TAMPA, Fla. — A Sarasota woman is testifying in an international trial that is making headlines in the United Kingdom, but most Americans haven't heard anything about it.
The case involves abuse allegations at a former residential school attended by thousands of young girls from 1961 until 1993.
“Over all these years, we haven't forgotten,” said Ali Flanagan.
Flanagan wrote us an email which said, “I’m the only survivor in the U.S. testifying in the historic Scottish Fornethy Residential School trial.”
We searched for information about the school and discovered dozens of news stories from throughout the UK, many calling the school a “house of horrors” based on allegations by former students involving physical, psychological and sexual abuse.
Key witness testifies by video from federal courthouse.
Ali attended the school for six weeks in 1974 when she was six years old and lived in Scotland.
We interviewed her when she was in Tampa, preparing to testify in a weeks-long trial through a secured video connection at the federal courthouse.
Ali was one of about 50 witnesses scheduled to testify against her former teacher, who is now 76 years old.
The defendant is facing trial in the Scottish Crown Court more than 4,000 miles away.
Interpol, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office were involved in arranging Ali’s testimony.
Ali says she was selected to attend the school as a youngster, and her mother encouraged her to go.
“It was for girls that were either handicapped or from a poverty family,” she said.
She says the six weeks she spent there haunted her for decades.
“I want to see any teacher that's left over prosecuted to the fullest. And I really want to know why they weren't before. Why has it taken this long?” Ali said.
Video and pictures show what “house of horrors” looks like now.
We researched the school and found video and pictures posted online by Natasha McCallum, an urban explorer who visited the now-abandoned site last year.
“It was a very heavy, just such a sad feeling,” Natasha said, during a Zoom interview we arranged with her from her home in Scotland.
“The vibe of the whole place was just very, very unsettling,” she said.
The pictures and video Natasha posted offered the first glimpse of the old school to the public since Fornethy closed in 1993.
Many former students have reached out to her after seeing the photos online.
“I just couldn’t believe that people were so interested. I didn't realize the big thing that this is really, so you just don't know what you're walking into,” Natasha said.
We also contacted Lynn Sheerin, a former student who started a Facebook Survivors group and organized demonstrations at Scotland's Parliament.
The alleged victims’ complaints led to an investigation and the arrest of one of the school’s last-known living employees.
“We wanted her at court. We wanted her to be charged and pay for what she's done to us because she's destroyed a lot of our lives,” Lynne said.
We also contacted journalist Diane Rasmussen, who works for the independent media company UK Column, which first brought Fornethy’s dark past to light.
“We think as many as approximately 10,000 girls would have gone through this throughout the life of the school,” Diane said.
“It was the perfect place for bad things to happen.”
We asked Natasha about her visit to the site, which she said took several hours to reach.
“It was just so eerily in the middle of nowhere. It was just such a strange vibe to it,” she said.
The mansion was owned by two wealthy sisters who never married.
They left their house to the government for use as a residential school for girls between the ages of 6 and 12.
An old document Natasha found described Fornethy as “an educational centre providing environmental studies”.
It is located on 39 wooded acres, six miles from the nearest small town.
Fornethy is 80 miles from Glasgow, the closest large city.
“It's the perfect place for bad things to happen. It's in the middle of absolutely nowhere,” Diane said.
Natasha and her colleagues parked outside a locked gate and hiked a mile down a private road.
Ali says she remembers the driveway from arriving in a bus a half-century earlier.
“There were an awful lot of trees... pine, and it was almost like a tunnel,” Ali said.“It got really dark, and that was very frightening. “
Ali says things became more frightening when she arrived.
Women detail abuse
“We were all crying as soon as we walked in. It was like a military camp. It was horrible,” she said. “They had us take all our clothes off and stand in a cold, cold corridor.”
She said they were bathed and then scrubbed with a toilet brush until their skin was raw.
Ali remembered other abuse as well.
“I remember her kicking the back of my knees, so I would fall,” Ali said.
“If you didn't eat, you get force-fed, if you were sick. You get force-fed your own vomit,” Lynne said. “And you had to eat that. You can imagine for a 6-year-old, a 7-year-old, an 8-year-old, how bad that was. That was horrid, horrendous.”
The women say children who disobeyed were taken down to the basement, where Natasha shot video of enclosures.
The women say there were daily forced marches through the woods.
“It was like a five-mile walk,” Ali said.
“It was keep up, walk till you drop,” Lynne said.
The women say they believe they were drugged by the Fornethy staff when they were given biscuits and milk before bed.
And at night, they say businessmen in tweed suits showed up at the school and girls were taken away.
“They were just taken out of their beds in the middle of the night to go to parties,” Lynne said. “It was like one big giant toy box and we were the toys.”
“They would get carried out and put into the cigar room for the men,” Ali remembers.
“Some of them have very vague memories of waking up in a room with men, smelling alcohol, cigarette smoke, sitting in men's laps,” Diane said.
In recent years, more than 200 women have claimed they were abused.
Scottish government considers compensation for victims
Scottish lawmakers are now involved.
“I want to share their story…a story that needs to be heard. I want to give a voice to those women's fight for justice,” Scottish Member of Parliament Colin Smith testified at a hearing earlier this year. “I want to help ensure that what happened to those wee girls at Fornethy is finally properly acknowledged. “
Parliament is currently considering compensation for women who reported abuse, which is an uphill battle, since the government shows there were big gaps in tracking attendance at the school, with several years of records missing.
Also, there were no records of individual students who attended, which was blamed in a report on “the retention policies of the time.”
Ali moved to the United States as a teenager but says what happened at Fornethy haunts her daily.
“I've been seeing a therapist for a long time and a psychiatrist,” she said.
She says her short time at Fornethy led to anxiety, depression and PTSD.
Ali hopes her testimony will be a step in righting decades of wrongs.
“I wanted people to know about what happened because they're really trying to cover this up,” she said.
That trial is expected to last at least two more weeks.
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Adam Walser has spent more than a decade fighting for what’s right in Tampa Bay as part of the I-Team. He’s helped expose flaws in Florida’s eldercare system and held leaders accountable for how they use your tax dollars. Reach out to Adam with any issue you think he needs to investigate.
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