An engaged-to-be-married MIT whiz who taught math at the exclusive Riverdale Country School in the Bronx — where tuition tops $40,000 per year — had an affair with one of his teenaged students, authorities said today.
Richard Hovan, 30, was hauled before a Manhattan judge in handcuffs this morning, charged with carrying on with the under-aged girl in his Chelsea co-op and at a Brooklyn hotel.
Hovan twice brought the 16-year-old to an apartment he bought in 2010 with his then-fiance at 101 W. 23rd St., where the teacher and student engaged in “sexual contact.”
“This is a very serious case,” prosecutor Shanda Strain told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Charles Solomon, in asking for $75,000 bail.
Hovan started an “improper” e-mail correspondence with the girl when she was 15, and began their illicit romps after she turned 16, the prosecutor said.
A source in the Chelsea building said Hovan brought a “very young-looking” girl home several times when his then-fiance, 26-year-old Harvard University graduate Marina Bontkowski, was away.
Bontkowski almost walked in on one alleged tryst, the source said.
“I saw the girl climb out of the fire escape from his apartment and hide there. She waited until [the fiance] was gone and then she came back in,” the source said.
The source said that when Bontkowski found out about Hovan’s alleged dalliance she hit the roof and threatened to have Hovan arrested.
The source said the cops came a few weeks later and confiscated security images showing the girl entering the apartment with Hovan.
Prosecutors also caught him on a taped phone call with the girl.
In court today, Strain said it wasn’t the first time that the teacher had acted inappropriately with a student — although no charges were filed in the prior case.
When he had taught math at Westtown School in Pennsylvania — Hovan had also engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a student who was under 17, according to law enforcement sources.
The prosecutor said Hovan and the student “came to New York together” seven years ago after he left to work at the Buckley School — an all-boys private school in Manhattan.
In September 2009, however, Hovan got engaged to Bontkowski — who was a teacher’s assistant at Buckley when he worked there.
The couple bought the Chelsea co-op in 2010, according to records, and are renting out another apartment they own together in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. They called off their engagement shortly after Hovan’s alleged sexual contact with the teen, neighbors said.
Hovan had been teaching calculus and geometry at the prestigious Riverdale school for less than a year when he was canned last summer.
Hovan was released on $25,000 bail after pleading not guilty to two counts of Criminal Sex Act in the third degree. He was also charged with endangering the welfare of a child. He was not charged with having intercourse with the student.
The prosecutor said it appeared Hovan had recently accepted a job starting in July with a Washington, D.C.-based charter school.
Hovan and his lawyer declined comment outside court. Bontkowski also declined comment.
Additional reporting by Julia Marsh, Reuven Fenton and Jeane MacIntosh