now known in China, too.
