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A former IT director at a prestigious Upper East Side private school attended by political scions Andrew Giuliani and JFK Jr. claims she caught her co-workers surfing Internet porn — and the headmaster allegedly turned a blind eye when she told him about it.
Nancy Lin divulged the dirty secret in a blockbuster discrimination suit against the exclusive St. David’s School and headmaster P. David Halloran. In court papers, Lin says that shortly after being hired in 2005 she found the school’s computer server clogged with “shocking and inappropriate” Japanese “anime” cartoons.
“Additionally, Ms. Lin was alarmed to learn that the school did not have a Web content filter in place on its network,” her suit says.
To protect students at the pricey, all-boys academy from “unfettered access to . . . offensive and obscene material,” Lin says she installed a “Web content filter” in 2007.
“Once the filters were in place, [Lin] was surprised to learn that the school’s faculty members or administrators were regularly accessing pornographic Web sites using school computers,” her Manhattan federal court filing says.
“The server indicated that the explicit sites were accessed mostly during summer hours, when school was not in session.”
Lin says she immediately reported her findings to Halloran, who allegedly responded “that he was not interested in using the Web content filter to monitor the productivity of personnel.”
Her suit seeks unspecified damages for alleged civil-rights violations tied to her discovery last year that she was the school’s lowest-paid administrator.
Lin, who is Asian-American, claims she stumbled on a computerized salary list while retrieving a file for a top school official, and was “troubled” to find that two recently hired white women with less experience were both being paid $120,000 a year.
Further research revealed that while Lin was making “a mere $76,000” annually, her counterparts at the Dalton and Spence schools pulled down $178,000 and $155,000, respectively.
Lin says she complained to Halloran that she was being discriminated against “based on her Asian ethnicity” and was canned two weeks later in retaliation.
In addition to John F. Kennedy Jr. and Rudy Giuliani’s golfer son, the school’s famous attendees include Robert Kennedy and “preppy killer” Robert Chambers.
Halloran didn’t return requests for comment, but he and the school have denied the allegations in court papers. A countersuit also charges that Lin hacked into the school’s computer network “and likely destroyed data” after trustees voted to fire her for searching through the “highly confidential salary data” without authorization.
The countersuit seeks at least $5,000 it cost the school to investigate and secure the “breaches of its network,” along with unspecified damages covering “any compensation wrongfully received [by] Ms. Lin during her period of disloyalty.”