The (False) Accusation

In 2019, a 12-year-old accused a Chicago school teacher of inappropriate physical contact. It was false. Reflections on my recent reconnection with the teacher, who also happens to be my namesake.

Think back to a time when you were falsely accused of something.

Maybe it was recent—a private, petty squabble with a family member over a trivial matter: forgetting to lock a door, a cookie that went missing, some other minor misunderstanding.

Or it could be something much more significant, from many years ago, encompassing more people and much more pain. Its memory still stings.

Everyone winds up on various points on this spectrum. It’s the price of admission in a fallen world where we interact with other flawed people. If you know this truth only on an intellectual level, then you’ve had good fortune.

But there are others—because the stakes have been so much higher—who have endured false accusations on a visceral level. A special subset of this kind of ordeal: when a falsehood gets into the public eye.

In these instances, especially in our lightning-fast social-media era, the audience’s vastness can compound the pain and shame.

Hopefully, sooner than too much later, the truth comes to light. The accusation is exposed as revealing more about the false accuser than the one maliciously maligned.

In a broad brushstroke way, this has been the experience of a Chicago-area educator, writer and musician with whom I share something else of extraordinary mutual significance: we’re both named Matt Baron.

That common ground brought us together briefly in 2012, kept us in light touch over the years, and led to another reconnection in person this past Sunday when I went to a record store in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood. There, I saw him lead his band, Young Man in a Hurry, as they performed songs from their latest album.

Trudging in from Clark Street’s sidewalk snow and slush, I caught a glimpse of Matt through the storefront window, then opened the door to Rattleback Records. A few steps inside and a few minutes shy of their appointed time to play, he was adjusting his guitar and microphone.

Matt Baron (front, left) and his Young Man in a Hurry mates.

We shook hands and he introduced me to his bandmates. We bantered about our prior face-to-face encounter (more on that here in this footnote¹) and he recalled how, some nine years ago, friends asked him whether he was the Matt Baron running for a school board. (It was me, instead, crazy enough to pursue—and get elected to—that office).

For over three years, I’ve been meaning to see Matt in person. My rekindled interest in reconnecting came after I read a wonderfully written Chicago magazine feature story about this horrible chapter in his life. Headlined simply as “The Accusation,” the 6,000-word article by Jake Malooley chronicles the saga that followed a 12-year-old boy falsely claiming Matt made inappropriate physical contact in a classroom.

In time, holes in the fabricated story allowed the light of truth to shine through. Matt was exonerated, he returned to the classroom, he won a financial settlement from the City of Chicago after filing a lawsuit alleging false arrest and malicious prosecution—but there’s no neat and tidy “happily ever after” here.

It’s far more complicated than that. Matt’s path to vindication was a hellscape, complete with the sting of the horrifically unwarranted public shaming that the false accuser’s mother stoked on social media.

An excerpt from The Accusation²:

In Baron’s case, he was immediately suspended, although he continued to receive his salary… He was named on television newscasts. He was interrogated by the police and locked in jail. He was slapped with a battery charge and prosecuted in criminal court.

All told, it cost him about $27,000 in legal fees, nearly three years away from the classroom, and, not least, the standing that he had built over a decade as an educator and entertainer of children.

Later, WGN TV aired a story covering much of the same ground.

Toward the end of that segment, he shared this remark from a wise friend:

“Matt, if you put this story behind you, it’ll become a shadow. But if you put it out in front of you, it could be the light that shapes your life moving forward.’”

I hope my writing here contributes, in some small way, to that illumination.

The two Matt Barons after the performance Sunday. Scroll to the footnotes to see the photo from our initial 2012 meeting.

More Common Ground

Matt also writes a Substack, Baron Creative: Letters From My Mind, that I’ve subscribed to the past couple of years. When it hits my in-box, usually on Tuesdays, I enjoy seeing just what's been on Matt’s mind lately.

In addition to being a relatively new dad (he has a 3 1/2-year-old son), Matt’s a passionate pickleball player, coach and writer. In fact, he’s compiled 10 columns into a book called allgoodnoworries: Essays on Presence, Play, and the Power of Pickleball).

His writing is reflective, eclectic, vulnerable and amusing—and spurs me on with my own writing. Seeing his name on a regular basis is also a nudge to ask him how he’s been doing in the aftermath of what he went through. I have so many questions and having read Matt’s column these past few years, I know he’s the type of guy who will give authentic answers.

I plan on doing that and following up with another column; it should be sooner than too much later because Matt and I are plotting to meet for lunch. This past Sunday evening, though, my place was to step back, browse the shop and enjoy the music of Young Man in a Hurry, including this excerpt from “Inside My Mind.”

1. In 2012, awareness that he'd be performing with his group Future Hits at the Oak Park Public Library, I assigned my intern, Jose Moreno, to cover it. From Jose’s write-up, headlined Music Review: “Future Hits” Rocks Oak Park Public Library:

“…the first song, “Sign by the Sea,” has an entertaining vibe, as if Coldplay and Radiohead decided to do music for children while retaining their distinctive qualities.” At the end of the brief review, more for my own amusement than anything or anyone else, I inserted “Inside Edge PR’s principal is Matt W. Baron; the Future Hits frontman is Matt L. Baron. They met for the first time at the library performance.”

I also blogged about it at the time: My Face-to-Face With (Another) Matt Baron.

2. The Chicago magazine feature is viewable at the link I provided. Here it is again…if you’ve gotten this far, then I highly recommend reading the story.